And now, Scary-Crayon presents... by: Wes Like many stories, this one begins... with cheese. See? Cheese. However, it must be noted that this story does not begin with ordinary cheese, for this is no ordinary story. Which is not to say that all words that describe the cheese accurately describe the story, or vice versa, for that is not the case. For example, this is Low-Moisture Part-Skim Mozzarella CHEESE, but this is not a Low-Moisture Part-Skim Mozzarella STORY, nor is this story an excellent source of calcium. Moreover, if all modifiers to the cheese could rightly be applied to the story, this would be a very old story indeed. But it is not an old story. It is a fresh story. The cheese, however, was not fresh. Not by a long shot. Here, come closer. As you can see above, the date on the package reads "APR-03-03", which we must take to mean April 3rd, 2003. Whether this is the expiration date or the born-on date of the cheese we cannot say, nor is it extremely necessary that we discover the truth of the matter -- either way you look at it, this particular block of Low-Moisture Part-Skim Mozzarella CHEESE is fucking old. Removing it from its plastic pouch which has become cloudy with the passage of time, we see that the cheese is so old that, like aging humans, it has begun to develop liverspots. Orange liverspots. Or perhaps they are stripes. Is the cheese mutating into some sort of reverse tiger? We cannot say. We know only that it has taken on the scent of a wild animal as well -- the sort of wild animal that is best served with wine and overpriced stale crackers. Perhaps this explains the fondness that the wealthy have for stinky, aged cheese. We know that many rich folks are fond of hunting -- the bigger the game, the better -- and we suspect that old cheese mutates into reverse tiger creatures. Ponder this and other thoughts at your leisure. We skip ahead in our story to the frying pan, where something appears to be cooking in the grease. Something strange. Something nearly unidentifiable. I suspect that a first guess might peg it as some sort of creepy apple cobbler, but THAT FIRST GUESS WOULD BE WRONG. So what the hell is it, you ask? Let's answer you with... A BONUS CRAYON HAIKU!!! It is an eggplant, mixed with flour and water and mashed up a bit. Well, alrighty then. Not much more to say about that, is there? By the way, eggplant really soaks up grease... and I just had a vision of a pants-wearing mashed eggplant-flour thing living in a frying pan in a sea of dirty grease, with THE SANDWICH SO WEIRD it frightens McGriddles as its best friend and a slimy rotten bean sprout creature who doesn't really like the two of them very much as a neighbor. I think it's just crazy enough to work. Eat year-old cheese and you'll agree, not to mention go mad singing stupid songs about greasy ocean-dwellers in a salty sea captain's voice. The final product sees both our strange tiger-cheese and this eggplant mixture united in between two slices of toasted bread, thus creating the Fried Eggplant Stuff with (Year-Plus-Old) Mozzarella on Toasted Bread Sandwich. And there was enough fried eggplant to have some on the side, too, so it serves as its own side dish as well, just as a handful of corn chips would when accompanied by a corn chip sandwich with mayo. Is he joking? No, 'fraid not.  :P THE VERDICT: Well, I think it goes without saying that I don't recommend trying to recreate this one at home, but that's not because it tasted particularly bad. On the contrary, it tasted quite good. However, if you've got Mozzarella cheese lying around that's over a fucking year old, please don't eat it, even if you do (like I did) scrape off its tiger stripes and sniff it up and down like a crazy crackhead dog around bitches who shit cocaine and say to yourself, "Eh... STILL GOOD!" It may not be, you may die, and the world may be sadder for it. No, if you've got cheese that old in your refrigerator, skip the food experiments and get started cleaning that bastard out, because odds are that there's something living in there and plotting horrible schemes such that if someone hits you up later with the "Is your refrigerator running?" gag you might have to answer, "Yes, it is, in both senses of the word, and it's also skinned the members of Congress and is puppetteering them about by their partially-severed sinews. 'Cause it's EVIL." However, if you like battered and fried grease sponges and regularly eat oatmeal (to offset the inevitable death effect that this much grease would have by itself), I wholly recommend the eggplant portion of the sandwich. It's quick to make -- cut up an eggplant in a bowl, throw maybe 1/4 cup of flour in there, drizzle some water in there (say, start with 1/8 cup or less and add more as necessary), and stir until all of the contents have been moistened a bit. Then you just spoon the mixture out of the bowl into the frying pan with grease that you already had warming up on the stove (you always have a frying pan with grease warming on the stove, don't you?) and fry it up, flipping it over once or however many times you need to flip it to be satisfied with the level of, uh... fryage. And then you can eat it as is or throw it in between two slices of bread. Hell, you can even add some Mozzarella or other cheese -- just make sure it's fresh cheese. Otherwise you may have to deal with a creepy reverse tiger mutant creature trying to rip a hole through your bowels. ENJOY! WHO LIVES IN A FRYING PAN SWIMMING WITH GREASE...? -- Wes -- Psst...wanna make a PayPal donation to Scary-Crayon? Just click the image above! Simple, no? ;)