Chef Boyardee’s Mini Dinosaurs!
It’s been a rough month. I needed something simple and pleasant to ease my way back into the wonderful world of low-level blogging. I think pasta shaped like dinosaurs is just the ticket.
Me and Chef Boyardee don’t cross paths often nowadays. It only happens during those rare times when I’m forced to go food shopping at shady convenience stores. The kind with lax attitudes about expiration dates, and magazine racks with a whole lotta lady nipples in plain sight.
But even when I go to normal supermarkets, I still love to look at the Chef Boyardee stuff. It makes me happy. Those cans are fun and colorful, and I’m always impressed with what they’re able to shape pasta like.
Last night, I found this. I doubt it’s new, but I’d never noticed it before. Chef Boyardee’s Mini Dinosaurs with Meatballs. I was immediately enamored, in part because it’s dinosaur macaroni, but also because they managed to make those meatballs out of pork, chicken and beef. Impressive in one way; overkill in another, perhaps more literal way.
Aside from making me feel like an eight-year-old, this also makes me wish I had the flu. Hell, I’ve been dodging it for two months now, and I’m definitely owed one.
Sane people can’t stand the flu, but I relish it. It’s nature’s permission to be a whiny, useless slug who cares for nothing except immediate gratification. That sounds like the perfect time to be the thirty-something who cries for Chef Boyardee without giving two fucks about how it sounds. Somebody cough on me.
The can delivers as promised. It’s a bowl of tiny, edible dinosaurs. The neat thing is that all of the pasta dinos that fell apart just look like random dinosaur bones. From an artistic point of view, nothing in that bowl missteps.
I know it’s hard to identify the specific dinosaurs when they’re swimming in a pool of blood, so I constructed this absurd guide, just for you:
The tyrannosaur is my favorite. If you turn its pasta shape sideways, it looks like a defensive crab.
The quickest way to my heart is to be a dinosaur and a crab at the same time. I’ll serenade you with Barry White’s My First, My Last, My Everything, right on the spot. Then you’ll kill and eat me, because you’re a dino-crab.
I didn’t want the meatballs to just be meatballs. There should be a cohesive canon to this. Let’s think of them as the comet that killed all of the dinosaurs, even if I’ve never really bought that particular extinction theory.
Maybe “fossilized dung” would’ve been a better way to identify them, but I don’t want to eat that.
