This is better than I thought it would be. That's a nice surprise. No cheese and that is strange because I passed on three logical cheese opportunities.
The corn is my favorite thing. I think it is considered nutritionally suspect. This is two types of corn combined, regular pulverized dent corn with everything in it, and masa harina for tamales. The combination is pleasant, I don't know why it is not famous.
The sauce is a regular Bèchamel, the sort of thing you do for gravy, butter and flour in equal proportions and milk to form a sauce. Plus nutmeg. This has ground hamburger meat and a few other sausage-type spices.
My dad used to make a similar thing, an idea that he picked up from the military. He poured his hamburger sauce over toast and he called the combination SOS, which we were allowed to say, and which in the colorful and piquant and sometimes amusing nomenclature favored and perfected by military personnel is an acronym for shit on shingles, and would be a compliment to the chef, and another potty-mouth word we were not allowed to say. As kids we liked it just because of that -- we could say the letters and laugh about suggesting the forbidden words and still be well-behaved naughty little children -- but we probably would have liked it even if it had a nice name because it was bland and that is what we demanded. This is like that except tastier and much better.
The SOS, now that I'm recalling it, was ghastly. I did try it a few times. Each time I was thinking the whole time that toast was wrong and so is the sauce. It was completely wrong. The toast gets strangely both soggy and difficult to cut. Eventually mush. So glop on top of mush with edges that are difficult to cut.
Do you know what? I take it back. I'm all wrong. Forget everything I just said. I am sorry. The stuff is probably still called SOS because it looks and tastes like shit and even airmen know it.
I did something different with the hamburger meat too. Instead of breaking apart the hamburger or smashing it, the meat was pulled apart using two forks to gently separate it following the pattern made by the machine, the opposite of compression, to increase the browning surface.
Once a bird came over from work and we were fixing up something together that involved hamburger. Her job was to stand there and brown the hamburger. She did what I told her to do. But I didn't tell her when to stop so she didn't stop. She reduced the hamburger to a particle size that impressed molecular scientists. <-- partial lie. There was no texture or sense of meat remaining, just a million tiny brown caramelized dots. <-- contains exaggeration. It occurred to me she had absolutely no idea what we were doing. <-- 100% of truth.
That's not a bad thing, Persy.
I mean, per se.
It's just not anything I expected.
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