One of my normal meals on an average week is microwaved potato skins.
A while back, however, a mistake was made: instead of buying the normal microwaved potato skins brand, my mom bought something she thought would work as a substitute, from a brand she thought might even be better.
When I actually went to try them, I learned to my despair: this brand wasn't meant to be microwaved. They were meant to be made in the oven. I didn't have time to wait, so I microwaved them anyway, guessing at the time. And it turned out...they were absolutely awful.
However, I was reasonably sure it was not because of the microwaving a product not meant to be microwaved. I was pretty sure the potato skins themselves just sucked. More specifically, the cheese being absolutely terrible, ruining the taste and flavor of the whole thing.
My mom knew better than to try buying more, but thought that if the mistake was ever made again, it would be worth trying to do them the "proper" way.
Fast-forward to this Friday. My dad had bought the same exact wrong brand, but instead of it being deliberate, it was absolute incompetence. (It's a little hard to mistake one brand for a completely different brand. It's even harder to read 'Fridays'--what he got--as 'Farmers'--what he meant to get. And yet, he somehow managed.)
My mom followed through however and decided to make them anyway. I warned her that it wouldn't do much good, but I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt--she was after all taking time to make me food when she didn't need to and failing that food, I had a chocolate muffin I could consume.
...And then it turned out that I was right. It was absolutely terrible. Godawful even. The taste was abysmal. The culprit? I could clearly identify now more than ever as being the cheese. I let her know that, no, it wasn't my method, the product just sucked and wasn't very good.
She decided she would try one just to see what the big deal was.
Her reaction?
"Oh my god".
She agreed: peel the cheese off and it might be edible was her stance on the subject.
So then my sister decided to try it out. She was wise enough to only take a fraction of a piece, and she...came to the conclusion it was terrible. She said she was surprised at how good the potato skin itself was...but that the cheese made it inedible.
And now you have the background behind me fast-forwarding to yesterday. Where my other two siblings were over. My brother asked what the potato skins were. We told him all of the above. His reaction? "How bad could it be?"
The moment he took a bite, he spit it out. And went?
"Oh god."
And he kept spitting.
And he wolfed down some extra food just to drown out the taste, morbidly saying that's basically the worst thing he's ever tasted. "The cheese! The cheese!"
My younger sister must have been a masochist because at basically the same time she tried. She had a strategy of trying a small piece at a time. "Oh god!"
Nope.
Didn't work.
"The cheese is just awful!"
She then proceeded to try and drown it out with water, a strategy my brother copied.
The universal consensus from basically the whole family: that cheese is something that is absolutely terrible.
We did have a fair amount of good food though, once we got to eating. I decided to stay to hot dogs (same as today actually), but also had hamburgers and corn on the cob available. After the main course came S'mores. In a surprising twist, my younger sister got first burn of the evening (something we always track as a mark of shame), though that wasn't too difficult an achievement since the charcoal we had wasn't really at ideal s'more distribution at the time (it's ideal when it's primarily white in color, yet still solid: too much black, too much heat and too little surface area; too little solid, and there's not enough heat and again too little surface area).
Universally with the possible exception of my older sister, we all seemed to settle on "two, then done" as a nice number for S'mores. The nice thing about doing them isn't really the s'mores themselves (honestly I actually don't really enjoy the flavor) so much as it is the experience (including the nasty bits like mosquitoes and the sticky nature of marshmallows and gooey nature of pre-melted chocolate which wasn't supposed to come pre-melted).
We took a lot of time deciding what to watch, before settling on--of all things--...George of the Jungle.
Which is a funny coincidence, since that's something I had wanted to suggest, and yet when push came to shove, there was "a film I couldn't quite remember what it is I was going to suggest". My mind went to Mulan as being it, but I was really actually trying to go for George of the Jungle, yet it wasn't me who finally suggested it. (When it did get named, my mind instantly went, "OH! That's what I was going to say earlier but couldn't think of!")
So it was a fairly good day overall.
In other news, today my mom did acknowledge that I do need to see a doctor, so. That's not something she forgot about. (Nor something I did, though reminding her about it is something I kinda sorta kept slipping up on, but at least in this one instance, it's good to have a mom who can remind/remember you about a thing like that.)
Soyeah.
Good times.
Now if you don't excuse me...I think I've got a date with Princess Tutu. (Well, more accurately. A date with whom to watch Princess Tutu. <3)