As is my custom on Thursdays, I woke up at 4:30 this morning ready to caper down the stairs so I could watch our sixteen qualified culinary competitors cook themselves some rattlesnakes. First, though, I decided to check my Smartyphone for e-mail, just to make sure I wasn't missing anything important out there in the big wide world.
Imagine my chagrin when I discovered in my Inbox a diatribe from an outraged West Coast reader berating me for yesterday's gluten-free chocolate/hazelnut bar posting in which I maligned (unfairly in this camper's opinion) Wegmans' frozen-turkey bowlers and their cavalier price-labelling policies. Aggressive questioning from said fan ('To what did the weight refer, each bar or all of them together?') was followed by a link to a Wikipedia entry that described in stupefying detail a wide variety of mass-measuring strategems. The note went on to accuse me of an incomplete (well, let's not mince words - 'totally perverse' was the implication) understanding of the meaning of the term net weight. The e-mail closed with the hypothesis that ambiguous verbiage on the part of the manufacturer, rather than the rotten education of my supermarket's employees, was to blame for the misunderstanding and that I should be a bit less quick to cast stones, already.
The epistolarian - you will no doubt have guessed - was Sir, currently three hours' behind the times in California and with nothing better to do than bury me under smug pedantry. What did the details of the case matter when I had been confronted by specious signage that led me to believe my new-found coffee-time accompaniments were three times more expensive than they actually were? I was so upset by my spouse's disloyalty and lack of sympathy that I had to send Che down to watch Top Chef without me while I stewed, grumbled, and plotted revenge.
An hour later my faithful notebook reported that rattlesnake had indeed been on the Quickfire menu (very tasty, apparently, when covered in tempura beer-batter and served with zucchini-almond gazpacho) and that Keith from Wilmington (the one in North Carolina) got auf'ed for serving a soggy and disgusting chicken enchilada made with a wheat tortilla. Che, in an heart-warming bid to provide me with some much-needed cheer, empathically editorialized that it served Keith right for preparing gluten-filled wraps when the blameless corn variety would have been both tastier and more auténtico.
I was forced to agree and took comfort from the fact that my notebook, at least, knows where his true allegiance lies.
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