Pescatarian peanut butter and hard boiled eggs

This week you can read my podcast, and see what I've eaten, plus your music pairing...

My literary battery needs a chance to recharge after transcribing an episode of How Long Gone this week. We had technical difficulties with our guest’s recording, but somehow, we had a crudely AI-generated transcription of it, so we cleaned all the text up and released it as a Google Doc. Anyway, it’s kind of fun and different to read a podcast—also, no ads to fast-forward through. Hey, wait a minute...

Our guest, Lauren Sherman from Puck, is really smart and cool. We’ll have her back again with audio. Let me know what you think. Maybe we’ll release more in the future. (TW: we talk about Met Gala looks.)

How Long Gone Episode 641: Lauren Sherman (Google Doc)

Jerry Seinfeld is having a weird week. His COVID project, a fictional retelling of the origin of Pop-Tarts, was released on Netflix, and he began showing his age after a string of quotes popped up in which he complained that, thanks to the woke mob, it’s getting more difficult for him to make jokes. And now, in peak “Jerry,” he’s complaining about how he’s doing too much press while doing the press. It’s hard not to compare his trajectory to Larry David’s. Larry has spent the last 25 years dribbling his ball through the woke mob’s legs like a Harlem Globetrotter, and people love him more for it—he taught America how to transgress, while Jerry spent the last 25 years working clean in Vegas and buying deadstock Nike Shox on eBay. At this point, the only thing this once-inseparable comedic duo has in common is that they both know how to make a shitty movie.

Clear History (2013)

Jerry isn’t a celebrity; he’s a utility. Seinfeld will run in syndication until we run out of screens to flatten. But when Jerry suddenly starts Clint-Eastwood-ing, that means I’m getting older, too. Clout chasers like Jerry can’t hang up their Mets caps and start keeping bees; they have to continue talking. Eventually the things they say will stop sounding sane, like this line here:

Via GQ

Jerry is a bastard for saying something like this. But I had to try it for science. Slathering some Skippy on a still-warm egg is unacceptable, so I threw on my chef’s whites and whipped up a nutted egg

a nutted egg

I began this deceptively simple recipe by boiling an egg, chilling it in an ice bath, halving it, and removing the yolk. I then smashed the yolk through a tiny sieve and mixed in equal parts peanut butter (I used creamy, despite my preference for crunchy, which would have demoted this already infernal compound to sub-satanic levels.) Mixing egg yolk and nut butter created a Styrofoam-like stiffness in my bowl. The once-playful paste now seized up like drywall insulation. This also happens when I’m making a tahini sauce. The nut fats soak everything up like a sponge, making it angrier. With tahini, a few drops of water whisked in will eventually loosen things up into a silky-smooth pourable product, but the thought of mixing eggs and water seemed even more vile, despite water’s near-flavorless profile.

sieved yolk and peanut butter

I now had a workable marzipan-like substance that could easily be molded into any shape, so I chose a ball about the size of my yolk crater. You would think that having just seen how these two ingredients reacted to each other, things wouldn’t go well inside my (wet) mouth, but I had no idea what was in store for me. I took a bite and tried to keep my mind as open as possible as I began to chew this abomination of texture and flavor. I put myself in billionaire Jerry’s shoes. Popping down to the kitchen in his Brunello pajamas, feeling peckish between college basketball podcast appearances. His trusty old friend: hard-boiled egg and peanut butter. What was once simply a nuisance in the mouth became more of a horror with every bite. This was an open bag of cement being sprayed with a hose. The composition began setting up shop inside the dark corners of my mouth, quickly lining the walls from ceiling to floor. My amusement switched to shock as breathing quickly became difficult. I finally found myself over the sink, spraying the inside of my mouth with my faucet’s hose. Stick with a schmear if you’re dying to know what these two things taste like together.

For some reason, this video I posted on Instagram of my tofu press got tons of replies. It’s just a tofu press. You should get one if you eat a lot of tofu; it pays for itself in paper towel savings. I’ve been a pescatarian for the last week, eating painfully outdated food like this.

Tuna salad stuffed bell pepper, you eat it like an apple

And regular food like this:

Tempeh bacon, lettuce, tomato, avocado on toasted sourdough

Filet-O-Fish from McDonald’s

Music Pairing 

“Landslide,” Smashing Pumpkins (via YouTube)

If you look at the YouTube comments of heartbreaking emotional ballads, you’ll see a real cross section of humanity, like a TSA line. It’s the digital version of leaving an artifact at someone’s gravesite. You’ve probably heard this song before but should play it anyway.