Big Bikes

Lying About the Invention of Nachos

I know I spend a whole lot of time talking about what an idiot I am, but sometimes, I have to admit, I'm kind of a god damn genius. Don't look at me like that, just hear me out.

Last week I did a ride where I spent a little more time on the bike/wandering around getting my feet soaking wet in stinking swamps than I had planned to. My fueling plan failed me. The calories provided by the egg & cheese and the small packet of hippy cookies I'd eaten during the first five-and-a-half hours of my day did not prove adequate. Two hours into what (inadvertently) turned out to be a 3.5 hour ride, I was bonked out and depleted. Although I know full well that it only makes things worse, all I could think about for the last hour of the ride was food, food, food.

I like to visualize everything in the pantry, freezer, refrigerator, and various other places I can't name, where I hide all the really good stuff from my wife (um, I mean robbers, raccoons, and terrorists ). I think of which items I might devour first. I think of how these things can be combined into delicious, perhaps heretofore unseen, concoctions. How peanut butter and cheese can be combined into a meal is always an interesting conundrum to ponder.

Of course when I stumble in the door on my faltering wet-noodle-legs, all bets are off: the cabinet doors are thrown open, bags and boxes and bins are pulled out en masse and deposited haphazardly on the counter. Somehow during this process crackers painted in peanut butter find their way into my mouth. Every dairy product is torn from it's home in the fridge. Every appendage reaches for salty snacks and sweet treats.:I grab bags of tortilla chips with my toes, hold jars of salsa between my knees, and grab raisins with my prehensile third nipple. Yes raisins, that's right, vastly exciting raisins.

The snack that was doing it for me was the chipotle salsa and tortilla chips. Trouble was: the chips were pretty much entirely comprised of tiny, pain in the ass crumbs. I needed to shovel salsa into my maw and these little, puny bastard chips were not doing the trick. I had to think fast. I required a binding agent, let me see...what could possibly work? CHEESE and lots of it. I dumped what was left of a bag of some taco blend cheese on a pile of the broken bits of tortilla chips and threw the whole mess in the microwave.

Success! I could now scoop up massive quantities of salsa with my primarily cheese based chip-binding nightmare.

And that, is how I invented nachos.