FLOG: The Foodiness Blog

Let’s discuss McDonalds’ new pancake chicken sandwich…available only in Ohio, and only for a limited time. Yes, you heard me right, the pancake chicken sandwich. I dunno the actual name, the McChickCakeWich? The McPansSandChick? Somebody tell me please.

So this new work of food-esque genius comes from a franchisee in Ohio, who cleverly took a McChicken fried chicken breast-esque filet, and sandwiched it between two McGriddlers buns. It’s not actually sandwiched between pancakes, which btw are called hotcakes in the McD’s vernacular, but rather those weird syrup-flavored semi-rigid bun things that the house of Ronald serves in breakfast sandwiches, that aren’t English muffins either. I think they’re like thicker, more spongy, more rigid pancake-esque bun halves, with the syrup BAKED RIGHT IN! So that it doesn’t make a sticky mess all over the car seat and the Ipad screen when your fat-fingered Wall-E kids eat breakfast in the minivan on the way to their endocrinologists appointments.

So this franchisee in Ohio, because where else, created this new sandwich sensation, and apparently it’s just selling like…like, well you know, like hotcakes. But they’re not using hotcakes, or pancakes, they’re using Mcgriddlers, which, have I mentioned, have the syrup BAKED RIGHT IN?!

So sandwich two Mcgriddlers around a fried, simulated chicken-breast-shaped filet of something formerly known as chicken, and you’ve got yourself the biggest culinary success story since the Cronut? Enough of a story to make the Today show and national news headlines? Uhh, yeah. I mean it’s not like there’s anything else going on in the news lately, kind of a slow news cycle right now. Amirite? Actually, I’d rather look at a McChickPanWichCake 24/7 then have to look at the big orange pancake face of a certain candidate. Again, amirite?

So…What sparked this new culinary delight? Turns out, this is the franchisee’s attempt at a hand-held version of the chicken and waffle, I think. Since The Ronald has yet to introduce waffles, and I can’t imagine why not, although I’m sure they’re in the red and yellow striped pipeline, I guess the Mcgriddler bun is a good stand-in. The Egg McMuffin emerged as a handheld version of the eggs Benedict brunch warhorse, so why not make chicken and waffles portable too? Who needs cutlery anymore! Down with silverware, it’s only for elites and the 1%! Ban the knife and fork, too dangerous for our precious offsprings’ little fingers! Give ’em guns, not sporks!

Do you guys get the dreads? Where you wake up in the middle of the night or way too early in the morning and think about all the things you feel like you should accomplish but aren’t? Or that every decision you’ve ever made in your life has been the wrong decision? Dark, I know. Sorry, it must be the weather. This is why I get stupid-silly excited every year when I see the first crocus blossom popping up in some Brooklyn brownstone’s front garden. To me, it means there’s still hope for the world. If that fragile little purple flower has the tenacity to come back, year after year, sometimes pushing right up through the snow and showing its pretty little face, then I can do it, too. You go, lil’ crocus! I’ll be watching for you soon!

Back to the dreads. Often, what I wake up dreading, is having to come up with a new show theme or topic every week. People, it is a LOT of pressure. I mean, after 145-odd episodes, it is seriously not easy to do. In fact, last night, I dreamed an entire show script, I knew in the dream exactly what the show was gonna be about, down to the jokes, the title, everything…and in the dream, I was so relieved about it, because it came together so easily, that my brain let it go, since I thought I had a whole show done and written.

And then I had a dream about watery overcooked spinach, and that I was putting it in the fridge in my old house from childhood and the green murky water from the spinach overflowed and leaked out of the fridge and flooded underneath the white vinyl flooring that our kitchen had and when you stepped on the floor, the green water would gush up around the edges of the kitchen and overflow onto the white floor. Who puts a white floor in a kitchen, btw? Oh and there was something about pickles, too…

And then I woke up, and all I could remember was that the show that my dreaming brain had written wasn’t about floods of spinach water, but had something to do with the movie “The Martian”, which I watched twice on my flight to Mexico last month. (Once in English, once in Spanish, just for practice)

But that was the only thing I could remember from the dream, that the show was gonna be based on “The Martian”. Something about his immediate need for food, and how he grew those potatoes, and about the packaged space-food he was eating until then, and how he almost starved. But that’s the only part that stuck beyond sleep. Matt Damon and his potatoes grown in Mars dust and his own poop. It WAS really impressive, the way he did that. Grew that huge crop, only to have it destroyed by stupid Mars sand.

See? Monoculture, no bueno. It’s a very bad idea to only grow one variety of one crop…just saying… We give Matt Damon a pass because he had no choice. But don’t tell me it’s too hard to just EAT real food down here on earth, because Matt had to GROW his in a giant spacesuit, inside a plastic bubble, after hauling in dust from a hostile, water-free, uninhabitable planet, make his own water, save his poop for fertilizer, and wait for the plants to grow, while being fueled on vacuum-packed turkey tetrazzini and Foodiness space-bar Snaxs. I mean, where do you think all the original Foodiness technology came from? Space? Well, not FROM space, but from space-age technology. Uh…hello? Tang?

Today is February 9, 2016. We are now 39 days into the year. At the end of this week, on the 14th of February, the “holiday” season, will be officially over. The end, Done. Until…of course, Easter rolls around. Then we begin the next round of sugar-gorging, present shopping, holiday madness. Because people buy Easter presents now, apparently! It’s a thing. Hey! Let’s celebrate the crucifixion and mythological resurrecting of a Jew, by buying each other new X-boxes or pink Uggs! I know, let’s fill the Uggs with plastic grass and jelly beans! YES! I saw it on Pinterest! And then, let’s throw AWAY the Uggs, because they are seriously the ugliest footwear ever and I know because I lived through the 70’s and nobody over the age of four should be wearing squishy booties, ok?

The holidays begin with Halloween, fly through thanksgiving, then it’s your December holiday of choice that requires a huge cash outlay and much eating of red and green baked goods, despite which December holiday you choose…Ok, maybe your baked goods were white and blue, the official Hanukka colors. Whatevs. Then it peaks out at New Year’s eve in a heave of exhaustion, gives us a short breather to pretend to dry out and get in shape, then revs back up again in a blaze of red and pink feelings of inadequacy and misery in mid-February…And then, just when you’re speaking to your spouse or partner again after they give you a new sports bra for Valentine’s day, and you think it’s safe to go back outside again without the assault of the holiday-industrial complex in your face at every turn, things slow down again just long enough for the snow to melt, the sun to return, the taxes to get done…it’s Easter, or, for my peeps, Passover or what I call Spring Thanksgiving, since my seders are really just about getting out the nice napkins and having friends over for a big meal with my handmade matzo.

But somehow, Passover hasn’t yet been turned into a gifting or carding holiday, the way other formerly non-gifty-cardy holidays like Halloween have become, but I’m sure, somewhere, in a secret underground secure location, in Hallmark’s Kansas City HQ, someone is working on Passover cards and gifts. Maybe they already exist? Are there Passover cards? I haven’t been in a Hallmark store since the 90’s…are there still Hallmark stores? All of ‘em. Halloween, V-day, Easter, let alone Xmas and Hanukkah, have become cardy-gifty-candy-orgy spend-fests. Kids get Easter presents now, not just plastic baskets with a few milk chocolate bunnies and some Brach’s jelly beans like we did, when I was a kid. Oh wait, no we didn’t…

But Valentine’s day?…Here we go again. I know what you’re thinking. Is she going to simultaneously drone and rage on about cookie-dough filled Crossonuts or brownie batter filled Englullers (that’s an English muffin-cruller mashup that I just invented, btw)? Is she? Am I? Well, do you want me too? I mean, after five years, and five Valentine’s days, do you really want to hear that all again? Even I’m sick of myself, and I’m my biggest fan! But, If you really, really, want me too….