I lost a day at some point in the last few days. It's now Sunday, and I woke up thinking it was Saturday. I thought yesterday was Friday, and that today would be Saturday, and I planned out my day according to that belief. When I realized it was actually Sunday, I was suddenly a day behind on everything. So I had to spend the next several hours just mentally dealing with my schedule (such as it is) being wrecked and figuring out how to rebuild everything. Hopefully, I can operate correctly the next few days. But partially for that reason, today's post will be another short one (by my standards...someone pointed out they didn't really consider last week's post "short." And sure; it's a subjective term. But first, a burger news follow-up.
As promised, I picked up a Wendy's Krabby Kollab meal. This marketing arrangement celebrating Spongebob Squarepants' 25th Anniversary (fun fact: I watched the first episode debut) features all two Spongebob creations: a Krabby Patty, a Pineapple Frosty, and some normal Wendy's french fries. Now, logically, we can make a real Krabby Patty. And I don't mean one of the 10,000 recipes you can find through {insert search engine here} that takes you to a recipe site that is *almost* impossible to use. Not that many of those recipes aren't valid...Krabby Patty's are actually pretty simple, if you make certain assumptions. The "official" recipe is a sesame seed bun, sea cheese, sea tomatoes, sea onions, sea lettuce, pickles, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, a patty made of unknown ingredients, and a secret sauce of unknown composition. If we presume these burgers eaten by fish, crustaceans, and certain other sea life don't contain...err...them...then we're left with what we would consider "veggie" ingredients and the cheese. You can come up with undersea options to comprise the "veggie-based" condiments and presumably the cheese, the unknown burger patty and the unknown sauce; which leaves the known sauces. It is established in the recipe and in the show itself that ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise do exist in Bikini Bottom, as do plain-old pickles. This is assumed only because the pickles are never paired with the "sea" prefix, while other veggies (and cheese) are so designated. So basically, a Krabby Patty is a veggie burger made using entirely sea-sourced ingredients, minus the sauces. Therefore, if you want to make a human analogue, just a make a veggie burger like hundreds of thousands of restaurants already do. They're even pretty good at this point...there are some places where I prefer their veggie burger to other options. *Other fast food chains* already offer veggie burgers.
*Mild* Thousand Island, to be fair. As previously discussed, both Jack In The Box and Sonic use a spiced-up Thousand Island sauce, which isn't uncommon. I bet if you're a salad connoisseur, you've had some house Thousand Islands that required a gulp of water to get down. In the end it's just a slightly different way to eat a Dave's Single, if that's your favorite jam. The Pineapple Frosty is tasty, but also a bit disappointing. There is no pineapple in it; just pineapple syrup. Mine wasn't mixed well, if at all, and so I was handed a cup with a finger of dark-yellow liquid at the bottom topped by a scoop of vanilla ice cream. After mixing it myself with the spoon it was fine. A pineapple-flavored frosty is certainly a good idea, and it's a bit shocking they didn't already offer one; considering they already had pineapple syrup on the premises. At least I assume they use pineapple syrup in the pineapple mango tea; I could be wrong about that.
But here's where we get eerie.
An accepted truth for me for the past 25 years is that I get violently ill whenever I eat at Chili's. Not coincidentally, it's always my body attempting to expel what I ate as quickly as possible. The assumption for the longest time was that they were using cottonseed oil to cook with...I'm allergic. And cottonseed oil was a bit of a fad for while starting a few decades back. Everybody was using it, seemingly. But I *liked* Chili's food. So every few years I would try eating there again. We decided to try again a few days ago when we couldn't think of where we wanted to eat. The food was fine, nothing all that special. There are places that serve similar food better in the area which we will likely stick to in the future. The menu is much reduced from the 90's/2000's; I can tell you that. Mostly pub food, with even the famous "Babyback Ribs" only appearing in two dishes. But you know what their new burger option is?
Meet the Chili's "Big Smasher." Yep, it's even named the same. it is Chili's simplest burger: red onions, lettuce, cheese, pickles...and Thousand Island. I didn't order it. I've had my fill of Thousand Island burgers, and don't consider them all that special to begin with. This is an *old* concept. But, a restaurant burger is usually considered a step above a fast food burger...even it's a fast casual restaurant, which I suspect Chili's is trying to be. "Sports Bar" has evolved into an entirely new concept that merges Planet Hollywood with Hooters, and Family Dining seems to have split between Upscale and Fast Casual. And now I need to find out if this Thousand Island Burger trend is infecting the "gourmet" burger restaurants, like Red Robin, Fuddruckers, Hopdaddy, or whoever else I remember in the near future. I hope not.
In Star Wars: The Old Republic, I'm almost done with my Nautolan smuggler. This has also refreshed me on the Republic version of several planetary stories. I think pretty quick I'm going to talk about the Smuggler story, as it is simultaneously one of the best and worst. Which is to say, it has some of the best writing, several good companions, and some horrible writing and one of the very worst companions. I even already started a second smuggler. Same reason as why I have two Sith Warriors: I realized I wanted to do a specific romance option in the base story, so I would need a "male" smuggler in addition to Nuleen. But until then, here's a shot of Nuleen overlooking the starship graveyard on Hoth:
It's worth noting half or more of the graveyard is actually blocked by the giant crashed starship that dominates the image. Hoth is one of the planets in SWTOR that seems to generate "love it or hate it" vibes. I tend to enjoy it except for the overwhelming *brightness* of the snow and ice. Hurts my eyes.