Green Olives and Cheetos—12/8/2009
Green olives and Cheetos: a match made in Heaven as far as snacks are concerned—well, at least to me, anyway…
I don’t know why, but I seem to frequently encounter the munchies even though I don’t hit the bong. Maybe I get hungry during the wee hours of the morning because I usually don’t eat breakfast anymore and/or because I don’t eat enough supper. Yes, I know breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but I’m just not a breakfast person since my stomach is the very last part of me to wake up on days when I must get out of bed early in the morning; if I eat much more than a bowl of cereal or bowl of grits, I run the risk of puking… Since my stomach usually doesn’t fully wake up until about 11:00 A.M., I typically just skip breakfast altogether.
And then there are some nights when my dear mother—God bless her—cooks one of those rare meals that I just don’t care much for, such as meatloaf. On nights when Mom cooks such a dish as meatloaf—which I consider to be the single most contemptible thing she cooks because it gives me the Hershey squirts—I either eat a ridiculously small portion of it or scrounge up something else left over in the pantry or in the refrigerator. Sometimes these improvised meals simply aren’t enough to carry me over until lunch the following day, and I find myself with a case of the munchies late at night when I’m playing video games, watching the idiot box, or surfing the Internet. This makes it necessary for me to sneak into the kitchen in the middle of the night and raid either the refrigerator, the pantry, or both in order to scavenge for something at least half decent to sooth the sudden onset of my savage hunger. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I will eat just about anything I can find and gather silently so as not to wake my mother or step-father. Needless to say, this leads to me snacking on some very strange combinations of foods. If I’m not hungry, sometimes I find that I have a craving for something sweet—and my sweet tooth always seems to hit me hardest when there’s nothing dessert-related in the house, which causes me to invent a crude dessert out of desperation.
Among the strange combinations of foods I’ve consumed as late-night snacks are:
• Saltine crackers and peanut butter or chive-flavored cream cheese
• Quaker instant grits eaten dry and chased with a glass of iced tea
• Quaker instant oatmeal eaten dry and chased with a glass of iced tea (as either a snack or a dessert, depending on my current craving)
• Green olives and Cheetos
• French vanilla coffee creamer mixed into a glass of milk, occasionally with graham cracker crumbs stirred in as well (as a dessert)
There have even been moments when a sudden migraine has come on in the middle of the night, and I’ve used my peculiar snacking habits to cure it since Ibuprofen no longer seems to even touch the powerful migraines I get these days. I recall one night about a year ago in which a powerful migraine suddenly hit me while I was talking to people on the Internet, so I went into the pantry and ate a mouthful of Maxwell House instant coffee, chased it with another mouthful of International Delight French vanilla coffee creamer and a couple of packages of dry Quaker instant oatmeal, and then drank two glasses of iced tea. The idea was that the caffeine in the coffee would kill my migraine while the oatmeal settled my stomach before I became nauseated. Interestingly enough, this worked and my migraine was cured before it had a chance to bring me crippling pain that would require me to turn the lights out for the night.
Strange food combinations might seem disgusting to some, but to others like me, mixing odd foods does have its uses. I had the munchies about half an hour ago, and seeing as how there wasn’t any oatmeal and only very little grits which I had to save for my mother, I took what was on hand: green olives and Cheetos. Green olives and Cheetos… If you think that’s odd, I even drank some of the juice left in the jar from the green olives to chase the Cheeto crumbs when I was done eating. Green olives and Cheetos, a match truly made in Heaven…..
