I made that viral Spaghettio pie that everyone is crapping themselves over

if these words mean nothing to you, be thankful

Good Tuesday, clowns!

Despite the fact that social media is a complete cesspool of fermenting garbage, I am constantly looking at it, out of curiosity, boredom, and a feeble longing for human connection. While I’m on Facebook and Instagram a lot, most of my social media time is spent on Twitter, where I am known as @fartsandwich. I enjoy engaging with big brands by telling them I am a celebrity chef, and I am generally ignored for being a class D troll who shouts at them in at great lengths, typically about flatulence. How I became an employed food writer will be a mystery for the rest of eternity.

This past weekend, I was made aware of yet another food video which has been making the rounds on social media.

Elliott Bambrough @E2TheBam

Chicago restaurants, listen up. You need to up your game, because this culinary genius just changed everything forever.

This video is in lots of places, resulting in me getting tagged about a million times by friends and strangers alike. Most outlets didn’t seem to have the end of the video, but my friend Elliott who shared this online had the ending too.

Elliott Bambrough @E2TheBam

And the highly anticipated conclusion to the world’s greatest pie.

There is so much to unpack here.

If you did not bother to watch the videos, that is okay. You have saved a few neurons from fizzling out and dying. To save you some time: This lady is sharing a quick dinner hack, calling it “the fastest family recipe for dinner that you will see, and all the kids will love it, because obviously who does not like spaghetti Italian?”

The first sign that something is wrong is that she is one of those people who pronounces it “Eye-talian,” which should put you at high alert. I am sure she is a perfectly nice person, but this immediately raised some suspicions. Oh, and dumping an entire can of Spaghetti-O’s into a pie crust may have also had something to do with it.

But what really got me was this:

That is buttered bread covered in garlic powder. She is kneading the bread with her fucking forearms.

Then she mashes the garlic powdered and buttered bread with her bare fists, and then lets the sleeves of her sweater fall back down to her wrists like nothing happened.

Listen, I know we all have our own quirky cooking styles, but if I am feeding people I care about, I generally avoid maximizing the surface area of skin that the ingredients touches. I also cannot believe she let her nice sweater back down around her wrists because holy shit what kind of monster deliberately lets that happen?

She then proceeds to put layers of Spaghettios and cheese into a premade pie crust and oh my God did she just pour milk into it.

The final result is a Spaghetti-O, milk, cheese, and garlic bread pie that goes into the oven with no specified temperature or bake time. The final reveal shows the concoction baked off, golden brown, and all. It cuts off before you get to see her slice into it.

“Fine, fine. I’ll do it. I’m Dannis Ree. This Substack newsletter is a culinary torture device of my own making. I’m never looking at social media again,” I said, opening up Twitter for the 47th time that day.

At least the ingredients were easy enough to procure.

My stomach gurgled uneasily as I farted with despair.

If you are a serious food person, you are already an expert in making pie crust, and you have secret techniques that only you know. Otherwise, if you’re me, you just buy a frozen crust and call it a day.

I swear, though, if I find out one of you has been feeding me pie crust kneaded with your sweaty forearms, I’m reporting you to the authorities.

The sound of Spaghetti-O’s being poured into a pie crust is one that’s worth experiencing, at least once.

It’s both a plop and a squelch, plus you get to make that tin can scraping noise with a spoon while you scratch the last of the stubborn Os into your pie crust afterwards.

Sorry about the blurry photo here, but I was too busy crying at the fact that I was pouring milk into a pie crust full of Spaghetti-O’s to keep my hands steady.

The milk pooled along the edges of the crust, turning a slight shade of pink as the sickly sweet tomato sauce mixed with cow mommy juice.

That was it. That was the best sentence I’ll ever write in my food writing career. I think I’ll go throw up now.

The host of the video suggests you double up on the cans of Spaghetti-O’s if you’re feeding a big family.

I thought there’d be too much, but turns out you can fit two entire cans of Spaghetti-O’s into a frozen deep dish pie crust. That’s something fucked up I never thought I’d learn.

I did a miserable job buttering my bread slices with the crusts sliced off, and no, I didn’t use my goddamn forearms to mash the garlic powder into them, either.

Cue I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That - Radio Edit) by Meat Loaf.

So here’s a problem. The video doesn’t talk about temps, baking times, whether or not the pie crust is supposed to be pre-baked, or what. I just looked at the instructions on the pie crust wrapper and turned my oven up to 400°F and just hoped that’d work.

When the bread started browning, I took the pie out. This took probably around 20 minutes, which seemed pretty early.

Guess what, dickholes? That crust was as pale as the skin of my three buttcheeks. A single tap verified that it wasn’t baked all the way through, and a piece fell off the side, mostly raw.

Since there wasn’t really a binding agent to the innards of the pie, I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to firm up.

As you can see, my suspicions were indeed correct, though a small part inside of me hoped that the cheese and starch from the pasta might fuse together to become one solid block. I was wrong. Dead wrong. I’ve never been so wrong in my entire life.

At least the cheese melted.

I tried some. Basically, what I’d like to report, is that it tasted exactly like tinny sweet Spaghetti-O’s with melted cheese and cheap garlic bread on top, and that this cooking video was likely created just to elicit some kind of knee-jerk emotional response from my hollow, cynical, insides as a test of my humanity. This was a culinary Turing Test.

As I rage-ate the slice of Viral Spaghetti Eye-talian Pie, I fell into a pit of existential exploration. I felt even worse when I realized I had eaten way more than I’d thought. Deep inside, I kind of liked it. Mmm. Cheese. Canned food with weird soft meatballs. Garlic bread. Raw pie crust.

I fell to my knees and channeled my best character impression from Blade Runner, whispering, “All those moments will be lost in time, like farts in wind. Time to…diarrhea.”

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Hmm. With that ending maybe I should become a screenwriter. If you all like this newsletter, even one tiny bit, please share it on social media. If you’re feeling frisky, tag me, @fartsandwich, while you’re at it. Each share goes a long way.

Oh, and hey. This is the part where I ask you to consider supporting the newsletter with a bit of cash, as it’s been our saving grace this whole last year, and hopefully into the future. Plus, if anything, I break even on Spaghetti-O’s. Maybe watch one of those animal videos with Sarah McLachlan and pretend I’m that kitten with rheumy eyes.

You’ll get access to the paid subscriber archives, and I was wondering why this all felt so familiar, it was because I made something similar of my own accord nearly a year ago, but it was for paid subscribers. Little did I know I was going to become the snake eating my own ass.