Surprise Dinner

As I mentioned before, the other day for dinner I made some meatballs in tomato sauce. The next day, I made another bag of meatballs in the leftover sauce. There wasn't enough sauce leftover to cover the meatballs as they were heating, so I added some water. I also added some butter and some parmesan cheese to the sauce, and cooked off the excess water until I had a nice saucy consistency. The next day, I added the leftover sauce/butter/cheese to some cans of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee I was making, along with more butter, more parmesan cheese, and just because I had it and thought it'd be tasty, I melted about six or eight slices of provolone cheese into the sauce.

So yesterday, I had all this sauce leftover (there's a lot of sauce in Chef Boy-Ar-Dee) and no more pasta or meatballs to put it on, so I just heated the sauce in the microwave and dunked slices of Italian bread into it.

Now, remember what's in this stuff at this point: A mixture of two kinds of tomato sauce, butter, parmesan cheese, and provolone cheese, left overnight to let the flavors meld and then heated. It was sticky and gooey and cheesey and I was dipping bread into it.

It wasn't until today that I realized that what I'd made was a fondue.

Quick Review: A Plate of Meatballs

Since I blogged my dinner yesterday, I thought I'd do the same today. Tonight, I took some meatballs out of the freezer, put them in a pan with some tomato sauce, waited for them to get hot, and ate them.

Mmmmmmmmmm, meatballs.

Final Grade: A-

Quick KFC "Double Down" Review

So KFC has come out with their already-infamous "Double Down" "sandwich." (Straight quotes, then scare quotes there.) For anyone unfamiliar with this new item, it consists of bacon and three kinds of cheese (swiss, monterey jack, and cheese sauce) sandwiched between two chicken breasts, your choice of Original Recipe or Grilled. I got Original Recipe.

Now, in my mind a sandwich is stuff on bread, thus my use of scare-quotes above. I think if you've decided that the problem with sandwiches is the presence of bread, somewhere you're fundamentally misunderstanding what a sandwich is supposed to be. Bread is more than just a means to hold tasty stuff, it's integral to the taste and texture of the food. Just imagine taking a plain hamburger patty, slathering it with ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and cheese, and slapping it on a plate. It'd be a gooey, disgusting mess. Put that same combination on a bun, and you can open several different multi-billion dollar restaurant chains. So whenever someone tries to up the ante on a sandwich by getting rid of the bread, I'm skeptical.

The two chicken breasts in the Double Down are the same boneless chicken breasts KFC has been selling on their own for several months at least, so if you've had one you've already had 99% of this sandwich. And you already know one huge problem with this sandwich, which KFC has cleverly managed to turn into two huge problems: These breasts are dry as hell. Maybe on a real sandwich slathered in condiments that could be dealt with, but here not only is there nothing but a little cheese sauce to add moisture, but there's two breasts, with twice the dry.

Another thing you already know if you've had the KFC boneless breast is that this sandwich isn't nearly as large as you'd think: In terms of circumference it's smaller than most fast food burgers, about the size of the dollar burger from McDonalds. Obviously there's a lot of meat here, but not as much as the pictures make you think. This isn't a heart-attack-in-a-box, at least not any more than a Wendy's Baconator or a McDonalds Double Quarter-Pounder With Cheese.

Now that we've dealt with the breasts, let's get to the rest of the sandwich: Well, there isn't much else. Two slices of cheese and a slather of cheese sauce, and a strip or two of bacon. Honestly, eating this I forgot there was bacon on it except when it got caught in my teeth. These cheese was tasty, but even three cheeses wasn't enough to make up for the dryness of the breasts.

In the end I pulled off one of the breasts, and just ate one breast with the cheese and bacon. That was okay, if messy, but still a bit dry. How would I fix the Double Down? I'm glad you asked:

1. Get rid of one breast.
2. Put it on a roll.
3. Add more bacon, so you can actually taste the bacon.
4. Add either more cheese sauce or some mayonnaise, to help cover the dryness of the breast. Alternately, figure out how to cook a boneless breast so it doesn't wind up half-way to a hockey puck. But hey, how can KFC be expected to make a decent fried chicken breast, it's not like "Fried Chicken" is in the freaking name of your restaurant.

Final Grade: C-