Monthly Archives: December 2025

Nestled. Stacked. Mashed. Cosplay.

Cooking, Creative non-fiction, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, Writing, ,

Food-in-Food Ad Nauseam

I just made several dozen cookies using cookie butter, essentially folding finely ground cookies into other cookies. This was after I contemplated making Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies.

Maybe it’s the season. Maybe it’s my brain. Most likely, it’s the eggnog that leads me to share these thoughts.

Once upon a time, food had a certain dignity. I don’t mean to romanticize the past – the food wasn’t necessarily good, but everything sort of stayed in its lane, just as God and Ina Garten intended. Pies and cakes didn’t go seeking thrills inside one another’s layers. A turkey wasn’t trying to form some sort of poultry Voltron with a duck and a chicken. And you could enjoy a donut without fearing it would attempt a surprise flank maneuver on the croissants.

(We’re just going to take a moment to pour one out for the troubling put-everything-in Jell-O era, okay?)

Image via Molded Memories (moldedmemories.food.blog)

Do yourself a favor and do not look up photos of the final product.

ANYHOO. BeJell-Oed fish aside, these were orderly days. Predictable.

Naturally, this didn’t last, because America, God bless her goofy heart, just had to ask things like, “What if this were two foods?” and “What if this were three foods wearing a trench coat?”

And we just had to answer, “Let’s find out!” We even had the temerity to be enthusiastic about it.

Long story short, everything started declining.

It’s not total collapse. Not yet, at least. Decline takes time. Decline is a gentle slope you slide down while clutching a cocktail weenie.

First came the turducken. Fine. Well, not fine. Terrible. But it was a novelty, a kitschy one-off we could pretend was harmless.

Along barreled the cronut, then entered the piecaken, and at that point the Universe quietly ducked out for cigarettes.

Of course, the Tofurkey strutted in trying to claim creative credit for all these food mashups. Pretty bold for a plant impersonating meat with more commitment than half the actors on the WB in its heyday.

Now, for those preparing to storm the comment section of this VERY SERIOUS AND HIGHLY ACADEMIC TREATISE to inform me I “misunderstand food” and to quote from the Book of You Got Chocolate in my Peanut Butter, I say unto you: NAY. NAY, ESTEEMED SCHOLAR. I am not speaking of such blessed unions

I speak of “Your chefs were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” I speak of culinary unions baroque and unsound, where a food is nestled inside another food, occasionally mashed with a third, and often pretending to be a fourth. I speak of the insult added to injury via portmanteau.

You may ask, “What ho, Malvolio?”

Which is a weird question right now. Why are you asking that?

A better question is, “What comes next?”

I (or maybe it’s the eggnog) have taken the liberty of imagining exactly that. (Oh, no.) I’m not saying these will happen, and I’m not saying they should.

Except they will.

And still, they definitely should not.

So, what horrors await?

A pork tenderloin tucked coyly into a soufflé, resulting in the Souffloin? The Brûléurger, a burger with a cracked sugar crust, because separating dinner and dessert is a real time waster?

There is, I fear, a genuine possibility of a Sushperd’s Pie, sushi nestled beneath mashed potatoes. This is the sort of thing you serve only to your nemesis.

Our pastries may develop pork issues (Baklavacon), and our Fritos may develop pastry issues (Fritocotta).

Let us not pretend we are prepared for the arrival of the Chocochimachattorellacci (Chocolate + Chimichanga + Cacciatore + Cappellacci).

Any faith in humanity you’ve been clinging to may at this point be folly.

Now, this is the part of the essay where I write some sort of takeaway. (Pun not intended, unless you laughed, in which case pun intended).

Ahem.

This is the part of the essay where I make it about me.

Look, maybe culinary monstrosities are born of loneliness and/or an impulse to unnecessarily break something, hot glue it back together, and call it innovation.

Maybe we keep stuffing food inside food because stuffing feelings inside feelings is harder and definitely not something to bring to an office potluck.

Or maybe some influencer is issuing gastrointestinal dares to shoppers as they enter the grocery store. I don’t know. Theories abound.

What is certain is that someone, somewhere, is going to read my jokes and think, “Bisquisketbabka? Challenge accepted.” And suddenly I’ll be forced to eat some sort of bisque in a brisket in a babka, and it’ll be my own damned fault.

But there’s still hope for you, dear reader.

If someone produces a Quesoquichewich, or a Mortarollini, or a Bouillabiscuitryanibatten, rise from your chair, walk to the door, and leave without looking back.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my Salisbury Schn’moruflakanaki (Schnitzel + S’mores + Soufflé + Saganaki) is calling.

No, wait. That’s the eggnog.

I’ve named it Malvolio.

Personal, Communal, Existential, Structural.

Book Review, Books, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio

What I Read November 2025

Why does November always feel like someone handed me a blinking device, said “cut the wires, good luck,” and wandered off to make a sandwich? November wasn’t catastrophic. I mean, no one actually handed me a bomb, none of my kids ran away to join a third-tier circus, and absolutely nothing went wrong on Thanksgiving (though my holiday prep was questionable, as usual). Like I said, November simply feels like that all happened.

(*le soupir*) November is just that month. It’s a little dumb and a lot chaotic and kinda drafty.

I don’t care much for dumb drafty chaos, so I hid and read. And by accident, subconscious choice, or cosmic joke, I read four books that each dwell in chaos. Personal chaos! Communal chaos! Existential chaos! Structural chaos! What a spread!

Sloane Crosley mines the human experience (hers, yours, mine) and comes up with glinting stories to share. James McBride unleashes riotous confusion in a Brooklyn neighborhood, where it morphs into grace. Katherine May slows everything down until the mess reveals a mossy, watery texture. Jennifer Egan fractures time and form, letting chaos spool into something Pulitzer Prize-winning.

Look, I get it. Life (November) is mostly uncontrollable, and yes, it can still be meaningful, funny, periodically beautiful, and let us not forget the glory that is this. But, sheesh, can things settle down a little? Or can we at least keep the chaos to the page? I can always pause that kind of bedlam for a moment by putting the book down to go make my own sandwich or cut the wires or whatever.

Which is all just to say here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:

  • Deacon King Kong by James McBride
  • Enchantment by Katherine May
  • I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley
  • A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

The world of Deacon King Kong absolutely pulses from the get go. We start with a cinematic, panoramic sweep that situates us in late-1960s Brooklyn, where, the Cause Houses are a fully realized sociocultural ecosystem. And because the neighborhood is so fully formed, and its residents carry the whole spectrum of human feeling, the world of the book feels piercingly real and often achingly funny.

Aging deacon Sportcoat shoots a young drug dealer, Deems, in broad daylight. The mystery of why Sportcoat did this is the narrative aperture, and the mystery expands, matryoshka-like, into a larger one: how does an entire community swallow, digest, argue over, misremember, and metabolize such an event? Through this violent and abrupt act, McBride explores community, memory, and the layered structures of power shaping the neighborhood…

(continued here)

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May

Katherine May’s Enchantment rearranges your insides. It’s a little uncomfortable until you realize you can breathe! Wonderful!

She defines enchantment as “small doses of awe” (which sounds about right. Larger doses would be too much). Her small doses of awe are the everyday sparks of joy, moments of breath, and our decision to pay attention.

The book is organized into four sections: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, which sounds a bit woo-woo, but each section reads like a grown-up, old-time fairy tale, the kind scuffed and weathered and passed forward by wind and rock and tide. May documents a lived folklore of how humans can and should make meaning in noticing. Even the structure is soothing.

(continued here)

I Was Told There’d Be Cake By Sloane Crosley

Sometimes the universe takes an ordinary Tuesday, shakes it like a snowglobe, spritzes it with lemon juice, then publishes it as Sloane Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake.

I Was Told There’d Be Cake wanders through human experiences from childhood mishaps, to mall culture, to bosses who probably should not have been in charge of anything, to boyfriends who definitely should not have been in charge of anything. These worlds are recognizable, but tilted just slightly so we can see their underbellies.

(continued here)

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Sometimes literary fiction still pulls off a magic trick. Sometimes you open a book and discover an entire small galaxy.

Which is to say, I just finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It’s marketed as a “novel in stories,” though that undersells it. It’s quite not a traditional novel, but it’s also not 13 stand-alone stories. It’s something hybrid, slippery and recombinant and fluid.

(continued here)

And there be the November reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?