Let’s discuss.

First off, don’t get my wrong: I love my parents. They are wonderful, charming, and caring people…and they occasionally (consciously, accidentally, intentionally, to their own chagrin) provide blog fodder. Case in point, they have both independently and inadvertently sickened me from their respective outposts in Pennsylvania and Alabama with talk of horrible and truly sickening food of two polar extremes.

Exhibit A in the greasy, fried corner comes from my dad in an email entitled: COULD IT GET ANY WORSE?

He even thoughtfully provided a picture. And it looks awful. Fattening and processed and clearly something a nutritionist would wag her finger at and perhaps even spit upon.

And yet somehow it also looks kind of good. Maybe it’s two months in the land of Loco Moco and Spam Masubi…but it doesn’t even seem that ill-advised. And what’s this about bacon!? I might have to order a couple: one for me, and one for….um….a friend. A friend that’s waiting outside in the car. Or…somewhere. I need two. Do we really need to get into the details?

While looking up the price…uh….nutritional information on the aforementioned cornucopia, I happened to discover a second KFC bowl that is, arguably, worse.

Say hello to the Chicken and Biscuit Bowl which takes the aforementioned smorgasbord and adds a dash of gravy and a biscuit, because a 1000-calorie bowl wasn’t inadvisable enough.

Vile!

Artery clogging!

Probably delicious!

And something about “tucking” the biscuit in is both sentimental and tempting in a way that makes me want to…destroy that biscuit with my mouth while rolling around in a vat of white pepper gravy.

Oops.
Did I write that?

Damn you, KFC and your siren song of delicious debauchery, the worst of which is the Double Down: a sandwich where the bread is actually fried chicken. Yes. You read that correctly: fried chicken flanking bacon, cheese, and probably a layer of lard: I’m not sure. In Australia – where it’s apparently been a big hit – the tagline is ”make time for mantime.” That’s right, boys, this heart attack in a bag is looking at you.

I suspect the name was a similar nod. Something implying you understand Blackjack and are willing to take risks. Personally, I would have preferred another manly sports analogy that’s perhaps a bit more accurate and named it the “Sudden Death,” but I hold no real sway over the folks at KFC…for now.

So by now you might be thinking this journey into the bowels of bad cholesterol and pulmonary edemas would be the worst of it. That’s what I thought until I got the following email from my mother earlier today: RECIPE REQUEST IF NOT TOO DIFFICULT TO FIND IT

I was feeling confident. I am a versatile cook and I can work in many mediums – vegan, vegetarian, omnivore, carnivore, and now raw (where is that dehydrator!?!? Argh!!!) I had this under control.

Then I read the details.

Um…

What?

Did you lose a bet, Mom?

Or – God bless you – did your love of lime Jell-o actually drive you to volunteer for this terrible idea?

The thought of raw cabbage and raw carrots and lime Jell-o is, well, not good. I spent the last few hours thinking about this, and at first I was discouraged. What could be added to make this good?

Tumbleweeds blew across the landscape…

And then it occurred to me.

As clear as day.

The way to make lime Jell-o and raw carrots and cabbage a hit boils down to one simple solution: cocaine.

Just cut a few lines into this salad disaster, and you’re set.

Pablo Escobar couldn’t have whipped it up any better himself.

p.s.

I have truly given it some thought, and if I were on some cooking competition where I had to make a salad from lime Jell-o and carrots (because I can’t quite fathom any other circumstance in which I’d get roped into this), I think I would add:

shredded coconut

crushed pineapple

walnuts (cut fine)

some small amount of something creamy like sour cream or cottage cheese

and something unexpected like a jalapeno cut fine: something to give it some interest.

And, of course, cocaine.