And now, Scary-Crayon presents... by: Wes Ah, the Random Lunch. Always strange, often slightly unsettling, sometimes mildly offensive -- but until today, mostly harmless. However, think back to the rancid bean sprouts of A Crayon Haiku #13 (the one haiku thus far to come oddly out of order). Or, if you'd rather not go back there and look, the photo below should refresh your memory well enough. As you can tell from the picture, those bean sprouts were probably about a week past their better days -- unlike the crisp crunchy texture of fresh sprouts, these guys felt like some strange cross between soggy corn flakes and limp dicks boiled asparagus. Or I guess a better comparison would be to bean sprouts that were way softer than they should've been... and were also brown and coated with a thick gooey sludge that would've made your slimiest booger green with envy. Get it? Booger? Green??? Alrighty then. So that was the last of 'em, and I fried them in oil for a bit, threw in some garlic salt, and after seating them atop a slice of Whitehall jalapeno cheese and a piece of toast made an open-faced sandwich out of the above experiment. It wasn't too bad, but that's another story. Also, it was dinner... ...and in case you've forgotten, the name of this segment is A Random Lunch. I didn't have the stomach to down the entire writhing mass of oozing bean sprouts on that fateful day that I discovered them festering in the lowest and most sinister (i.e. leftmost) corner of the refrigerator, so I decided to try to stomach some for lunch on the condition that if I died of food poisoning before dinnertime I wouldn't eat the remainder of them. In hindsight, I probably should've made arrangements to make certain that nobody else ate them either (as that guy in Thinner found out all too well, a simple "HEY DON'T EAT THIS" note on the cherry pie would've been a lifesaver in more ways than one), but somehow I don't think too many people would be inclined to consume the contents of a bag that may or may not be filled with dead maggots soaked in the water from someone's bowl of dead sea monkeys. Dead, dead, dead. And really icky, too. Anyway, after washing the bean sprouts for quite some time to get the gook off, I decided to toss them in a bowl with some lettuce, cucumber slices, and fake crabmeat and go to town with some fork and knife cutting action. As you can see above, with those colorful additions, it looks almost edible... unless you're focusing on what's in the background. Personally, I've never had a problem with fat free versions of products and, given my calorie-counting MADNESS (which might shock you, considering some of the SC Foodstuffs offerings, but it's true, it's true), have even come to prefer them over the regular ones, but there are folks who insist that the fat free incarnations are awful and tasteless and wouldn't eat them to save their lives (or shed a few pounds). By the way, pretty much everything above thus far is fat free, making this one of our healthiest culinary experiments yet. Fuck Dr. Phil and his tubby bastard of a son who go around grinning with clenched fists and shilling "ultimate weight loss solutions" that apparently fail to work for them -- stick around Scary-Crayon for a while and you'll get weight loss tips in spades. Here, the tip is to swap certain ingredients for versions with less fat (which usually have significantly fewer calories altogether, too). Seriously, it works. But you don't have to be a nutritionist to figure that out -- it's common sense, really. Tip #2: Use common fucking sense! This from a person who uses rancid bean sprouts as an ingredient. Do as I say, not as I do. Unless you want to. I don't care.  :P So with the Kraft FREE Ranch Dressing and Kraft FREE Miracle Whip added... Hey, I didn't even notice that they were both Kraft products before. Hell, apparently I like Kraft. Might as well be proper and give them a link, then. Anyway, with them added to the mix and stirred about a bit, there's the result. I considered stopping here and just going with the healthy (save for the rancid bean sprouts) salad deal, but then it struck me that this isn't all that random -- it's pretty much seafood salad with a few atypical and/or spoiled ingredients. And since the segment is called A Random Lunch... ...I broke out one of those flour tortillas I like so much and went about making a burrito with the mixture. (Making things into burritos ups the randomness by a factor of two.) Sure, it adds a bit of fat to what would otherwise have been a fat free culinary adventure, but it sure doesn't add much, nor does that piece of cheese that I tore up and mixed in with the contents. I'm pretty sure the cheese is from Kraft too, making this a pretty Kraft-centric adventure here. K-R-A-F-T!  :D Aaaaand there we have the finished product. As you can see, during the course of the frying some of the contents came out, so I just put them on top... and I dunno about you, but I think it gives the burrito a sort of artsy and sophisticated look to it. That makes the Mostly Healthy Except for Rancid Bean Sprouts Seafood Salad Burrito tops in two categories -- it's not only the healthiest offering we've served up yet, but it also garners high marks in the artistic department. What rich interpretations can be made; what deeper meanings might one grasp simply by staring at this culinary masterpiece? Seriously, if I hadn't been taking pictures all along, I would've rushed to get the camera just to capture the image of the finished product. This is the most beautiful burrito I have ever seen. I was sad to eat it.  :( THE VERDICT: So we know how the Mostly Healthy Except for Rancid Bean Sprouts Seafood Salad Burrito fared with respect to artistic merit and taste, but how about the other kind of taste? High marks here as well, people -- as sad as I was to eat it, after that first bite I don't think I would've been able to stop if I wanted to. Actually, it wasn't so much a bite as a forkful -- seeing as how it didn't hold together all that well and all attempts to begin to pick it up projected horrible failures -- but you get the idea. It was delicious... much better than our last Random Lunch burrito experiment. Actually, looking over our previous entries, thus far I'd call this the best Random Lunch yet. Maybe that's not saying anything, given that it was up against cheesy grahams and peanut butter sandwiches, but still, this one gets a pretty enthusiastic thumbs up A+++++ from me. So while I don't advocate letting a bag of bean sprouts sit around for weeks on end to recreate this culinary experience exactly, I'd definitely recommend rounding up some fresh ingredients and giving this one a shot in your home kitchens, fat free dressings included. This is truly quality stuff, folks. And relatively low in fat, too! See, unlike Dr. Phil and his son, who appear neither thin nor particularly fit and therefore strike me as unqualified to give weight loss advice (WHY THE FUCK DO PEOPLE KEEP LISTENING TO THEM AND BUYING THEIR BOOKS?!?!?) you can kinda trust me on this one, at least barring high cholesterol levels that would cause me to knock over a row of surfboards. And hey, you can fault me for being vain all you want for this photo, but unlike Oprah I wasn't so vain as to keep the spotlight entirely to myself -- I made sure that my old pal E.T. was in attendance and dressed accordingly. After all, we go way back. Because good and healthy food keeps good friends together! Or some shit like that.  :P -- Wes -- Psst...wanna make a PayPal donation to Scary-Crayon? Just click the image above! Simple, no? ;)