Kodiak Cakes

My friend Todd (not to be confused with my first year of college roommate Todd, who is also my friend), who often eats garbage foods on purpose (seriously, if there was a nice restaurant on one corner and a gas station with microwave burritos and those hot dogs in the spinning heat racks on the other corner, Todd would go to the gas station; I know that sounds mean but I guarantee that this is an actual choice that Todd has made at least once in his life), casually mentioned to a few of us online the other day, "My microwavable pancake in a cup is pretty tasty."

My immediate response was, "WTF?", because "pancake in a cup" doesn't sound like anything that should be possible or acceptable, and I say this as a person who actually liked the hot dog-flavored Pringles.

Todd isn't the only one who sometimes likes garbage food.

Todd explained that he had eaten something called a Kodiak Cake Flapjack On The Go, and that he'd bought it at Target. We peppered him with questions, because it sounded kind of awful, but the other night at Target I decided that I would just have to find out for myself:



I won't say it's the best two dollars I've ever spent, but it wasn't bad.

It didn't look very appetizing, and smelled like nothing when I opened it:



I added 1/4 cup of water and mixed until blended:



and it did smell a little bit like pancake batter. I popped it into the microwave for a minute and fifteen seconds, and when it came out it looked like this:



It looks like mush in that picture, but it's solid. The top springs back when you touch it with a fork, and it smells so good. I got the cinnamon and maple flavor, and it smelled so maple-y (maple-ish? My spellcheck will not suggest any words for "smelling of maple") that I was suddenly excited about trying it:





It's light and fluffy, like a pancake should be, and it tastes pretty good. If you work in an office or someplace like that where you want a somewhat filling snack or small meal (one of these is 260 calories) and have a microwave, this might be good to keep in your emergency desk drawer.

It's not a pancake, though. It tastes like a pancake, but it's not flat or seared on either side. This is a pancake-flavored muffin that you bake in the microwave.

It was pretty good for breakfast, though.

Arizona

I spent Monday through Friday of last week in Arizona, for a conference. Since the conference had pretty solid blocks of activity every day, I didn't really get a lot of sightseeing in, so I don't have as many pictures as I normally would on a vacation trip. I saw a lot of friends and colleagues, though, had a really good time, and brought back some good ideas.

Our trip started before dawn on Monday, when I dressed in a shirt that I got on clearance at Kroger:



It was on clearance because the score printed on it is wrong. I wore it all day, and even though several people commented on it and talked about the game, no one noticed that mistake.

Dawn came while we were on the plane:



but it wasn't the only thing. The flight attendant brought me a stroopwafel, a strangely sweet cookie that I'd never had before. After reading the ingredients, I gingerly tasted it, and then immediately devoured it.

I also spilled my ginger ale on the plane, and helplessly blurted to the (attractive) flight attendant, "I SPILLED!" as if I am a toddler. I'm sure he noted and was impressed by my highly articulate vocabulary. I'm still not sure how it happened, as I was reading, sipping, reaching for my cup, and then all of a sudden ginger ale and ice in the aisle.

They left the cubes there to melt.

Once the plane landed, we knew we were on limited time and pretty much only had Monday afternoon free, so we dropped our bags and took a car to historic Old Town Scottsdale:











That last one was inscribed on a bus stop, of all places. While in Old Town walking around we did some shopping, poking into a lot of touristy stores filled with touristy crap:



Nothing says "America" like a fringed leather bag made out of our flag. Even better, I saw the same bag in multiple stores.

We also got some food. I had some delicious chorizo and jalapeno corn cakes at the Daily Dose:



and I have to say that I ate more chorizo last week than I have at any other time in my life. If I was ordering anything and it had a chorizo option, by God, I got the chorizo. All of it was very good, as was the Golden Nugget that I got at the Sugar Bowl, a charmingly pink ice cream parlor that looked kind of like a soda fountain counter in Barbie's dream house:









I was less pleased with the Meat and Potatoes Martini that I got at Cowboy Ciao later in the week:



The deep fried bacon was delicious, but the cocktail itself had a strong, almost sour taste. The mac and cheese I had with it was wonderful, though.

Other than that one day of sightseeing, the only scenery I saw on the rest of the trip was when I went for walks:













but that's ok. I was there for work, not for sightseeing.

The Month in Books: September

I didn't really have a theme to my September reading, which I bring up because I will in October.

I'm also bringing it up because I'm thinking of a secondary book project: reading or rereading all of my Stephen King books. I know that there are other blogs already doing this, reading them in publishing order and such, but I've been a Stephen King fan since high school. I have an entire bookcase in my apartment that is nothing but hardcover Stephen King books, and once I even wrote Stephen King a fan letter.

That turned out kind of hilariously, as I wrote to ask for an autographed photo. He wrote back and explained that autographed photos were more a practice for actors, not authors (Oh really, Stephen? So what were you doing appearing in all of those movie and television adaptations of your work? Writing?), and invited me to send a book to be autographed instead. I was so mad about it that not only did I never get around to sending a book, but I also threw the letter away. I wanted an autographed photo of Stephen King, and I threw away a signed letter that he wrote me because I was mad.

Ah, youth.

Anyway, I haven't read some of those books more than once, and some of them I haven't read at all. Over the years, Stephen and I have drifted apart a little, and I don't automatically buy and read his books as soon as they come out anymore. Some of them I don't even buy in hardcover, because I didn't feel like spending the money after Dreamcatcher, which I remember reading once and thinking, "Jesus, this is so bad." I'm wondering, though, if those books will mean the same things to me reading them as an adult that they did when I read them as a teenager, or if I will see them differently through a lens of different experience.

It's an idea for a New Year's resolution, but in the meantime I need to get some books out of the house, which means attacking the "books to be read" piles. That was the theme for September, and ties into the theme for October.

1) Grady Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism is a love letter to the 80's. It's 1988, and even though high schoolers Gretchen and Abby have been friends since 4th grade, their friendship is a little strained after a night of skinnydipping and LSD. Gretchen's acting a little weird, and bad stuff keeps happening around her. Abby is concerned, but when she starts asking questions, that's when the really bad stuff starts happening to her, to their friends, to their school, and maybe to the whole world. Is Gretchen possessed by a demon, like the weightlifting exorcist Abby consults believes, or are high school girls just bitches? And can their friendship survive?

This book was fun, but also a little disturbing. There was some really intriguing imagery, and when I got to the end I was kind of just plowing through because I wanted to see what would happen.

2) I don't really know how to sum up Welcome to Night Vale except to say that it's just not the novel for me. I don't remember which friend said, "You don't have to listen to the podcast to read it! Go ahead! You'll love it!" but I listened to that friend, and I stuck this book on my wish list, and then my parents bought it off of my wish list for Christmas, and now I wasted a Christmas present on a book that was more interested in being cleverly surreal than in actually telling a story that might interest a reader, and I wasted time reading it.

Maybe I just didn't get it, or maybe there's not really that much there to get.

3) Holly Madison's Down the Rabbit Hole offers the incredibly shocking idea that Hugh Heffner, a man who dates seven interchangeable women at once, might be a man who mistreats women and ignores their feelings. Who could have predicted such a thing from a man who presents this image to the world:



I'm sorry to mock her struggles to find self esteem and happiness, but throughout the book she seems incredibly naïve for a woman who willingly agreed to move into a shared bedroom with another girlfriend in a mansion with a curfew so that she could group-date a seventy year old. And not just agreed to, but requested. She sought out this lifestyle, and then was perpetually amazed that she wasn't treated like an individual and nobody cared about her feelings.

I'm also kind of surprised that Criss Angel didn't sue, because the part where she talks about him being emotionally abusive and stealing her jewelry after she broke up with him could be construed as defamatory, unless he agrees that's what happened.

4) Back in the early days of the war in Afghanistan, a lot of people had an impression of Pat Tillman, the NFL player who walked away from a football contract to join the Army. In Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer tells us about the man behind the propaganda: who he was, what he believed in, and why he thought it was his duty to help others. This is both a biography of Tillman and of the US involvement in Afghanistan going back several decades before the fighting, the tragic way in which the two histories collided, and the way that the US government did their best to obscure the fact that Tillman was killed by friendly fire.

This book is ultimately frustrating, because it's a story about how Tillman thought he was doing the right thing, and trusted the government to tell him and the American people the truth. Since that didn't happen, you're left with the feeling that his sacrifice was a terrible waste.

5) Gordon Merrick's The Lord Won't Mind is a trashy romance novel. There's crying, emotional outbursts, a whirlwind romance, a little bit of violence, sinister machinations to keep the lovers apart, and a lot of sex. A lot of sex. More sex than "50 Shades". The kind of sex you awkwardly read on the treadmill while hoping that no one else is looking at your Kindle, because there's so much of it and it's so graphic. The surprising parts of this, though, are that it's a gay novel from 1970 that doesn't end in horrible tragedy, and that it's really super racist to the point that I assumed it had been written prior to the 1950s.

It was an interesting read, but drags in places. It also didn't clear anything off of my reading pile, since I read this one on the kindle while on the treadmill.

6) I realized at the bookstore a few weeks ago that I've never read anything by Robert Heinlein. That seemed odd, since he is a legendary science fiction author and I like science fiction, so I went to the science fiction section and grabbed the first Heinlein book I saw: Methuselah's Children. It tells the story of the Howard Families, a group of people in the near future who have managed to extend their lives by a few hundred years through decades of selective breeding and concealed identities. Regular humans are hunting the Families, convinced that there's a secret to their long lives, and the Families have a wild, desperate plan to steal a newly constructed interstellar starship and leave Earth behind.

This felt like half of a book. Up until they actually got into the spaceship and took off, everything was moving along, but once that happened the book seemed to fall apart. They go to a couple of planets and, eventually, back to Earth, but that whole half of the book seems directionless, like Heinlein wasn't really sure what kind of story he wanted to tell or was just throwing things at the wall until it got long enough to be publishable. I should probably try at least one more book before I decide he's not the author for me, but it may be a while.

I'm open to suggestions for another book of his to try. I was thinking of Starship Troopers, because I've heard that it's good and also because Casper Van Dien was really cute in that movie, but now I'm not sure that's a good reason to read a book, because a lot of times now I can't tell Casper Van Dien from Grant Show, so I'm open to other ideas.

For October, the theme is Joyce Carol Oates, because I have a number of her books in the "to be read" pile, so I might as well read a bunch of them all at once.