Fat Guy

So how many did you buy? ← One.

That's how I perceive it. For example, if I take a plum, where the filmy stuff on it is easily seen, and I run it under water, I can rinse it for as long as I like and that stuff will not come off completely. If I spray it with some of this produce wash stuff, the filmy stuff washes right off. At least, that's the appearance of what's happening. In terms of the gray cast to the washing water if you do this in a bowl, it may be a chemical reaction, however it doesn't happen after the produce has been cleaned: unclean produce + produce wash = gray stuff; produce already washed in water + produce wash = gray stuff; produce already washed in produce wash + produce wash = no gray stuff. Again, lot of places in that chain of events for misinterpretation, but all this favors, to me, the presumption that the stuff does something. Making your own: this seems like the way to go, if we can deconstruct everything and figure out what does what and why.

Here's what the Veggie Wash people claim:

If they're water soluble, won't they wash off with the rain?

I'd also like to see some more serious studies. This is a situation where common sense says the stuff should work, so I'll need more convincing. In terms of analogies, if these produce washes work on the same principles as soap, then are the studies saying washing with water is just as effective as washing with soap? That seems hard to swallow. Also, it's plainly visible to the eye that these products get stuff cleaner than water does. So I'd have to see some information as to where that gray stuff comes from if it's not from the surface of the produce -- someone would have to explain that it's a chemical reaction of some sort and not actual grime.

That's not how I've ever seen the term used. Egg salad = egg and mayo mixed together. Just as tuna salad = tuna and mayo. You can add more stuff, too. Maybe if you spread may on bread, then put sliced egg on the bread, that would be an egg sandwich.

Egg-salad strategy tidbit: I've found that sometimes in a worst-case scenario, like when you're on a road-trip and there's nothing to eat, you can acquire a hard-cooked egg from a mini-mart or even a vending machine. Then you can acquire a few of those little plastic packets of mayonnaise from a fast-food restaurant or other source of free condiments. Hard-cooked egg + mayonnaise + fork = egg salad.

Lettuce is the big one for me. Most other things, I can freeze, repurpose or otherwise extend, or give to the dog if it's protein-heavy. But lettuce is short-lived and once it starts to go there's not much you can do about it. We try to make salad every day, but between meals out, takeout and the newly unpredictable lives of parents we may go one week where we make salads seven times and another week where we make them twice. Lettuce, however, rarely lasts beyond four or five days, so in a typical week where we shop on Sunday our Friday-Saturday salads are usually lettuce-free (mostly diced cucumber and tomato, which is how those items pretty much always get used up, though in a pinch aging cucumbers can be peeled and made into a cucumber-onion-vinegar salad for a few days' life extension and wilting tomatoes can be added to canned for a nice pasta sauce).

Forgive me. Still-warm hard-boiled egg, room-temperature mayonnaise, salt, freshly ground white pepper, crushed together with a fork until medium chunky, served on whole-wheat sourdough toast with Romaine lettuce.

As if eggs weren't great enough, egg salad is eggs with a dressing made from eggs. I love it so much, and I think we should talk about it. I really do. My contribution to the discussion is this: the best egg salad is warm egg salad. As in, you make it immediately after you hard-cook the egg, while the egg is still retaining its heat from cooking, and you eat it right away. Who's next.

Thought about it? I've had dreams about it. In one dream, the Frito-Lay guy is the warden of the prison where my brother is being held. He looks like Stacy Keach and together we build a scale model of the Taj Mahal out of Munchos, but it never gets finished because I keep eating the Munchos and, while I'm being a glutton, my brother is executed. In another dream, the Frito-Lay guy is Lauren Graham from Gilmore Girls, has a perfectly preserved collection of BBQ Munchos from the 1990s and begs me to eat BBQ Munchos and mint chocolate chip ice cream off her body while she croons "I will always love you" over a karaoke track. But a real-life relationship is impractical. It's not always the same delivery guy, and he probably has no more control over it than he does over the weather.

The Frito-Lay rack at the Patrick Murphy Market has been re-stocked with Munchos.

I was just out walking a dog and he seemed to sense a disturbance in the Force. I looked around and noticed a Frito-Lay truck parked out front of the Patrick Murphy Market. I'm going to investigate shortly.

There is definitely some cosmic connection between Munchos and Funyuns. For example, I was talking to the Yogi Gupta about this. He said that, when BBQ Munchos were discontinued, Wasabi Funyuns restored balance to the universe. Funyuns, however, are not Munchos. Neither are Bugles or anything else. Munchos are sui generis. A Munchos craving cannot be addressed by any other food. Believe me, I've tried.

That list is amazing. The technology, able to pinpoint every dealer of Munchos in a Zip code, should be the envy of the DEA, the ATF, the Department of Homeland Security and Cirque de Soleil. However, it's all lies. For example, the Patrick Murphy Market is listed as number 23, but I was just in there. THERE ARE NO MUNCHOS THERE. I bet I could go to 29 stores on that list and not find a single bag of Munchos. The Frito-Lay cartel is cutting off our Munchos supply and nobody is doing anything about it. Well, I didn't slave away, building the eG Forums, for six years only to have this fraud perpetrated on our members. I won't stand for it. Who won't stand with me?

That was actually one of the very first things I wrote when I sat down to pull all my research notes into a book, anpanman. Great minds think alike. The only reason I haven't posted it (other than that I can't post the whole book!) is that there has already been so much discussion about it elsewhere in eG Forums.

I feel it's best never to speak of BBQ Munchos. Too much pain of loss.

Only the greatest snack food ever, not to mention a great source of Disodium Guanylate.

93rd and Madison, please.

Oh jeez, I hope this isn't going to be like "Firefly" or "Jericho," where we need a viewer campaign to get eight more episodes.

One more try and then I'll pack it in. Maybe lying would have been better service. However, if the guy was being truthful and the customer extended the invitation, it wasn't categorically bad service. If we get that sommelier on the witness stand and he says . . . . . . then I'm fine with that.

I assume we are all in agreement that Munchos are the greatest snack food in the universe, so let me move on to the issue at hand: they're damn near impossible to find. I love Munchos so much that I can't keep a bag in the house. Given access to an unlimited supply of Munchos, I'd simply eat them until I exploded, like a goldfish. I'd weigh double my current weight of one million kilograms (I use metric so Americans will have trouble figuring out how much I really weigh). So my approach to good eating is to use Munchos as an occasional treat, by setting up a system of rules that makes it somewhat difficult to acquire them. I won't buy a full-size bag. I'll only buy the individual bags. If I'm doing well that day, I may even be able to make the individual bag last a couple of days. I try to do this at most once every week or two. I'm aided in this plan by the limited inventory of Munchos in my neighborhood, the tiny hamlet of Carnegie Hill in Manhattan. The place I usually go is the Patrick Murphy Market on Madison Avenue between 92nd and 93rd. It is of course owned by Koreans. Anyway, the nice thing from a nutrition perspective is that the Patrick Murphy Market only has Munchos about 25% of the time. I've tried to figure out why, and have been told by the owner, "A guy brings the chips and stocks the shelf; sometimes he brings Munchos, sometimes he doesn't." Usually, if I can't get Munchos at the Patrick Murphy Market, I take it as a sign and I turn back, vowing to eat Munchos another day. But there has been an incredibly long dry spell at the Patrick Murphy Market, as happens every year or so -- I think it has been almost two months since Munchos graced the Frito-Lay rack at the Patrick Murphy Market (from a distance, by the way, the reddish SunChips "Harvest Cheddar" package looks very similar in color to the orangeish Munchos package, leading to many instances of dashed hopes.). In such a scenario, I fall back on plan B: a little market on Lexington Avenue between 92nd and 93rd. I don't even know its name. The strange thing about this market is that it is adjacent to a smaller market that sells many of the same products, and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins -- I'm always opening the door to the wrong place, then feeling bad when I turn around and go to the other place. Anyway, my backup place doesn't have any Munchos right now either. That's okay, because I have a plan C. There is one place in my neighborhood that always has Munchos. I know this because every time I have walked past this place for the past 16 years I have glanced a the rack (it's plainly visible as you pass) and seen the Munchos. This has always been my security blanket, my Strategic Petroleum Reserve of Munchos. It's the newsstand in the subway station at 96th and Lexington. I went there yesterday, and there were no Munchos on the rack. Just like that. Nothing.

Maybe it was a lie, maybe it was true. My point is that you can't assign anything near zero credibility to the true option, and if that's the case you can't say with certainty that it was a wrongful act. I know quite a few sommeliers, two of whom I would call real friends. They do indeed drink wine at the $150+ (restaurant price) per bottle level most every single day. Indeed, at a restaurant with a serious wine program, like Union Square Cafe, they taste the whole waitstaff on nearly the entire wine list on a rotating basis -- not just the $50 bottles but the $500 bottles as well (I've been there for staff training and seen it happen). A small part of the 200%-400% wine markup you pay in restaurants goes to subsidizing staff tastings, though distributors also often throw in gratis bottles for those purposes. So, again, I don't really know what happened, but I think there is ambiguity here given the facts as stated.

I imagine he does get plenty of wine at cost or for free, as he is a sommelier. Also, depending on the restaurant's markup, the retail on a $170 bottle of wine could be pretty low; and he could be drinking a glass a day out of the same bottle for several days at a time. Of course, he may have been lying. But if he was telling the truth, giving an honest answer to the question "What are you drinking?" it hardly seems immoral.

Marcia, when you say it's too raw and sharp, are you talking about tasting it alone, or on a salad? One of the things I've found is that what tastes good on its own isn't necessarily what's best on a salad, because when you put a thin coating of dressing on a salad you get it in a diffuse form. Or are you already factoring in the salad?