I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Beer!

So about a week ago I wrote something on the Harry Potter phenomenon. (By the way, I went to see the movie, and while it was good overall, there were several things that confused me, namely the fact that these kids are looking for these magical things in the weirdest places, like the tops of mountains and in the middle of the woods. Also, there are random high pitched noises that appear throughout the movie for no apparent reason.)

Anyway, I wrote something about butter beer, which is a drink in the series that is supposed to taste really good. Now, they apparently serve this drink at a Harry Potter theme park in Florida, where my two friends Bridget and Maddie went over the summer to take a break from torturing small animals with forks. They tried butter beer and apparently it was good because, being the great friends they are, they of course proceeded to laugh at me and constantly point out that I couldn’t have any.

So while I was sitting at home one day over break, I decided that I was going to look up a recipe for butter beer. I figured that Harry Potter fans are so crazy dedicated, there must be someone out there who came up with a recipe. As it turns out, there actually were several, so I of course decided that I was going to make some butter beer.

Of course, being a non-baking male, I had almost none of the ingredients required to make butter beer. I thought I did, but ironically enough there is not much butter and even less actual beer in butter beer, and those are really the only two items I have in my fridge.

So I made a trip to the supermarket to pick up some ingredients. This was an adventure in itself, since apparently those wacky Harry Potter fans are a few owls short of a magical post office because some of the ingredients were clearly fictional. What the hell is cider vinegar anyway? Also, I wanted to buy a little bit of powdered sugar, but apparently in addition to looking similar, cocaine and powdered sugar are both only sold in kilos. So on a related note, if anybody wants to borrow some (sugar, not cocaine) feel free to stop by.

Now I had all the ingredients, and I had just one problem: I had no idea what the hell butter beer looked or tasted like. So, grudgingly, I had to invite Maddie and Bridget over to help. Having the twins in a kitchen is bad for several reasons. For one, it puts them in the vicinity of sharp knives. Two, Maddie (by her own admission) has all the cooking savvy of a baboon.

Anyway, my research (believe it or not, I actually did research) showed that this is the most authentic and popular recipe. But it looked hard, so we went with an easier one. It ended up tasting awesome, and the twins both gave it two (four?) thumbs up for authenticity, so by all accounts we succeeded. So in case you have ever wanted to try butter beer but don’t want to risk running into alligators and/or the twins in Florida, I have included step-by-step instructions, including some problems that we encountered and how to solve them (don’t involve women).

Butter Beer

And yes, this drink does contain butter and sugar and lots of other wonderfully fattening things. So if you are trying to lose weight, you might want to split one with a friend. Then again, you might not have friends, so just give me the rest. I’m trying to gain weight before I vow to lose weight at New Years.

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons powdered sugar
• ½ cup heavy cream
• 12 oz cream soda or root beer
• butter
• vanilla extract
• butterscotch schnapps* (In case you want some extra kick, I’ve heard from others that this works. I’m actually not being coy; I’ve never tried it, odd now that I think about it. For one thing, I can’t find any).

Whisk the cream and the powdered sugar together, in a small bowl. I say small because we used a bowl so big that the cream barely covered the bottom, which is ironic since the twins brought over fifteen different mixing bowls and we still chose the biggest one. Also, do not be like me and spill the powdered sugar everywhere. My stove still looks like Lindsay Lohan’s night stand. Anyway, the mixture should end up looking like a foam. Don’t ask me how it happens, it just does. It’s probably magic.

In a separate bowl, mix some butter and a drop or two of the vanilla extract. I have no idea how much butter, because Bridget wasn’t exactly using exact measurements as much as she was just stabbing repeatedly at the tub of butter with a knife (probably about a teaspoon). Take that mixture and melt it in the microwave. Do not, as Maddie suggested, nuke it for 60 seconds, unless you are on a diet and you want your butter to be butter-free. 15 seconds should be good.

Mix the butter mixture with the cream soda. The recipe online calls for a chilled mug, much like the one they sell at the theme park in Florida. You should buy several in case you are worried J.K. Rowling needs another mansion. But if not, a regular cup is fine.

Spoon the mixture on top of the soda. It is supposed to rest on the top of the drink to make it look sort of like the head on a beer, so do it slowly and gently. Bridget tried, but her foam sank to the bottom faster than the Titanic. But it’s mostly for visual purposes, so if you are similarly uncoordinated, it doesn’t matter.

And you’re done. Now invite me over. What? You think I gave you this recipe for free?

A Holiday Feast

A lot of people ask me, “Mitchell, what is Thanksgiving truly about?” I think that sometimes we can lose sight of what this great holiday is all about. Sure, there are huge sales at Wal-Mart that kill people and football games featuring the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions every year even though a comprehensive survey of the country (conducted in my living room) shows that nobody likes either of those teams. But let’s not forget what is truly important about Thanksgiving: food.

Oh sure, some of you saps out there are blabbing on about family, but that only happens in Hallmark commercials. Trust me, I haven’t seen my family for four straight Thanksgivings, and I’m no worse for the wear. But I couldn’t imagine not eating Thanksgiving food on Thanksgiving.

Take football announcer John Madden for instance. Now, for years Madden announced the Thanksgiving Day football game, yet he spent maybe four seconds talking about actual football during those games. He spent the rest of the time talking about a monstrous creation he loves called a turducken, and yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. It is chicken meat, stuffed inside a duck, which is then stuffed inside a turkey. It’s like a Russian nesting doll made of poultry. Madden would talk about this turducken with way more passion than he ever did when he talked about blitzes or blocking (in fact, I’ve heard couples at their own wedding say their vows with less emotion in their voice than Madden has when he talks about turduckens).

Madden: “But if you wanna go bigger, you take the turducken and then BOOM!, you stuff that inside a pig and then BOOM!, you stuff that inside a cow and BOOM!, you stuff that inside a camel…”

Other announcer: "And the Cowboys lose another fumble!"

Madden: "…but the real problem is finding an elephant, since they’re technically endangered…"

Other announcer: "Huge mistake by the Cowboys. They don’t get any bigger than that John."

Madden: “Well, you could put it in a whale. BOOM!”

Now, I am not suggesting that you cook a turducken, or a whacamacowpiturducken for that matter. I think it’s a little ridiculous that a family can eat an entire flock of birds by themselves while children in Africa are digging up roots. However, cooking a turkey is important for tradition’s sake. Of course, my tradition is different, cause I use a live turkey. I live alone and I don’t even really like turkey, but I stick one in my oven anyway just to piss PETA off. Some people suggest deep-frying your turkey, but dunking a live turkey in hot oil is just cruel. I have my limits okay?

Anyway, with your turkey now running around in your oven (or swimming around in your pot, depending on the route you took), it’s time to get the rest of the meal prepared. That’s where all the good stuff is. You have stuffing and casserole and pies and potatoes and all sorts of other awesome stuff. The only problem is, I’m lazy so I don’t want to cook all of this. But I’ve found a way around it, so I’m going to share my method with you fellow lazy peoples.

But first, a warning. Shopping close to Thanksgiving can get a bit dicey. For one thing, a lot of elderly people suddenly appear. This means that nobody in the parking lot will be driving normally and they will be moving through the aisles very slowly. Also, a lot of people go Thanksgiving shopping with their families. The only problem with this is that families hate each other, and there is no time that they argue with each other more than Thanksgiving. Holidays like Thanksgiving are meant to bring families back together once every few months to remind them why they don’t live with each other the rest of the year. So expect that the store will be filled with large clusters of angry family members blocking the “oriental foods” aisle (what the hell are people doing in the oriental foods aisle on Thanksgiving anyway?).

With that said, here is the shopping list:

• 1 can of cream of mushroom soup
• 1 can of French-fried onions
• 1 can of sweet potatoes
• 1 can of green beans
• 1 can of cranberry sauce
• 1 box of stuffing
• 1 jar of gravy
• 1 pre-made pumpkin pie
• 2 six-packs of beer

Once you’ve left the store with all of your ingredients (allow four to six weeks), it’s time to get started! Luckily, it’s a easy recipe with only five easy steps. So get started, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Mitchell’s Thanksgiving Day Dinner Recipe:

1. Take the cans of mushroom soup, sweet potatoes, green beans and cranberry sauce and donate it to some charity for the children in Africa. If they have hot soccer players working the food drive, like the one I saw today at Safeway, you get bonus points. (No, I have no idea what you are supposed to do with the bonus points. This is a recipe, not a video game.)
2. Drink first six-pack of beer.
3. While sitting on couch, eat entire pumpkin pie straight out of the pie dish without cutting it while eating stuffing and French-fried onions straight out of the box.
4. Crack open second six-pack of beer.
5. Turn on TV and watch Cowboys lose. Enjoy.

Mitchell Vs. Food

So somebody sent me this link today. It is about some wacko in India that claims he has not eaten or drank anything in 70 years. I’m not sure why he would want to do this. It could be possible he doesn’t like spicy food, and in India not eating spicy food leaves you with few options. Apparently they actually put him under observation for two weeks to try and prove his claim, and he (by all appearances) appeared to be completely fine.

Now I think we can all acknowledge that this guy is cheating somehow. He claims to be a yogi, whatever that is. Wikipedia says that a yogi is a “fictional bear who appears-” wait, that can’t be right. Oh well; this guy is some sort of monk or something. But frankly I don’t care if he is Yoda, nobody can go more than a week without eating or drinking. Forget what it does to your body, not eating and drinking starts to mess with your mind.

I would know. I am currently (against my better judgment) trying to lose weight. Mainly because I made a bet with a friend at the beginning of the year on who would lose more weight, and seeing as I have only started trying now, I might be a bit behind. And I really do not want to have to run naked through a candy store painted like an oompa loompa. And even if I did (which I don’t, I think) the restraining order would prevent me from doing so. Therefore, I have decided I have to get this whole weight loss thing into full gear.

So this means that in addition to resuming swimming (the only physical activity I have ever been decent at), I have tried to go on a diet. Now this is hard enough for me already, but I have been making it especially hard on myself. This is because my roommate and I like to watch the Travel Channel. For those of you who haven’t watched the Travel Channel in awhile, at some point they stopped doing shows about traveling and became the Food Network. Although to be honest, whenever I travel I ignore the sights and culture and prefer to just eat things, so I guess this is appropriate.

One of our favorite shows is called “Man vs. Food.” The show follows a guy named Adam Richmond as he goes around the country checking out restaurants and doing eating challenges. Now, I just want to know how people get jobs like this. Not only does he get to be on TV and travel the country, he gets to eat the best food in the country. Of course, this means that while I’m eating cereal and my roommate is eating what smells like spinach and tuna, we are watching this guy eat ribs and burgers that look like they dropped straight out of heaven. Watching this show while on a diet is the worst strategy since BP decided to drill just a little bit deeper (what’s the worst that can happen?).

Anyway, Chris and I got excited when we found out that Adam had come to Boulder, Co. for an episode that aired last night. Now, I have to be honest I was a bit confused when I found out he was coming to Boulder. Boulder is not exactly known for its great cuisine, unless you happen to be a horse. Most of the locals here spend most of their time eating things that were very recently in the ground (and by that I do not mean prairie dogs). Although when you think about it, for a town that smokes so much dope, you would think that there would be better pig out spots.

He somehow did manage to find some places that served good food, and Chris and I were taking careful notes. For instance, there was one place he visited that somehow puts bacon and sausage into the pancake and tops it with an egg and syrup. These things are called saddle bags, which sounds weird when you order. If I was a waiter and somebody told me they wanted my bacon saddle bags, I would get really self-conscious all of a sudden. Or flattered. I’m not real sure. But it is everything you want for breakfast all on one plate. The only way it could be more perfect was if Megan Fox served it to you while playing “Black Magic Woman” on the guitar.

At the end of the episode, Adam tried the Wing King challenge, which requires you to eat 50 wings in 30 minutes. Sadly he failed as dozens of stoned onlookers kept asking him “Hey man, you gonna finish that or can I have some?” I guess the only hard part about this guy’s job is the eating challenges he has to do. Now, I can eat a lot, but not as much as you would think a guy my size could. I’m fat mainly because I sleep 14 hours a day and spend the other 10 trying to move as little as possible. For instance, at the moment I want to eat something, but the fridge is at least ten feet away, so I’ve decided not to. Me and the yogi, we’ve got that in common: willpower.

Long Arm of the Law

So on Monday night, me and my roommate Chris were up at 1 am trying to study for a philosophy midterm exam. Needless to say, I was studying for this exam by watching Sting music videos, and it just so happened that the ad before the video for “Fields of Gold” (favorite song ever by the way) was an ad for Chicken McNuggets. And we all know what happened next; desperate for those little bite-sized morsels of chicken-flavored Styrofoam and an excuse to stop not studying, I told Chris we should drive to McDonalds and go get some.

Five minutes later, we pull out of the Drive-Thru with twenty nuggets, fries, and happiness in a paper bag (I literally mean happiness; that was not a drug reference). It seemed like nothing could go wrong (aside from failing the midterm that is). This was a sign that everything was about to go horribly, terribly, Bieber-esquely wrong.

Now, at 30^th and Baseline, there is a no u-turn sign that everybody ignores. I mean everybody. When the Pope goes to this McDonalds he pulls a u-turn in the Pope-mobile (I’m assuming that is what he drives). It was one in the morning, and the road was empty, so we pulled the turn. As he is doing this, Chris jokingly comments “I hope there aren’t any cops around.” Of course the last time he said this to me while making an illegal turn, we saw a cop. So I jokingly told him not to jinx it. As most of you have already figured out, sure enough a cop car appears out of nowhere and pulls us over. Now, we assumed that once he figured out that neither of us were drunk or high he would let us go with a warning (although it’s harder than you think to convince someone you aren’t high when you have two pounds of chicken nuggets sitting on your lap at one in the morning). But instead, the cop gave Chris a $100 ticket. These are the same Boulder cops who every year let 10,000 people gather on a field to smoke pot.

So basically, we ordered $110 McNuggets. With our luck, I was half expecting to open the bag and find out they got our order wrong, at which point my head would have exploded thus releasing the hamster that lives in there (his name is Happy). I haven’t had a fast food experience this bad since I was walking back from Wendy’s and I was jumped by a herd of raccoons (flock?). For those of you who can’t understand why this is scary, clearly you have never encountered a pod of raccoons (gander?). Just one of those things is scary enough, much less an entire school of them (maybe it’s a pod?).

Now, this story illustrates several points. First, studying is bad. If I had just conceded I was going to fail this test and gone to sleep like I should have, none of this would have happened. Also, no matter how great he was with the Police, watching Sting music videos past midnight never leads to anything good. But most importantly, we need to remember whose fault this really is: the cops.

Now I’m not ragging on all cops. I’m sure that most of the cops out there are drug-busting, cat-grabbing, rapist-catching, gun-toting, hyphen-using, bad-ass defenders of the innocent. But then again, there are cops like these. Now, I’ll at least give them this: if I were in a drug lord’s house for nine hours, the Wii wouldn’t have been the first thing I would have gone for, if you get my drift. But still, we pay these guys to get drug dealers off the streets, not beat their high scores on Wii bowling. Also, look at the cop’s celebration at 16 seconds into the video. I don’t want guys who celebrate like that confronting heavily armed criminals; they would eat him alive.

Now let’s go to the other end of the spectrum, from cops who don’t take their job seriously enough to cops that want to shoot you. Now, I understand using tasers on dangerous criminals and drunken people, but a 76-year-old? Where was the guy going to go? He was on a tractor (and why do they drive tractors in parades in Wyoming?) and he’s 76 years old. I’m pretty sure the cops could have handled him without shocking him (and yes, these cops were later fired).

I mean, if cops were serious about stopping real crime and drug use, they should just watch a Denver Nuggets basketball game on TV. The Nuggets have a deal where Taco Bell offers four tacos for $1 if the team scores more than 100 points in a game. This is a very big deal for the Nugget’s two announcers, Chris Marlowe and Scott Hastings, who occasionally mention it.

Marlowe: And Carmelo scores! The score is tied at 12.

Hastings: Only 88 more points until tacos.

Later on…

Marlowe: Basket is good! Nuggets ahead 97-95.

Hastings: Someone should shoot a three so we can get tacos.

Marlowe: Billups drains a three! Nuggets win!

Hastings: TACOS!!!!!!!!

Now don’t tell me that these two just like tacos. They have the munchies. The other night, with the Nuggets up by 40 points, Hastings stopped talking about the game and just started giggling and talking about tacos. If the cops just checked under his table, they probably would have found a bong the size of a large dog. But no, instead of arresting stoned sports announcers, they are on empty roads ticketing students merely trying to get some study food. Then again, maybe they’re just trying to catch Hastings coming back high from the Taco Bell Drive Thru.

Cop: Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?

Hastings: TACOS!?!?!?!

And the Lent is On...

So this morning I once again awoke depressed because I’m stuck in a land-locked, snow-covered, tofu-eating, hippie-hugging city. So you can imagine my surprise when I picked up the paper and discovered that according to a recent poll, I apparently live in the happiest city in America. That’s right; Boulder, Colorado was named as the happiest city in America. Of course when you consider the other lists that Boulder is near the top in (pot usage and party schools) this is not as surprising as it would seem.

What I want to know is how the hell they determine how happy people are. Do they just go up to them and ask which they do more during the week: contemplate suicide or write poems about birds? But whatever method they are using is clearly not correct, because Honolulu, Hawaii was only third on the list, behind some city in Michigan. That’s right; Hawaii was behind Michigan in happiness. Nothing against Michigan, but would you be happier jobless in the cold or sitting on a beach? Besides, I’m almost certain that Michigan is actually part of Canada, and is thus disqualified from this survey. And speaking of Canada, how about the US beating Canada in Olympic hockey? I hope that stung for those Canadians; I bet they all went home and needed to hug their moose and listen to Celine Dion to console themselves.

Anyway, even if Boulder is the happiest city in America, you wouldn’t guess that right now. Unfortunately, lent is underway. Now for those of you who know as little about religion as I do lent is a period of forty days where people often give up a vice for the entire 40 days. I think traditionally, they were supposed to fast for those 40 days. Supposedly it got them closer to heaven (in the sense that it killed them). I was at a party on Saturday and a girl there told me that you are actually supposed to give up alcohol, milk, cheese, and meat. This was ironic to me, since as she was telling me this I was working on a bottle of Jagermeister that was mysteriously empty by the end of the night and may or may not be related to me sitting in the snow wearing shorts for five minutes yelling at my cell phone. But anyway, most people just give up some sort of vice, which means that there are hundreds of people right now walking around without the very things that keep them going, which can be very dangerous.

Take my journalism class for instance. The professor gave out cookies, but several girls in the class had given up on treats, and so they looked at the cookies, started crying, yelled at me to take them away and then yelled at me for taking away the cookies and then yelled at me for giving them back to them and in general just yelled a lot. If any of them had also been PMSing at the same time, the pure hatred and anger would have left a large smoking crater where the class used to be and probably tear a hole in the universe. During all of this, the unstable guy was sharpening his pencil with a switch-blade because he apparently gave up his medication for lent. What’s even weirder is that he sharpens this pencil, but he writes with a pen.

Now, I personally give up Christian traditions for lent, so I don’t go through this. Either that or I choose to give up things that I don’t like or don’t do anyway, like eating turnips and doing homework. For one thing, I don’t have the will power to give up anything I like for longer than about five hours, particularly food and drinks. For instance, I watched a hockey game the other night and the puck instantly reminded me of Hostess Ding Dongs. Needless to say, about an hour later I had bought an entire box of Ding Dongs. But to my disappointment, I discovered that for some reason, Ding Dong’s in the Midwest don’t come wrapped in foil like everywhere else in the country. To my horror, my roommate did not even know that they came in foil, and I had to look it up on the internet to prove it to him. By the way, Googling “Ding Dong” is a really bad idea. I didn’t find a picture of what I was looking for until about the third page. Of course, because I said that, at least 75 percent of you are going to go and Google “Ding Dong.”

Anyway, the point is that when it comes to food and drinks, I am not good with temptation. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t in the Garden of Eden, or I would have eaten the apple before Eve, and then God would have punished men with painful childbirth and unstable emotions instead of women. So I applaud all of the brave souls that are undertaking this challenge, no matter how many people they kill in the process. And there will be death this lent. Just to be sure it’s not me, I’m going to stop going to my journalism class; because if the unstable guy doesn’t stab me, the chocolate deprived girls will.

Watching Our Weight in the New Year:.. And There It Goes

So the entire world is really obsessed with this whole earthquake in Haiti thing, but that is sort of depressing so I’m going to talk about a much funnier story of buildings falling down. This story is much funnier because it involves fat people. Everything is funnier with fat people. How else can you explain why people still watch Jay Leno?

Anyway, apparently a building in Sweden where a local weight watchers club regularly met collapsed during one of their meetings. For one thing, I had no idea that they had weight watchers in Europe (Sweden is in Europe right?). I always thought that obesity was one of those problems that only the U.S. had, like bad beer and “Jersey Shore.” Of course, it doesn’t help that I have no idea what weight watchers is. It sounds a little too similar to whale watching to me; like you just get on a bus and drive through Texas and take pictures of fat people dancing in the McDonalds’ dining room. In fact, it’s probably way better than whale watching because half the time you go whale watching you don’t see whales and they have to give you a refund. This is because whales, as it turns out, spend most of their time under the water, where you rarely see boats (or at least working boats).

Getting back to my point, to cure my ignorance about weight watchers, I decided to take my second nap of the day and think about it. When I woke up, I decided to go to their website. Apparently weight watchers is not a diet plan as much as it is “Fat People Anonymous.” The way it works is that you go to a meeting to talk to other fat people about being fat or where to find the best all-you-can-eat buffets in town. Maybe they do it while eating donuts. And just in case you were wondering, they do have a meeting location in Boulder, which is funny since most of the Boulder population is one tofu shortage away from starving to death.

Anyway, I thought this information would be helpful since it is just after New Years, when a lot of people are still pretending to stick to their New Year’s resolutions. Do you want to know why people always make these promises on New Years? Because a lot of people consume a lot of alcohol on New Year’s Eve, that’s why. Now, I’m not going to lie, I also made a New Year’s resolution. It was to stop setting unrealistic goals for myself, and so far I’ve really stuck to it well.

For instance, I have decided that going to school every day is expecting way too much of myself. Really, who goes to school five days a week? Which is why I’ve reversed the typical work week; I go to school two days a week and have five off (okay so I have one afternoon class on Wednesday, but the class is made up of me and six girls, so I don’t really count that one). This allows me to wake up at one in the afternoon almost every day. Which is good, because my other New Year’s resolution was to get more sleep.

Okay so there are some of you out there shaking your head at what a shame on society I am. The rest of you know me and have already gotten past this. I used to try and make New Year’s resolutions, but I would rarely keep to them. A year is a long time for a guy to stay in a commitment. I mean I’ve had classes for three days and I already had to be talked out of skipping some. So there is no way that some stupid promise at the beginning of the year is going to last until next week, much less December.

Do you know what we should do instead? New Day resolutions. All you do is make a resolution to keep to for the day. For instance, my resolution today was to not get hit by a bus (in order to fulfill this, I have not left my couch, where buses rarely go). Think about it, no long term commitments, so even if you pick a hard one, it’s not like you are really doing a lot of work. I mean if you make a New Day resolution to lose weight, just take a dump before you go to sleep and voila! (which means “poop!” in some foreign language). And of course if you fail, you don’t have to think about how big a failure you are for an entire depressing year. You simply make a new one the very next day!

Isn’t this fun?! Once again I’ve brought lowering standards to even lower depths. Speaking of which, my New Day resolution today is to not embarrass myself dancing. Of course, now that my roommate’s ringtone is “Love Machine,” this might be a harder task than I anticipated.

Going Green

So this morning (by morning I mean when we woke up, which was at noon), me and a couple friends decided to go someplace to eat breakfast. This was a harder task than you would think, mainly because every other normally functioning person by this time was eating lunch and doing many productive things with their day, while I was still wondering where I put my underwear (and I still am for that matter).

Anyway, we finally found a place called Turley’s that was still serving breakfast food so we decided to give it a try. Now, a more alert and awake person would have noticed several warning signs when we went to this place. First off, when we walked in the place there were maybe ten people in there, and I’m counting the three of us and the seven workers. The second warning was the menu. Anytime you see something called a Tofu Scramble on the first page of the menu, you should carefully set the menu down, back away slowly, and don’t make any sudden movements or loud sounds. If not, you will frighten the vegans and they will try to scamper back into the woods and get run over on the highway.

Okay, so there were some normal items on the menu, but even the meats supposedly had no anti-biotics or steroids or heroin or whatever they put into animals nowadays to make them taste good. But the food is not what we should have feared. For some reason (I would say a combination of low IQ’s, high testosterone, and the word “shot”) we decided to try something called a wheat grass shot. The menu said that one ounce of this stuff was equivalent to 2.5 pounds of leafy greens. Now, I’ve never been great with math, but I’m not exactly sure how that works. I bet it involves quantum physics or molecular biology or the alphabet or some other concept I don’t understand.

All I know is that I’m pretty sure even I’ve never eaten 2.5 pounds of anything in one sitting. Okay that’s a lie, but steaks don’t count. But I know I’ve never eaten more than a pound of green things before. Do you know why? Because the last time I checked, I am not a cow. I just look, smell and think like one. I’m pretty sure even cows don’t eat more than a pound of grass at a time, and they have four stomachs. I only have two, so I don’t stand a chance. All cows do anyway is eat like one bite and then keep throwing it up in their mouths and chewing it and swallowing it again all day, kind of like a frat president.

Anyway, the waitress finally brought us our shots. Now to be honest, I’ve eaten and drank a lot of disgusting things in my life. I’ve had bugs, cat food, live crabs, month-old beer, and dorm food. But after seeing and smelling this thing, it was the most scared I had ever been to drink something. This thing smelled like freshly mowed lawn and was the same color as Oscar the Grouch, but less friendly. I of course asked the waiter if I was going to like this and before I even finished my sentence she said “Absolutely not.”

After about five minutes of crying, we finally did chug it. I have to be honest, you know how there are some things that you are apprehensive about trying, but when you finally do you realize it actually tastes really good and you were ashamed to be afraid of it in the first place? This was not one of those things. It tasted like grass. Which we probably should have figured out earlier, but if we had decent reasoning skills we wouldn’t have ordered them in the first place. In reality it didn’t taste as bad as it smelled and looked, but by no means did it taste good.

After drinking them we took a look at the menu to see what benefits we would get from it aside from smelling like the garden section of Home Depot. Apparently it I supposed to help increase among other things our athletic potential, which would be useful if I was ever in the mood to be athletic, which I never am. And of course, we got enough fiber to unclog the Hoover Dam. I’m pretty sure everything we eat from now on will just slide through our body like a water slide and drop straight into our pants (which means I really need to get on finding my underwear). I feel like Snow White, I’m walking around and all these random animals are following me around because I smell like some kind of food trough. Every time I burp it tastes like I maintained an entire golf course with my teeth.

And if you think the wheat grass wasn’t sitting well with us, you should have felt what my stomach did when we got the bill. Each shot cost us $2, which is ridiculous. McDonald’s charges you a dollar for a burger, which actually tastes like food. But as with almost everything, this experience gave me a great business idea. If people actually pay to drink these things, I say why stop with grass? Tree bark cocktails, moss margaritas, fungus bombs, dirt daiquiris, the possibilities are endless. And since I can get all of the ingredients by walking around the woods, it’s 100% profit! Now all I need to do is herd the vegans away from the highway and into my bar. All I need is some of that Tofu Scramble as bait.

Casa Bonita: Disneyland Mexico

As a deep and intellectual person, I often think about life’s deepest questions. What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose here? Should I eat Lucky Charms or Frosted Flakes? (E. all of the above plus Cinnamon Toast Crunch). But the question of what heaven will look like was answered on Wednesday: it looks like Casa Bonita.

Actually it’s probably better than heaven, because to get into heaven you have to be nice and virtuous and then you have to die. To get into Casa Bonita you just pay ten bucks. Casa Bonita is essentially what happens when a Mexican restaurant and a small amusement park get drunk one night and have a baby that they abandon in the middle of Denver. If the name Casa Bonita sounds familiar, you probably have watched the South Park episode where Cartman goes there. As a fellow fat, foul-mouthed, fourth-grader (at least mentally speaking) I watched that episode and instantly wished a place like Casa Bonita really did exist, but like many non-Coloradoans, I thought it was just some sort of mythical legend, like the Loch Ness Monster or hockey fans. As it turns out, South Park is just a big inside joke that only the state of Colorado is in on, and now that I live up here the show makes way more sense.

Anyway, unlike Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Jessica Alba, Casa Bonita does exist, and we finally went this past week. We were driving along when someone shouted to look straight ahead. I did, and before my very eyes was: a car dealership. For whatever reason Casa Bonita is in the middle of about five car dealerships, a bunch of dollar stores, one of the largest Wal-Marts I’ve ever seen. But sure enough, there it was, glowing in all of its glory.

As far as the food goes, well, it was Mexican food. There’s only so much you can do to Mexican food before it stops being Mexican food and starts being edible food. But as someone who just got back from a trip to Texas and way too many roadside Mexican booths, Casa Bonita’s food wasn’t nearly as bad as people said. Then again, asking me if food tastes good is like asking a dog if it likes its food (coincidentally, dog food isn’t all that bad). I just the other day drank a combination of Coke, salt, pepper, and Jalapeno Tabasco sauce for $2 (I was going to do it for $1, but I held out for a better offer, cause I still have some dignity).

But the entrees were just to distract you from the real thing: the unlimited sopopillas (you just raise this little red flag when you want more). Now, I don’t know about women and skinny dudes, but when real men hear all-you-can eat, we don’t think “I’ll eat until I’m satisfied.” We think “I am going to eat this place into the red and make them regret ever challenging me with an all-you-can-eat buffett.” This is why restaurants are the second deadliest place for men over the age of 18 after shopping malls (stats courtesy of Anderson Cooper). It didn’t help that the sopopillas were awesome; I would have married one if it wasn’t just trying to use me to get its green card. Of course, we paid the price for all that eating. One of my friends had the worst look on his face when he was done: the look of a man who had an epic battle with his food and he was about to lose (not just lose, but Mortal Combat “FINISH HIM!” lose).

Once you’re done eating, you can roll around and check out the many other entertaining things at Casa Bonita. There is a waterfall where actors do a little skit involving (I swear I’m not making this up): guns, cowboy hats, a blonde wig, a giant butterfly net, and a large angry gorilla named Chiquita who is there to enhance your dining experience and rape your children (he is actually listed on the website as “the angry gorilla”; I’m not sure what makes him angry, but it could be that he eats too many enchiladas). There are people who dive into a pool and a strolling mariachi band, which a friend of mine tricked into playing me a “Happy Birthday” song (“Happy Birsday, Happy Birsday Meecho!” is what it sounded like), an arcade, picture booths, and a cave.

We finally had to leave, and I’m pretty sure all of my friends are regretting taking me because I will now resort to the same high pitched whining and tantrums that I used to use to get my way as a child (and as a teen and a young adult for that matter) to make them take me back. In my opinion, Casa Bonita is what amusement parks should look like. I’ve been to Disney Land, and I disagree that it is the happiest place in the world. It is, however, the hottest, most crowded, most expensive, and most tiring place in the world. Really, I just go there for the food anyway. I remember on one trip to Disneyland with a group, I left the group midway through the day, bought three bags of cotton candy, and walked by myself all the way back to the hotel to watch football. So if you park designers out there are listening, remember these wise words: less lines and rides, more gorditas and enchiladas, and plenty of clean toilets for Chiquita the angry gorilla.