Then you die a little on the inside.

“I’ll have a Coke.”

“Is Pepsi okay?”

GAH! Well, it’s okay. I don’t really even dislike Pepsi. If I open up the fridge and see a Pepsi, I don’t mind drinking it. But wanting a Coke and having to settle for a Pepsi is an incredibly frustrating feeling. Some may say that the drinks don’t taste all that different. Trust me, they do. And when I’m really, really thirsty, a fountain Coke is quite possibly the best thing in the world. But to seek that thirst-quenching goodness and then have it ripped away from you by a restaurant’s exclusive contract with Pepsi can be a terrible, terrible feeling.

I admit I don’t know what the economic factors are involved in whether a restaurant decides to serve Coke or Pepsi. Obviously, some national chains have deals with one beverage company or the other. And I’m guessing Pepsi must be cheaper because why the hell would anyone choose Pepsi if it weren’t cheaper? I’ll admit that most people probably don’t scratch a restaurant off their list just because it serves Pepsi—I don’t—but sometimes I really find myself wondering why a restaurant skips out on Coke to serve Pepsi.

And no Coke means no Barq’s Root Beer either. I love Barq’s with a roast beef po-boy or fried shrimp or some other New Orleans-style food—given the regional connection, it just feels right. And Barq’s is so much different from other root beers that there’s really no comparison. I’m not saying that other kinds of root beer are worse; but nothing is really all that much like Barq’s.

So restaurant owners, I realize you’ve got a bottom line to consider, but please give us Coke, okay?

The problem was the chocolate milk. When I first sat down I ordered a water, uncertain as to whether I’d be getting dinner or breakfast. When I ordered pancakes, I asked for chocolate milk. When it came, I took a sip, hoping that my mouth would be flooded with the creamy, luxurious goodness that is chocolate milk. Instead, I got the Hershey’s syrup kind. Which isn’t terrible, and is far from inedible, but is it worth $1.99 plus tax? Hell no. I have no philosophical or aesthetic objection to fake chocolate milk; in fact, I pretty much grew up on the stuff. I’ve probably consumed a billion pounds of Nesquik powder. Truth be told, the Hershey’s syrup milk is probably far superior to the Nesquik milk, but I’m guessing it’s more expensive. And I’m so used to the taste of Nesquik with dinner it just seems right. But obviously, neither of those two compares to real chocolate milk. Sure, it has something like 30% of your recommended daily intake of saturated fat, but it’s totally worth it. It just tastes and feels so wonderful. I love it. I want to go drink some right now. And thinking that I was about to get real chocolate milk and then getting fake stuff was a brutal surprise. I probably should’ve sent it back, but when you’re with a group of twenty people and you figure the waiters probably hate you anyway you don’t feel like pissing them off. Hopefully we tipped them well; I know I did. And fortunately the restaurant wasn’t too crowded, so we weren’t pissing off too many other customers with our raucous ruckus.

Just thinking about this makes me want to go buy some chocolate milk right now. Or maybe tomorrow I’ll stop by Cafe du Monde and have some chocolate milk with my beignets.

Also, while I’m on the subject, I’m not crazy about the 1% fat chocolate milk either—I think it’s pretty cheap at Sam’s so we get it sometimes. It doesn’t have the same rich creaminess that the whole chocolate milk has. (FWIW, when it comes to white milk I’m a 2% guy all the way. 1% is okay, skim and whole are dreadful.) Granted, chocolate milk is hellishly expensive compared to the white stuff, but it’s worth every penny.

The moral of this story is not to order chocolate milk in a restaurant unless you ask first if it’s real chocolate milk. I won’t make that mistake again.

* Not-so-subtle self-promotion. I may try to sneak mentions of my show into every single post I make in the next two-and-a-half weeks.

One of my favorite foods ever since I was little has always been rice and gravy, which my 91-year-old Maw Maw* (who grew up in rural southern Louisiana and whose first language was French) often cooks for us. Rice and gravy is a staple of Cajun cuisine; there’s a few variations with different types of meat, but hers always uses veal rounds, which my family would get from Guillory’s on Derbigny Street in Metairie, just a block down the street from where I grew up. The meat and gravy are prepared by braising the veal rounds with some onions and garlic over a low heat; my grandmother seems to leave it on the stove all afternoon. As the veal rounds cook they make a wonderful gravy. It’s really fantastic, and I’ve never had anything like it.**

In between our visits to our grandmother’s house, my mother would cook rice and gravy (or, as my sister and I called it, “meat gravy and rice”—I don’t think anyone else in the world ever called it that), and while the meat came out okay, her microwave-made rice was a sorry substitute for the real thing.*** The microwave rice was only edible if you could manage to drown it in gravy. I would always protest at having to eat my mother’s second-rate microwaved rice. And I think that’s where I first acquired my hatred of microwaves.

Which is not to say I didn’t use them; on the contrary, I used them a ton. I made myself breakfast every weekday throughout all my years of school—nothing fancy, just a bowl of cereal or Pop-Tarts or instant oatmeal or instant Cream of Wheat or instant grits. Or maybe french toast sticks or Eggo waffles or…well, you get the point. Packaged, overprocessed, sugar-packed trash, much of which was designed to be microwaved. And for some of the items, I was pretty damn used to the microwave kind. The few times I would have grits at a restaurant I wouldn’t really care for them, being more used to the instantly microwaveable variety, topped with a pat of butter, and maybe with an ice cube thrown in to cool it off more quickly. I eventually came around on the grits, though, in two especially wonderful experiences.

The first was about a year and a half ago. I was in the chorus of an opera, and in addition to a weekend of performances in Metairie we also had a rehearsal and performance at the Saenger Theatre in Biloxi.**** I got a room at the Beau Rivage and made a weekend out of it, but, alas, I lost money at the poker tables. In any case, I met two of my fellow cast members for brunch at the casino buffet. I mostly stuck with the breakfast items, which were very good. Especially the grits. They were amazing. I realized why my mother had always sworn by real grits. I guess I’ve had some microwaveable grits since then, but now I know the fake stuff isn’t even in the same league as the real deal.

Just in case I needed confirmation, I got it a couple months ago. My father, sister, and I were visiting my paternal grandparents, who moved to Bogalusa a few years ago. They’re regulars at many of the restaurants (all three of them, give or take) in Bogalusa and the surrounding towns. One of those restaurants is Vicki’s. We had eaten there once before (possibly when we evacuated up there for Ivan, but I wouldn’t swear to it). I’d had a fantastic chicken tender sandwich along with a disappointing cup of baked potato soup, which had been highly recommended. My mother and I wanted to try said soup so badly that the proprietress was willing to drive over to her house to get some for us because they had run out at the restaurant. (It’s that sort of a place, and that sort of a town. You know, the sort of place where the owner hugs you as you leave.) On my most recent visit I ordered one of the day’s specials—barbecued shrimp served over an enormous bowl of cheese grits. I actually wasn’t crazy about the shrimp—I’m much more of a fried shrimp kind of guy—but the cheese grits. Wow. It was like having the same grits epiphany all over again. Which doesn’t seem possible, but it happened. So rich and flavorful and creamy. My only regret was that I was too stuffed to finish the enormous serving.

And even the things you think microwaves would be good at, they’re not. Like reheating things. You’re much better off turning the oven to about 350 degrees and heating up your leftover pizza. (Yeah, some people like their pizza cold. While it’s okay in a pinch, it’s hardly preferable. It’s like Pop-Tarts. Yeah, you can eat them cold when you have to, but they’re much better hot from the toaster.) And just about any sort of reheated leftover is a poor simulacrum of the original. I guess sometimes there’s no choice but to use a microwave—I don’t know you else you’d reheat lasagna, for example.

Or defrosting things. Every time I try to defrost something in the microwave I either underdo it or end up cooking it halfway. Very frustrating. Much better to let things sit in the fridge for the day or on the counter for a few hours.

I really just don’t understand people’s interest in microwaves. Are they quicker? Maybe, but most things that take a while to cook can be left largely unattended. More convenient? If you’re going to microwave anything, you usually have to stir it a couple of times to make sure it heats evenly. And stirring something is much less convenient when you have to pause the microwave, open it, reach in to stir the dish (or take it out to stir it), and restart the microwave. When you’re cooking something on the stove, you just stir it. At most you have to take the lid off. So the two biggest supposed advantages of microwaves aren’t all they cracked up to be.

Now, I think there are probably some reasonable uses for a microwave, but I don’t really care to know what they are. I do my best to get by without using that damn contraption.

* Yes, all her grandkids call her that. Even many people who aren’t her grandchildren call her Maw Maw.

** Oddly enough, the one thing I’ve had that reminds me the most of the taste of the veal rounds is the carnitas at Felipe’s. (If you haven’t been to Felipe’s, you need to go there ASAP. One location uptown near Claiborne & Calhoun, one location in the quarter, and the original location is in—wait for it—Cambridge, Mass.) Anyway, carnitas is made of pork, which is pretty different from veal, but I think the slow-cooking methods used for both lead to a surprisingly similar end result.

*** I was eating the similar dish of roast and rice the other day with my parents and my dad remarked that the only rice he really likes eating just for the taste if the rice is Maw Maw’s. I’d have to say I agree. I don’t know if it’s the ancient cast-iron pot she cooks it in, I don’t know if it’s some kind of esoteric knowledge learned on the bayous, I don’t know if it’s just years of experience. It’s just fluffy and tasty and just gooey enough to be perfect. And then add the gravy to it…words will not suffice. And as a pathetic footnote to a footnote, I consider myself a pretty decent cook but after several attempts I still can’t cook a pot of rice to save my life. As someone who is 1/4th Cajun (or Creole, or whatever the hell I am; see Chela’s blog entry about the topic for some information on the differences between the two commonly-conflated groups), I feel that this a rather humiliating shortcoming. Someday, I will rectify this.

**** Biloxi’s Saenger Theater opened in 1930, three years after the theatre of the same name in New Orleans opened. In fact, most of the Gulf South’s major cities have a Saenger Theater of their own, all dating to roughly the same era, as two drugstore owners, the brothers Julian and Abe Saenger, sons of a rabbi, got into the entertainment business and built an empire of movie palaces throughout the south.

I have never met a single person who doesn’t like blueberry muffins, nor have I ever met anyone who doesn’t like chocolate chip cookies.** Some people like other kinds of muffins or cookies—banana nut or oatmeal raisin, or whatever. I personally don’t care for just about any other type of muffin, and while sugar cookies are fine, you don’t see those at these sorts of places as often as you see those detestable, disgusting oatmeal raisin cookies. Now, I’m sure there are a few people who prefer some other types of cookies or muffins. So they can take those kinds without bothering the majority. But most people, even if they find banana nut muffins or oatmeal cookies or whatever edible, prefer chocolate chip cookies and blueberry muffins. If places run out of those, no big deal, they just pick something else. But given a choice, they’ll pick blueberry muffins and chocolate chip cookies. I don’t begrudge them this at all; I can’t blame them for picking something they like more, even if it means that I get screwed over and even though, from a utilitarian standpoint, their choice minimized the combined pleasure derived from the muffins or cookies for both of us.*** Whose fault is it? It’s the fault of people who set up these buffets and continental breakfasts and whatever. They’ll put out a big tray of cookies with only one-third of them chocolate chip, and five minutes later the chocolate chip cookies are gone and nothing else has even been touched. That’s borderline criminal. If you want a little bit of variety, fine. But these grossly improper ratios of muffins and cookies are a terrible loss for society. Anyone who’s ever wandered down to the lobby of a Comfort Inn only to find the blueberry muffins gone will surely understand my pain.

* Usually the finger sandwiches have mayonnaise (gross), or there’s some kind of sandwiches with way too many things on them. I like my sandwiches plain, ok? But that’s a story for another day.

** As soon as I post this, a couple of people will inevitably respond to my facebook status announcing this and say that they don’t like blueberry muffins and/or chocolate chip cookies. I wouldn’t brag about this if I were you, because if you don’t like either of those things, you’re a freak. So there.

*** I don’t really care much for utilitarianism, to be perfectly honest.

But wine snobbery is perhaps the most well-established and thus most annoying type of booze snootiness. They obsess over notes of fruit and oak, of aftertastes and aromas, of terroir and other French words. They buy fancy wine from Napa or Spain or Italy, they buy special refrigerators just to keep their wine, they talk about it at cocktail parties with other snobs just like them. And sure, some wines taste better than others. Maybe more expensive wines taste better, at least on average–or maybe it’s just another example of the price-placebo effect. This article notes several examples of the price-placebo effect. One of those examples involved a team of scientists from Stanford and Caltech who served identical bottles of wine to groups of volunteers, while telling them one cost $90 per bottle and the other cost $10. Guess which one the volunteers rated more highly? The $90 wine. In the absence of other factors, people assume the more expensive item is better. Or consider this report from NPR. MIT did a scientific test of a supposed new pain medication, and told one group of volunteers that the medicine cost $2.50 a pill and told the others that it cost 10 cents a pill. And, of course, the people who thought they were taking a pricier pill felt more relief, even though both groups were merely taking a placebo. Similarly, a recent Consumer Reports article compared store-brand and name-brand groceries, and in the majority of cases, the products were of nearly equal quality, even though the store brands cost 27% less on average. Tests like these show that a higher price doesn’t always mean better quality, but the wine snobs in their sheep-like state just keep wasting their money.

And besides, let’s assume for a minute that pricier booze tastes better (this applies whether we’re talking about well-aged liquors or fancy-schmancy French wine or microbrewed beer only six people have heard of). It tastes better? That’s missing the entire point of drinking alcohol! The point of drinking alcohol is to get drunk, or at least to get a decent buzz going! If you want to drink something that tastes good, have a Coke or a Barq’s Root Beer, or maybe a nice cold pint of chocolate milk. No alcoholic beverage is going to taste as good as any of those things. If we didn’t get drunk from alcohol, we’d never drink it! Yes, sometimes the bare bones absolute cheapest booze you can find is so dreadful you can’t even drink it. But if something fairly cheap is palatable, why waste your money on the super-pricy stuff? Remember why you drink.

* For example, I absolutely cannot stand Miller Lite. Oddly enough, though, Miller High Life is probably my favorite of the big-name cheap American brews. Go figure.

**Unless you drink it straight, in which case I guess you possibly could tell some differences, but why would you want to do that?

Disclaimer: This blog does not condone or encourage underage drinking or excessive alcohol consumption. Always use a designated driver. Don’t do anything stupid.