Thursday, January 21, 2010

McGross

This morning, running late to work, I realized I was particularly hungry. I stopped at McDonald's with the intention to get an Egg McMuffin, which I haven't had for a long time. I ordered and picked up my food without looking at it as the cashier's warning that the hashbrown was wicked hot was enough to convince me I had the right meal. I ate the hashbrown first because I like them scalding, like some sort of giant tater tot cooked at 500 degrees. If you leave them around for even a moment, they start to taste more like grease and less like a tater tot as far as I'm concerned. Which, not so coincidentally, is how I feel about tater tots themselves. Leave 'em sitting around and they taste less like crispy potato goodness, and more like cold grease. That applies double for tater tots with a hot cheese injection juicy lucy style.

After the hashbrown, I reached in for my McMuffin and, instead, found myself eye to eye with a McGriddle. It smelled strangely sweet and sort of like cheap maple syrup and was obviously pretty much a McMuffin, but with strange pancakes bracketing it instead of a muffin. I tried to remember if I'd just given them the wrong meal number, or if I was the victim of an attempt to unload some of the backlog. I had my doubts, but I took a bite. It was like eating maple candied breakfast. UGH! Revolting. In a moment that might be familiar to some of you, but was new to me, I was forced to consider whether it was better to spit or swallow. Get your minds out of the gutter. I was talking about when Kyle had uni.

I don't mind my food touching, and I've been known to let my breakfast eats indulge in a bit of of orgiastic mixing, but I generally keep my eggs and sausage separate from my pancakes and syrup. Apparently, Malcolm Gladwell's "thin slicing" was at work, and I had innately realized that syrup doesn't belong near the rest of your breakfast food. I drank my entire large orange juice, and still couldn't get the candied maple taste out of my mouth. It took a large refill of Caribou dark roast to eliminate the wrongness that permeated my mouth.

So much wrongness in such a small package. I don't think I'll ever be eating a McGriddle again.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is why if I order a McGriddle, I have to be IN the McDs to take it apart and eat the items separately. They seriously do not belong together, although my husband will beg to differ.

Sean said...

And here I was wondering if I was the only one that hated those things. I can't believe that they even still sell them.

Kyle said...

I've eaten McGriddles a few times, but I think I have done so only to remind myself that they just aren't very good. Sausage or bacon between two strange pancake-y items I can see, but when you invite scrambled eggs and cheese to the party, that's where the train goes off the tracks.

No matter what though, I would gladly eat a bagful of McGriddles before I would ever put a piece of uni in my mouth again. That experience wasn't so much a "spit or swallow" decision as it was a "control the innate gag reflex" battle of mind over body. It would have been a terrible waste of very good sushi if the mind hadn't won that one.

Anonymous said...

Snicker...that uni thing was funny! -PTW