Gourmet Meals for the Mentally Unhinged and Emotionally Dysregulated
Smooth Brain Gazette Vol. 4
Food. Mother nature’s way of holding us, suckling us to her life-giving teat as she fills our persons with the sustenance that is the lifeblood of our humanity.
But lol who gives a fuck because what food is actually for is keeping people like me out of the local maximum-security federal prison by allowing an escape valve for the pure, uncut terror and rage that comes with being sentient in a world actively trying to kill both you and itself! Wow!!!
I am talking, of course, about emotional eating. IDK about you, but ever since a certain GLOBAL EVENT WE SHALL NOT NAME the only thing that’s been holding me together is mashing Cheez-Its into my gob while staring out the window and dissociating. Self-care is so important! Food: The Ultimate Brain De-Wrinkler. It’s like Downy Wrinkle Release for the brain!
And so in this week’s edition of Smooth Brain Gazette, wherein we continue the honorable work of becoming as flat-brained as possible to survive these times, I would like to share with you one of my very favorite emotional eating recipes! Now before you start YES I KNOW EMOTIONAL EATING IS NOT A HEALTHY HABIT, THINS. Shut up! “Food is for nourishment, not emotional regulation.”
This kind of shit is why nobody likes you guys! And anyway I’d be willing to bet that all you Thins manage your emotions with alcohol because I’ve never met a Thin who didn’t! I have NEVER met a Thin who didn’t. So, you know, pot kettle black glass houses plank in your eye Matthew 7:3-5 JesusBible and all that! “Eat to live, don’t live to eat.” Okay but counterpoint: ~*NO*~🥰
The simple fact is that sometimes numnums are the only thing that will cure what ails you. Allow me to paint you a picture as a for example instance.
It’s just a normal day—you’re sad, you’re angry, you’ve cried seventeen times and it’s not yet 11AM! Just a day that ends in ‘y’ amirite! You’re out running an errand when suddenly your life flashes before your eyes because some sentient pair of Oakleys in a leased pickup that for some reason has six wheels and is louder than a fucking jetliner has decided to sublimate his rage over the fact they let a Black lady onto the SCOTUS by nearly t-boning you in the entrance to the Walmart parking lot.
And like, you’re not even GOING to Walmart’s! You’re just passing through en route to the Home Goods to buy candles that smell like old lady perfume and rotten produce at irresistible discounts! It’s not that serious! Also like WHY ARE THERE SIX WHEELS? Why? WHY?! This is not the rugged ranchlands of the wide open West, Kevin, it is a strip-mall wedged between a freeway and a bunch of fuckugly McMansions and YOU are the dude who cuts spare keys in the back of an Ace Hardware so I would like an exhaustive, alphabetized, itemized list of the things you are encountering in your one wild and precious life that require six goddamn wheels and an engine the size of a ballistic submarine, Kevin! I WANT IT IN A SEARCHABLE GOOGLE SHEET SHARED TO ME WITH EDIT PERMISSIONS, KEVIN. AROUND I AM NOT FUCKING, KEVIN.
Anyway, you get it, just a day, just an ordinary day, just TRY-ing, TO-get, byyy suddenly! As if you don’t have enough fucking problems! You’re hungry.
And so you have a choice to make.
You can accept the nourishment of Mother Gaia, her nutritive sun’s gratifying bounty, the almost pornographic crunch of crisp, verdant vegetables, the earthy satiety of chicken perfectly roasted over flickering flame, the whole glorious melange sailing through you atop an invigorating, stinging wave of perfectly balanced vinaigrette.
OR
You can recline your car seat, unbutton your pants, cup your balls with one hand and mash an Arby’s chicken-bacon-swiss into your dislodged jaw with the other while a slurry of grease and melted mayonnaise pools in the whiskers you haven’t shaved in 10 days because you haven’t showered in six as you drift at long last into a blissful, dissociative dream about Kevin’s death.
IDK about you but I am picking the latter because I love and respect myself and also was never taught any tools for emotional management! And no offense to the salad as a touchstone and an institution but it is simply not up to the task at hand!
Now of course I don’t do this every DAY. One must practice moderation! Plus I have been to 863 years of therapy and also had a brief brush with type II diabetes (oops! Haha! Life’s rich tapestry!) which I have no resources to address because this is America and the healthcare will continue to be withheld until morale improves! So a few years ago I went to my therapist like, “Ok while you’re like teaching me how to be a person or whatever might I request you also treat my ~*food issues*~ so I don’t die of diabetes even though LOL dying of diabetes after surviving all the other shit I’ve been through WOULD be fucking hilarious LOLOLOL might do it anyway as a bit tbqh” and she was like:
And I was like “Just teach me how to eat a meal without also eating the plate and silverware and the extra leaves from the table in a bid to make my stomach hurt more than my heart” and she was like, “Ohr, roight, ohrkoy,” (because she’s Australian), “here are some teeps alsohr a dingohr oight moy byebee,” which is Australian for “Oh, right, ok, here are some tips” plus a reference to the 1988 motion picture A Cry In the Dark starring Meryl Streep as an Australian mother wrongfully imprisoned for infanticide after a dingo eats her baby! Ohr naur!
The point is there are better way to manage your emotions than eating an entire family-size bag of Totino’s Pizza Rolls and vurping pepperoni for 48-72 hours, but sometimes there’s just no salve quite like eating a thing.
So to that end, here is a recipe for a gourmet meal for the mentally collapsing and psychologically unsound that will only take 15 minutes to make, unlike reading this newsletter that is parodizing the way online recipes make you read a 17-page origin story before getting to the fucking recipe! Did you notice how I was doing that? I know, brilliant right? What I love most about my ~*work*~ is how layered and subtly subversive it is. Who else is doing it like this?
Anyway here’s your fucking recipe go to hell.
Baked Cheeseburger Mac and Cheese for Emotionally Dysregulated Pieces of Absolute Fucking Shit
Nothing is more delicious than baked macaroni and cheese. Literally nothing. However making it requires things like INGREDIENTS and SKILLS and BASIC HUMAN EFFORT and that shit is for Thins with balanced brains like Giada DeLaurentiis! This is a dinner club for people who’d be on a permanent thorazine drip in a different era, you can’t sit with us sweaty!!!
(Sidebar: This past Christmastide I made these shortbread cookies of Giada’s and they were absolutely fucking disgusting. They tasted like unsweetened baking chocolate stirred into dry-rotted masonry mortar decorated with the dried fruit from a box of Special K Red Berries and I will go to my fucking grave angry about it. Even people in the comments under the recipe were like, “Yo what the fuck bitch these cookies are ass you should be executed at point-blank range!!!” which I guess should’ve been a clue, but everyone on the internet is so fucking stupid I assumed this was just yet another incidence of the great unwashed expecting “dark chocolate cherry shortbread” to taste like a fucking Little Debbie swiss roll dipped in maraschino cherry juice or whatever.
Well joke’s on me because on this occasion the internet stupids were actually right, and even if I have to do it in the afterlife I will one day find Giada and ram those fucking cookies into her stupid face like James Caan did with his manuscript to Kathy Bates in Misery!
Also, remember that time Giada cooked for Nicole Kidman on Ellen and Nicki fully spat Giada’s food out in front of her on national television?
A watershed in American art.)
Anyway what does any of this have to do with cheeseburger mac and cheese you ask? Literally and absolutely nothing whatever! If you find yourself staring at your computer in slack-jawed awe at the unhinged nonsense currently taking up perfectly good pixels on your screen then you should consider supporting ~*my work*~ on Patreon thank you so much!
The point is, EATING baked mac and cheese is the perfect remedy to the crushing blackness of human existence but MAKING baked mac and cheese is a fucking pain in the ass which requires making roux and bechamel and that kinda shit is for stunting on hoes who can’t cook at potlucks, not for emotional eating. So I have come up with a hack that has served me and my shattered psyche well for 10 years now.
Step 1!
In a small cast-iron skillet or other oven-safe skillet (NO you cannot put your teflon-coated Walmart shit in the oven you stupid bitch, open up Door Dash and see will they deliver you a fucking clue because you are dumb hahaha!!!) brown around ¼ to ⅓ of a pound of ground beef. (Or Beyond Meat! Or Impossible Burger! That’s fine too!)
To your beef add some Lawry’s seasoning salt, or some Mrs. Dash, or a packet of seven-year-old fajita seasoning you found while cleaning the mouse shit out of the back of the pantry–whatever you have on hand and enjoy on a burger! Personally? I’m a Lawry’s, garlic powder and cayenne type-a-bitch? But that’s just me and MY spice cabinet, by which I mean the reusable grocery bag of spices I have shoved into the pantry of whichever friend is dumb enough to be housing my semi-homeless ass at any given moment for literally no reward and at great personal emotional expense. You do you!
I also like to throw in a chopped quarter of a red onion but I UNDERSTAND THAT IS TOO MUCH WORK FOR MANY AND THAT IS OKAY. This is a safe space for abjectly lazy pieces of shit and I not only see you, I celebrate you! Fuck an onion!
Step 2!
Once your meat is mostly cooked, drain the grease if there’s a lot of it (a little is ok! Flavor!) and add to the pan the following:
-Ketchup
-Mustard
-Worcestershire sauce
-BBQ sauce
How much of each you ask? Bitch I don’t fucking know, enough! My cooking lessons consisted of my mother hurling dirty utensils into the sink while bellowing shit like, “WOMEN WHOSE HUSBANDS LEAVE THEM FOR THEIR COWORKERS DON’T HAVE TIME TO MEASURE INGREDIENTS” so you know, I go by FEEL mostly? We’re talking a DOLLOP of each. The point here is you’re making a sort of SAUCE, know what I mean? Not too much though, we’re not making Manwich here! Does that make sense? No? Great!
Just eyeball it, you got this! And look, if you don’t have all four of those sauces, that’s fine. Just add a little extra of what you DO have or whatever you normally like on your cheebergie!
Also while we’re here, I need to get something out? Worcestershire sauce is not hard to say. WISTERSHUR. It’s NOT hard! Worcestershire is not hard to say and moist is just a fucking word and you only like truffles bc a bunch of “fOoDiEs” with Blogspots told you they’re a delicacy back in 2009 and I wish you’d all shut up!!!
Also here’s a fun fact: Did you know that Worcestershire sauce is basically garum, the Roman fish sauce that was their most prized condiment and a HUGE part of their economy? Isn’t that interesting! As a person obsessed with Roman ruins to the point that my friends roast me about it I find that interesting and every time I use Worcestershire I hear the score to Gladiator in my head. Are you not entertained etc and so on and so forth.
Anyway so once you’ve added those condiments lower the heat and move to
Step 3!!!
Take a microwaveable mac and cheese–you know, the kind you eat over the sink after work while silently reconsidering every life choice you’ve ever made?--and microwave it according to the instructions on the box. I like to use Amy’s Organics gluten free mac and cheese because then this becomes a health food and I get to imagine I am a wellness influencer with visible abdominal muscles and a dumptruck ass who gets paid to hawk constipation tea on Instagram? But feel free to use whatever you like!
Okay Step 4!!!
Dump your mac into your skillet with your previously constructed white trash bolognese, and dump in a generous handful of shredded cheese of your choice, but listen–use sharp cheddar or something good, don’t be a fucking asshole! Mozzarella will turn this gummy and low-fat cheddar is for dipshits! You’re better than this!
Then add a bit of milk or cream. I DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH. ENOUGH. You want to add ENOUGH to make the whole thing have a saucy texture, because your meat is gonna soak up all the sauce from your sad-lady Lean Cuisine or whatever. Just blurp some milk or cream or half n half in bit by bit till it’s saucy and stop asking questions.
So ok! Stir that around and then taste it and if it doesn’t taste fucking delicious but also sort of disgusting, like in the way that Olive Garden is delicious but also sort of disgusting? Then you need more seasoning. I would stay savory here though—adding more ketchup or BBQ tends to lop it over into sweetness which is… gross? Anyway make it pop like pussy on the dance floor and then!
STEP THE SIXTH.
Cover it with more cheese and put it in a 375-degree oven, the pre-heating of which should have been step one but that’s YOUR problem, not mine! Rewriting stuff is for people who are making actual paper on Patreon (hint hint!) so I’m not doing that, it’s simply above my paygrade😌
Anyway put it in a 375-degree oven for like, IDK, 10 mins? Long enough that the cheese starts to brown. And THEN, turn the broiler on until that shit bubbles like skin in a burn unit. Make that cheese need extensive skin grafts like that little boy whose dad lit him on fire to revenge his mom in that Bernadette Peters TV movie from the 80s that my mother absolutely should not have let me watch!
Sorry no offense to the eponymous David but nothing is funnier than that logline. What a gift. Also turns out this movie was done in 1988 too. A huge year for cinema!
Anyway once your mac is good and bubbled and roasty-toasty, remove it and LET IT SIT FOR AT LEAST FIVE MINUTES. You should always rest your food! Also if you try to eat this now you will literally die! Your entire mouth will burn off your face like poor little David up there (too soon?) and you will have to watch in horror as your teeth liquify and drip out of your mouth until you look like me after I leave the backroom of the gay bar hahaha aren’t I just outRAGEOUS?! So subVERSIVE! I’m here, I’m queer, I’m making cum jokes about mac and cheese being too hot get used to it! GAY RIGHTS.
In any case, here’s what it looks like when it’s finished.
JK that’s just something disgusting from the internet because I realized I have no photos of this mac and cheese which is probably for the best because listen: this picture is close enough! This mac always looks low-key fucking disgusting? But it tastes good I promise!
Anyway, while it rests you can muster up the tears you will cry into the skillet while you ingest your feelings or better yet you can make a side salad and then this entire shit becomes health food and you become a wellness influencer as previously discussed! But also real talk a vinaigrette with all this fatty shit? God tier. Don’t look at me like that, that’s why they give you pickles with barbecue in The American South™! Acid and fat are friends you stupid bitch do I have to teach you everything?! Go back to Home Ec class ugly!
STEP EIGHT
After the 10 minutes EAT THIS ENTIRE SHIT. It seems like a lot and IDK it might be I’m not a fucking dietitian but basically what you’re eating here is a side of mac and cheese and a cheeseburger with no bun so I repeat: HEALTH FOOD. And when you’re done, the final and most important step is:
STEP NINE
Take a butter knife and scrape all the gridnodes off the pan. The fuck are gridnodes? Gridnodes is my Nana’s term for the baked-on crusty shit in a baking dish which is obviously the best part of anything cooked in your oven. She claimed the term comes from my grandpa’s native Swedish which I believed until LITERAL ADULTHOOD when I Googled how to spell it and found out it is fucking fake and my Nana was a lying ass bitch OMG JUST KIDDING NANA YOU ARE HEAVEN’S BRIGHTEST ICON THESE ARE JUST JOKES.
But as I’ve told you all a million times, I am the Dumbest Bitch In Every Room Since 1978™, and if you needed more proof of that concept consider this: My Nana was KNOWN for her made-up words and idioms that she would just say with no explanation as if they were well-known sayings— “quit wallering on the furniture” (sit like a normal fucking person and quit messing up all my embroidered pillows), “GO SIDDOWN, WHISTLENOSE” (stop hovering with your loud-ass breathing in my fucking ear), “Ish ka-BISH” (that’s fucking disgusting fuck you). This was her bit.
And yet somehow I was like, “Yes but gridnodes, a real term, from the Swedish.” My mind!
Anyway, scrape off the gridnodes and eat them, your brain will melt. If you REALLY want to be a fat bitch take a piece of buttered bread and use it as an implement with which to shovel scraped-off gridnodes into your tear-stained gob. Life is for pleasure!
So there you have it: You’ve sublimated all your rage and trauma and instead of your heart and soul aching because every emotional receptor in your brain is a finely honed boning knife wedging itself into your every neuron it’s now just your stomach that hurts really bad! You did it!!!
Or, you know, you just made a delicious 15-minute cheeseburger mac and cheese, if you’re one of these insufferable assholes who’s a normal person with a normal brain and a normal relationship to food.
Either way, bone apple teeth or whatever that internet joke is! Bye bye!
So okay! Another edition of Smooth Brain Gazette in the books! I have many other emotional eating recipes to share, so that’s something to look forward to for all of us and our stomachs and collapsed psyches, etc. and so on.
Anyway, from here you know the drill: If you enjoyed this descent into madness you should share it with someone you love or hate or love to hate or hate to love!
And also subscribe!
And also if this filled your figurative tummy up with figurative love, you could also consider giving me actual American currency for all this ~*emotional labor*~ It really does help!
Ok thanks I love you enjoy your mac and cheese bye bye!