At first I thought Taco Bell was just finally manning up and telling me what I already knew about my occasional indulgence in their food-adjacent product. I thought maybe God was using the Taco Bell website to send me some kind of message – “DON’T DO IT PLEASE! ADULT ONSET DIABETES IS JUST ONE CHEESY GORDITA CRUNCH AWAY!”

Then, I realized that this website was in mourning. And THEN, I realized that the “Bell” in Taco Bell is actually a dude’s name. It threw my whole world into disarray – who is Hardee? Who is Carl, Jr.? For that matter – who is Carl, Sr.? Is there a Mr. Sonic, America’s Drive-In out there? And how on earth did Glen Bell live to be 86 years old given that he HAD to have eaten some of his chain’s food at some point? I naturally assumed my continued Runs for the Border® would leave me with a lifespan more comparable to Jesus or Mozart than, say, Betty White, not to mention endless cases of Runs for the Border®.

At any rate, I eventually got deeper into the website, where I was confronted with another conundrum. Which is when this conversation ensued.

Me: Do you see any difference between these two pictures?

Brian: Let’s see. Both have crisp, freshly prepared tortilla chips, seasoned ground beef, warm nacho cheese sauce, hearty beans, diced ripe tomatoes, and reduced fat sour cream.

Me: Well – which one is bigger?

Brian: I don’t know.

Me: i want whichever one is bigger. Get me whichever one is bigger. So I can win.

Note the red tinsel over the kitchen door. Sometime this week I have a funny story about that.

You can’t tell from here, but there are no fewer than three dishes from The Pioneer Woman’s website on that table. Right in front of the reindeer-head cookie jar in the middle is monkey bread.

This is my friend K.C. Clifford:

K.C. warned me after that Christmas party that I am never, ever allowed to make monkey bread again. It’s too good. It’s too tempting. It’s too easy to stand before that dish and eat every last delicious bite. I mean – buttermilk biscuits soaked in sugar, butter and vanilla? How is a person supposed to resist that? IT’S JUST TOO DELICIOUS, I TELL YOU. But this is what the holidays are for.

So, today, to say thanks, K.C. and I wandered up to our friendly neighborhood Barnes and Noble to say thanks to The Pioneer Woman herself for all the deliciousness, as she was there signing books. We read the Postsecret books while we stood in line. Finally, it was our turn, and K.C. not only got her cookbook signed, but got to give Ree a copy of her new record, Orchid.

Then it was my turn. I told Ree how K.C. had forbidden me from ever, ever making Monkey Bread in her presence again and how my family had asked me to make her sourdough bread pudding for Christmas. She gave me a couple good tips, and I was so excited that I forgot to tell her that it was one of my photos she recently chose as one of her black & white favorites, but I just plum forgot. Which is okay, because I’d meant to bring her a print of that very photo, and I forgot that too.

It’s Christmas. Cut me some freaking slack.

At any rate, she was as sweet as could be, and now i have a signed copy of her cookbook, which is awesome, as I no longer have to haul the laptop into the kitchen with me when I’m cooking her recipes, including SANDWICH! This is good, as my computer does tend to get a little dusted with flour and sugar when I do that.

At any rate, thanks, Ree, for being such a sweetheart, and thanks to K.C. and Brian for standing in line with me. Have a great Christmas, everyone.

Last weekend Brian made a pot roast. It was a thing of sweetness and light, and when he was done and putting the dishes away, he let Sam have a crack at the spoon. He was a happy Sam, but what was formerly a passive habit of sitting at the edge of the stove while we cook, waiting for us to drop something, has become a tendency to push at the back of our legs with his nose, trying to MAKE us drop something. Which I may or may not have accidentally done last night when we made this, which is not only the best SANDWICH! in the history of mankind, but a thing of such mythical proportions in this house that its mere mention is enough to make us salivate. Its status is so elevated here at Casa de Okay City that it is known by only one name: SANDWICH! Not “the sandwich” or “THE sandwich,” or even “That really good sandwich” or “Pioneer Woman Sandwich,” but just SANDWICH!

SANDWICH!

Sometime in the next two weeks we are likely to get our first freeze; this means that, officially, the garden is over for this year. Which, to be honest, is totally fine with me. It’s been a great garden in a lot of ways, but a disappointment compared to last year. A lot of this is due to me; I didn’t take the same steps I did in 2008 to keep grass out of the plot, and a bunch of the new stuff I tried this year was a resounding failure. The squash especially, because it got infested with squash bugs that I never figured out how to get rid of, and the brandywine tomatoes were all split and rotted before they even ripened. The aurora peppers, though! They were GREAT! And the little yellow Beam’s Pear tomatoes! Put those things together and you’ve got a hell of a salsa.

This week I MUST get out and pull in as many of these peppers as I can, because my dad tells me they will freeze quite nicely. But as for the rest of it, I can’t say I’m going to be entirely sorry to take the tiller to it and return it all to the earth.

Well, the State Fair is in boxes for another 50 weeks. I’m a little bummed we only got to go once, but relieved that the rusted-down old Monorail wasn’t running, because that thing scares the bejeebus out of me, just like the rides do. Still, I got to do my usual minor culinary excursion around the Fairgrounds. Some people plan entire weeks’ worth of calories and Weight Watcher points around a trip to the Fair. They have the Indian Taco, Steak Sandwich, and everything on a stick they can possibly find. The grand finale, of course, is usually a funnel cake:

Those don’t excite me so much anymore. Perhaps it was my gateway drug – like marijuana or whippits, funnel cakes were only the first few skips down a Yellow Brick Road of fatty and fried goodness. And I do love them – I mean, you could tell me right now that a funnel cake is nothing more than the deep-fried and heavily-sugared intestine of a New York City sewer rat, and I’d probably still order one at the next country fair I visit. They’re delicious. But like with any gateway drug, eventually the high you get from them is not enough. Hence my graduation, in the middle of this decade, to the Fried Snicker:

I would say that the breakdown of human beings – or at least middle-American, fairgoing human beings – breaks down something like this: people who have tried a Fried Snicker, and people who, when you try to describe one to them, look at you like you’re describing sex with a rosebush. Here’s the deal – there’s not much to it, okay? It’s a Snicker. Deep-fried. On a stick. All melty chocolate and nougat and peanuts inside something like the shell of a corn dog, only sweeter. And liberally rolled in powdered sugar and topped with chocolate syrup. OKAY WHAT IS NOT TO LOVE HERE?

This same stand sells Fried Twinkies and Fried Oreos. This year Brian tried the Oreos, and let me sample a bite. It was good, but not Snicker good. Usually somewhere in the vicinity of this Mecca Of Fat and Happiness is the stand that also sells the miniature milk jugs full of root beer. This libation is especially helpful in eating a Fried Snicker, because not only does the extra sweetness ensure that your dentist’s kids will get to go to a great college (the root beer is made with a whole lot less carbonated water and a whole lot more syrup than the 2-liter jugs of A&W available at your local grocery store), but also because the Snicker will dry out your mouth and leave you crawling for any oasis. And we can’t have a repeat of the time we were caught drinking from the fountain, can we?

Like any good, responsible adult I started with dessert. But before you can try any of this sweet stuff, you’ve got to go get some Wisconsin Fried Cheese. We are healthy, well-maintained people, after all, adults who have done well, paid most of their bills on time, and built careers. Therefore we can have appetizer, then dessert, or vice versa if you’re kinky.

Wisconsin Fried Cheese happens here:

Brian really enjoys their fried vegetables (usually broccoli, mushrooms and cauliflower) with spicy German mustard. It’s delicious, but I can never resist the deep-fried (again) Jalapeno cheese with jalapeno ranch:

You’re going to need a beer with this. Go buy a beer from The Boob Lady and plop yourself down somewhere to enjoy.

Now, look. If you think you can handle all this fatty goodness and still ride rides, then by all means power to you and be prepared to get on the evening news for horking all over a crowd of teenaged bystanders. (Also, be prepared for me to take you to the fair next year and pay for EVERYTHING because I’d love to see a repeat of that). Some of the food defies even my explanation; for example, the Curly Fry Loaf:

…which I thought was the name of an early 20th-century Blues musician. A friend tells me that the Curly Fry Loaf is exactly what it sounds like – phonetically. It’s basically a bunch of curly fries so big and smashed together so tightly that it resembles something like a loaf of bread. Sounds like a lot of carbs. Me, I’m-a stick with my EXTREMELY HEALTHY fried cheese, fried Snicker and root beer.

But no rides. I’m fine if I only have to taste this *particular* meal once a year, to say nothing of tasting it once a night.

Why didn’t I do this post while the fair was still going on, you may ask. Here’s the thing – I have a YEAR, every year, to prepare my body to ingest this delicious-yet-slowly-killing-me-from-the-inside goodness. I figured it was only fair I give you just as much time. Just bookmark the post, and I’ll see you out with the other freaks in just 350 short days. In the meantime may I suggest you get a good colonic or two.

These are the flowers at the top of my basil plants. This stuff is so great, and we’ve been cooking with it all summer. One of the best things to do is to cook some walnuts in a bit of olive oil, then add in some basil, a mess of spinach and some minced garlic, with some salt and pepper. Throw the whole thing over some whole wheat pasta and top with a little bit of cheese. DELICIOUS.

A couple weeks ago when we went out to collect tomatoes in one of our shiny silver bowls, we accidentally helped to create something really beautiful. I rather love this photograph, and I really loved eating these vegetables.

This right here is a whole mess of red, ripe Aurora Peppers. They’re just the best things ever, and in my garden they are going insane. They are insanely hot; so much so that Brian and I have taken to calling them “Insanity Peppers,” because the first time we found a couple of them ripe, we just cut them open and ate them raw. And then, four days later when our sense of taste returned, we vowed never to do that again. They’re searing hot and smoky; we were determined to find something to do with them.

One of the coolest things about these peppers – other than their amazing taste – is what they look like on the vine. They start off purple, then turn yellow, orange, and then red. They’re gorgeous:

Really, really pretty, right? They add a great splash of color to my garden. And let me just say, if you don’t have a backyard, these things do great in pots, so you really don’t have any excuse not to grow them. And after our raw-tasting of them went south, I was determined to make something out of these suckers. Then it came to me. We went out and harvested a whole bunch of these guys:

These are Beam’s Yellow Pear tomatoes, and they are growing like crazy. So we picked a whole huge mess of them, with some peppers:

We went to the store and got some fresh pineapple, some cilantro and a red onion, some salt and vinegar, and we stuck it all in a food processor, and we made THE MOST AMAZING SALSA HOLY CRAP SERIOUSLY? And the smoky, searing flavor of the Aurora Peppers were the perfect bit of spice and the perfect complement to the tomatoes. You guys, it was seriously delicious. Now there are so many of these peppers coming ripe that it’s getting a little out of control. I’ve got to find some people to take some of these, give them my salsa recipe, and then hand them a legal waiver, you know, just in case. There’s nothing like fresh food you’ve made yourself to remind you that it’s summertime. I’m going to try to make a huge batch of this stuff and jar it up and save it for winter, when it’s cold, nothing’s fresh, and I can sit back with some blue corn tortilla chips and just pretend.

So, look. What with having Fridays off throughout the summer I’ve tried to keep my freelance load fairly heavy. This is to keep me out of trouble, and also rolling in green, because it turns out? YOU CAN GET PAID FOR WRITING. I know, right?

So last year I conceived of this loopty idea wherein we traipse all over the state of Oklahoma seeing and trying things that we never had before. It has taken us to a great number of fabulous locales, and earlier this year I pitched it as an ongoing travel series to my wonderful editor over at that kablamo publication I get to write for for some reason. He’s let me sort of go nuts and run with it, so we’ve had a great opportunity to repeat the trip this year.

I took a small exception for this month’s article, which was that I’d been to the small mining town of Krebs before, but I’d never eaten at either of the Italian restaurants we went to, and I’d never tried their signature dish, Lamb Fries. The article is coming out next week, so I won’t give away too much, except to say that that photo above, there, is me, a Choc beer, a local Oklahoma brew:

in one hand, a lamb fry on a fork in the other. For the uninitiated, lamb fries are just lamb testicles, skinned, rolled in batter and fried, and when we got to our first stop on our Tour of Krebs, I decided I’d feel like a huge fraud writing this article without trying lamb fries. The regular plate was $12.99, and thank God my inherent cheapness kicked in and we ordered the kids’ plate, which had 5 testicles. I thought about counting them aloud like the Count on Sesame Street, but.

Now, look. There are a lot of really, really bawdy things I could say about having testicles in my mouth, but my family and coworkers, as well as some of my spiritual peers and heroes, read this website and so I’ll just go ahead and point out that this wasn’t the first time. You were thinking it. Let’s not pretend we’re classier than we are, internet. Feel free to chime in on the comments with more jokes or condemnation.

So I forked a fry, raised it to my mouth, and was prepared to go the distance when Brian, perfectly apropros, quoted one of my favorite Simpsons lines:

“Lisa, this is lamb. Not a lamb.”

He wins.

Oh, and we not only each tried fries, we finished the plate. Because I was getting paid for this article, dammit, and one can’t be picky when there’s a buck to be made.

After Cork we drove on to Kenmare, where we got to stay at one of the neatest B&Bs in the world. The folks there were so helpful, and among Kenmare’s wealth of delicious food, they sent us to probably what is the best one, where Jayson and I each had this: scallops in cream sauce with eggplant & arugula with mashed potatoes. Probably the single best meal of my entire life. I mean; I mean. I felt like Jodie Foster in Contact, when she exclaims – “No words. Should’ve sent a poet.” Also, I learned something interesting – see that orange thing on the scallops? Turns out we don’t really get that in America, because most of our scallops are imported (big freaking shock, eh?) So they remove those before importing them because they go rotten and fall off quickly. But when you have scallops that were caught literally feet from where you eat them, they’re still on, like shrimp tails. Seriously, getting to have this meal was worth the entire cost of the trip.