Rainbow Grilled Cheese Toasties!

Sometimes the internet throws things at you that look and sound too interesting not to try. It was my girlfriend who found this online, and decided that we should give it a go.

The sprinkles on the toast offended me. In my experience, sprinkles are always sweet, and I am not someone who likes mixing sweet stuff with savoury stuff. There are exceptions, but generally I’m of the belief that sweet and savoury should not entwine, so if we were gonna do this shit, sprinkles were staying out of the picture. The toast already looked too much like cake to me.

As we didn’t have all of the required colours of food dye to really make the thing properly rainbow coloured, my girlfriend messaged me whilst I was in town reminding me to go to pick up some more colours of dye. Unfortunately for us both, it wasn’t enough of a reminder and I forgot all about it.

So using only the colours we had in the cupboard, this Sunday morning ‘rainbow’ toastie construction got underway.

One problem was that the bottles of dye in the cupboard were from made by different manufacturers and the colours weren’t really the colours they were supposed to be. The bowl closest to the camera was cheese mixed with pink dye. But it looked orange. The one behind it was orange, but looked pink. The brown one next to that was meant to be red but looked brown. The blue and the black looked as expected really.

I don’t know how the folks in the States do grilled cheese, but over here ‘cheese toasties’ are usually done under the grill, or in a toastie maker. My girlfriend seemed to think that they should be fried in a pan with butter, so that is the route we decided to go down. It didn’t take long before I lost my temper at my attempt as it fell apart when I tried flipping it and multicoloured cheese ended up falling out of it and melting in the bottom of the frying pan.

Nevertheless, I still managed to churn out something that looked vaguely edible.

I don’t have any experience with unicorn excrement, but this looks how I imagine it would look, smeared on bread. The bright colour really makes you think it is going to be sweet, but it isn’t. It’s just cheese on toast, just with a lot more washing up and having to remove food colouring out of the kitchen worktop and out of my hands than I usual.

This was neither a huge success nor a bitter disappointment. It was just unnecessary effort for a total mess really. If you want to see if you have more luck than me, the recipe can be found at http://www.popsugar.com/food/Rainbow-Grilled-Cheese-Recipe-41029936 (I stole the picture of how it was supposed to look from there).

Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans!

I was an avid Harry Potter fan as a kid. When the Philosophers Stone movie (Sorcerers Stone in the USA) came out back in 2001, you could buy Every Flavour Beans and Chocolate Frogs akin to the ones seen in the movie. The beans weren’t that bad if my memory serves me. I think the worst was horseradish flavour, which tasted exactly how it should.

We were recently in an imported candy store and we found these.

They didn’t look that different to how they looked many years ago, but I it said on the back of the box that they are made by Jelly Belly, who are probably the leading manufacturers of jelly beans and produce an array of amazing flavours. If anyone was going to be able to produce some beans that taste foul or really good, it would be them. The available flavours were helpfully shown on the sides of the box.

Horseradish sounded delicious in comparison to the sound of some of these grim offerings. So somewhat hesitantly, my girlfriend and I took our first beans from the box.

I ended up with a suspicious looking brown one and she an equally suspicious yellow one. We both popped them in our mouths the same time, and pretty quickly she started to gag and spat hers out, which apparently was rotten egg flavour. Mine tasted fantastically like dirt. Though it didn’t taste good, I couldn’t help but appreciate how spot on they got the taste. Is there someone working at Jelly Belly who has to taste all of the grim shit to ensure these beans taste accurate to the real thing? Kudos to that person.

The next two were candy floss and cherry. I really enjoyed the cherry one, but I think I actually wanted another nasty one, just to see if they got the flavour just right again. Masochistic bastard that I am.

The next time around I ended up with a marshmallow and she had a sausage. She apparently wasn’t keen as it apparently did taste pretty accurate.

After we both pulled out the same colour, I thought they were both they were both booger. Surprisingly, with all the weird shit I have chowed down on over the years, I haven’t wittingly ever eaten a booger. But to me it tasted just like the dirt one again, but my girlfriend thought hers tasted like grass. I didn’t realise until after she had said that but there were two other flavours listed on the side of the box just underneath the lid, one being grass and one being banana. So whether that was a grass one or whether boogers taste somewhat like dirt, I don’t know.

I tried a soap one next, which tasted like it could easily have been some sort of washing detergent. Then followed by this monstrosity.

From the pictures on the box, this was going to be either earwax or rotten egg. So neither were going to be great. It was the latter and the moment it touched my tongue, I understood wholly why my girlfriend gagged and spat it out. I am pretty good with eating weird shit but this tasted fucking foul. I too gagged and spat it out.

This one was another nasty one. I have tasted my own vomit enough times for this to have to only touch my tongue for a few seconds before I realised what it was. Bleagh!

Following that, I then tried sausage, another soap, earthworm (tasted just like dirt), marshmallow, dirt and another rotten egg. Thinking it strange that there weren’t any nice tasting ones left in the box, whilst I had been typing it turns out my girlfriend had eaten all the good ones leaving me with the foul ones. I did say that I wanted to try horrible ones, but I didn’t want to try only the horrible ones. So with a handful of only horrible ones left, I decided it was time to wrap it up.

It was actually quite fun. I remember the ones back as a kid being much much tamer flavorwise. If you’re sat with friends and want to try something fun, this isn’t a bad way. Just don’t sit with someone who will eat only the good ones when you aren’t looking.