Why I Eat Out

The hunger pangs were getting worse, and I had come to realize the horrible truth: I’m going to have to prepare a meal at home. Again. So, I cast about in my refrigerator, and found some macaroni and cheese left over from the last time that this had happened. It was fresh (meaning it was not fuzzy and didn’t smell funny), so I decided to warm it up.

Okay, I know that all of the women in my family--being good Southern cooks--make great macaroni and cheese, and I have been raised to know better, but I have to admit that I really like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Not the store brands, not any other kind; it really does have to be Kraft. And it’s really good; at least, it's good the night that you make it. Creamy and cheesy; just delicious. Then you go to warm it up and it turns into these greasy little vinyl flooring samples (only vinyl flooring is probably a little tastier). It’s not so good warmed up; it's chewy, greasy, dried out, and not even very cheesy-tasting. At least not unless you doctor it up a bit by adding more cheese. Most of the time, I don’t bother, because it’s work and I don’t like work. So, usually, I eat the vinyl flooring and don’t think too much about it. But, sometimes, I go that extra mile and add some cheese to it. This takes time because you have to do a lot of stuff first. You have to figure out whether you have any cheese, you have to find it in the fridge, you have to get it out, unwrap it, cut off the mold or the part that has turned into a very hard, clearish kind of plastic, and then you have to cut it up. All of this before you even put it into a pan and melt it and stir the leftover macaroni and cheese in with it.

The best thing is if you have some Velveeta and you melt that. That’s perfect. Cheddar cheese, while tasty for many other purposes, is not so good for this, for reasons that you’re about to discover, if you don’t already know.

I didn’t have any Velveeta. I had some cheddar, though. So, even though I knew that I had tried this in the past and that there was some reason that alarms were going off in my brain, saying, “Don’t do it! It’s a Bad Idea!” I couldn’t remember precisely what the problem was, so I persevered. I knew that melted cheddar is not very creamy, so I thought, “That’s okay, I’ll add some milk to it. That will make it a nice, creamy, cheesy sauce.”

I poured milk into the pan. About this much (not a whole lot). Then, I cut up the cheddar cheese (also not a whole lot) into little cubes and plunked them into the milk. I turned the burner on about medium. Often, these things don’t go well because, in my impatience to get on with it, I use too high a heat setting. But this time, I was willing to be patient. The cheese began to melt nicely. The grease was released from the cheese, turning the milk yellow. Well, that was okay, it was all going to end up a nice, orangey-yellow, creamy cheese sauce eventually, anyway. Besides, the milk absorbed the grease, so that the cheese wasn’t greasy and globby-looking like that commercial they used to have on TV. Do you know the commercial I mean? It was really disgusting. The advertiser, which was, in fact, Velveeta was trying to show consumers how much nicer processed cheese was than cheddar cheese. They compared how the two products looked when melted, and then they demonstrated how each melted product poured over something. The melted Velveeta poured smoothly and creamily and evenly over whatever you wanted to pour it on. It looked delicious. The cheddar fell in greasy, sickening globs onto the poor, hapless food victim that you had chosen for it to fall on. It looked disgusting. Because of that commercial, I became the only NASA bedrest test subject ever to throw up while immersed in the vacuum chamber and with electrodes hooked up to every inch of her body. It was quite interesting. But I digress.

Melted cheddar cheese is a yucky thing, unless, of course, you are clever, and you are melting it into milk to make a lovely, creamy sauce. Good thing I’m so clever. As the cheese began to melt, I began stirring it gently with a wooden spoon. Things were going along pretty well. I had melted cheese, I had yellow milk, I could see that at just any moment now the two were going to discover one another and blend as one into a creamy sauce.

I stirred. I stirred and stirred. The cheese was definitely melted now. There was no denying that. But why wasn’t it blending into the milk? In fact, the two were managing to remain as two quite discrete and disparate groups within the pan. There were little colonies of melted cheese, surrounded by a pool of yellow milk. I stirred for all I was worth. I tried beating the cheese into the milk. The cheese began to come out of its individual colonies and coalesce. This looked like a very good sign. Now I had a large lump of melted cheese in the middle of a pan full of hot yellow milk. I was stirring like a madwoman. I stopped. I had a lump of what looked for all the world like a huge wad of chewed-up cheddar cheese bubble gum.

You might think that this is when I gave up and went out for tacos. But it’s not. In fact, I wasn’t even discouraged. In fact, what I was thinking was, “This is good. I bet that the cheddar cheese balls up like this just before it blends with the milk to form a creamy sauce.” I took a deep breath, and then I really applied myself to that wad of cheese gum.

After some time, I began to see that this was hopeless. Nothing at all was happening. I had a wad of cheese gum swimming in a pool of yellow milk. I could stir all night, and that’s what I’d still have. This is the point at which I pitched it and went out, right? Well, I went through my options: I can throw this in the trash, and the liquid part–the milk–will seep through little holes in the trash bag and will make my trash can smell like sour milk for the rest of my life, or I can throw it down the sink, which will take care of the liquid part, but this cheese will gum up my pipes like tar. Besides, I’ve already worked so hard. Not to mention the wasted materials (the milk and cheese).

I looked at it. I pondered. “You know,” I thought, “the cheese, though disgusting-looking, is still an edible product. You like cheese. Just don’t think about that commercial.” So, without thinking about it any further, I picked up the container of cold, lumplike macaroni and cheese, and dumped it into the pan. I hacked at the cheese gum with the wooden spoon to try to break it up a little. I then stirred and stirred, trying to get the milk to absorb into the cold macaroni and trying to sort of slather the cheese gum evenly over the macaroni rather than having big lumps of it distributed throughout the macaroni.

I’m trying to decide if I should tell you now whether I ended up going out to eat or whether I stayed home and ate this stuff. What do you think?

Okay, I’ll finish the story.

It really didn’t look too bad. I knew that that cheese was going to be pretty stringy if I allowed it to set up at all, so I knew that if I was going to eat it, I would have to eat it fast, while it was still hot. I did just that, and it really wasn’t awful. But it’s not anything that I would want to feed to guests.