#435 Buffet Wanderings

I went to a party and they called the meal a buffet. I guess because everybody had to grab a plate and serve themselves. But the word buffet didn’t really describe the meal. Buffet to me conjures up mass quantities of food in lots of flavorless variety. Boundless, with a huge assortment, sumptuous looking bowls of steaming savory offerings, but with the same unsatisfying aspect that paradoxically impels you to eat more, even when you’re enjoying it less. Buffet food always seem to conspicuously lack that special nugget of whatever that tells the satisfaction section of your brain that yeah that was good, now lets stop before we puke. But food is funny that way. So much depends on flavor. The other day I got this box of cookies as a gift. They were called Pirouline Waferrolls. You know the type, thin cookies rolled into a spiral. Delicate light flavor. Kind of a little like an old-fashioned waffle cone but without the ice cream. Not, basically, like these cookies at all. First off they were tubes. Just straight tubes. They’d make a great dissolvable straw. Al Pacino could have used them in one of his movies to sniff coke. Not layer after layer of spiral, tantalizing the taste buds with alternate layers of cookie and void. A tube. Secondly, the description on the box hinted at the lack of satisfaction yet to come. The label said Chocolate Flavour Lined Waferrolls. And underneath that, “delicate toasted wafer cookies lined with fine dark chocolate flavour.” Flavour, by the way, was spelled in the English way, with a “U”, as in, we’re going to disappoint you with these cookies. The manufacturer had a Dutch name, DeBeukelaer, but the cookies appeared to be made in Minnesota. DeBeukelaer is a Dutch word that means “You’re covered in hives.” Or possibly, “don’t judge a book by is cover.” Yeah. Debeukelaer. In this case, it would have been a good idea. How do you line something with flavor? Is lining something with chocolate flavor kind of like electroplating something with gold? Under a certain thickness you say gold plated, or gold lined, or gold filled. Which reminds me, why when the gold is layered on the outside of the base metal is it called gold filled? If they are going to all the trouble of lining something with chocolate flavor, why not have a smidgen of chocolate itself? I read the ingredients thoroughly and they don’t seem to be worried about causing a chocolate allergy reaction in anyone. The ingredients said “this product contains wheat, milk, soy, peanuts and gluten and was manufactured in a facility that also produces products that contain peanuts and treenuts. I love that phrase, peanuts and treenuts. Sounds like a children’s cartoon. It’s the Peanuts and Treenuts show! We get into all kinds of fun hyjinx giving people allergic reactions. And our special weapon is a flavor-lined cookie tube that we call the debeukelaer. Debeukelaer! Gesundheit!
Caution, this buffet contains gluten.
America, ya gotta love it.