Bow Tie o’ the Veterans Day added a patriotic touch to our Sunday Brunch at PORCUPINE, in SLC. Once again we brunched at a restaurant where we had never eaten before.
Suzanne went the omelet route, while I had the white wine-poached salmon. Suzanne assured me that eating something that has been poached in white wine does not count as drinking alcohol, so I felt fine about doing it. True enough, my salmon did not get me drunk, or even buzzed. It was tasty, but the next time I order it at PORCUPINE, I will definitely say, “Yo! Don’t drizzle no stinkin’ hollandaise sauce on top of my salmon!” A salmon does not need to swim upstream or on your plate in hollandaise sauce.
Those sorts of frou-frou touches are not only un-needed, they can often be dang annoying. For example, consider just some of the current plethora of Oreo flavors: watermelon, jelly donut, waffles & syrup, red velvet cake, cherry cola, kettle corn, pumpkin spice, green tea, fruit punch, caramel apple, cotton candy, root beer float, S’mores, cinnamon bun, birthday cake with sprinkles, uh-oh (?), heads or tails (?), strawberry milkshake, Android (?), Swedish Fish, brownie batter, Peeps,… I could go on and on and on, but I must cease. I’m queasy just thinking about the lengthy list of flavor tangents. Who needs any of these filling flavors in an Oreo? Some of them are downright creepy. When will the bacon-flavored Oreos be on the market? I want to be sure I’m not at Dick’s Market on the day those blasphemous cookies hit the shelves.
My friends, this flavor-swinging is a sacrilege. The Oreo is an undeniably perfect culinary creation. Don’t mess with it. Don’t even “double stuf” it or make it thin. You can’t improve on THE Oreo. The only possible thing you can do to the Oreo by altering it is to crapify it– by small and bigly degrees. There is a word for this tinkering with an already-perfect product: bastardization. It means to lessen the perfectness of a thing while passing it off as equal to the real thing.
Hear ye! Hear ye! I will not be silent about this issue. I believe that candy-corn-flavored filling in an Oreo is a bastardization of a flawless, American cookie icon. Stick that in your Oreo and dunk it!