The nasty destiny sandwich

or the dish that created the greatest food writer in all of history

Hi clowns, welcome to downtown Clowntown, population us!

Had a bit of a rough start to the week. Davida and I were having a perfectly normal weekend until Sunday afternoon, when I noticed that my nose felt suspiciously big.

When I looked into the mirror I freaked out, because my whole face had started swelling up and it was a bright shade of red. Aside from my taut skin being extraordinarily uncomfortable, I didn’t have a fever, wasn’t nauseous, was eating okay, and could breathe normally, so I made sure to set up a doctor’s appointment first thing in the morning.

Nobody’s entirely sure what happened, but I’m on a really weird combination of medications to try and nail this eye pain down, one of them being steroids—and those do some really weird shit to you after a while.

Photo by Charge The Globe on Unsplash

Including turn you into a human-proboscis monkey hybrid, apparently.

Davida, being the ever-loving wife, examined my face closely during the peak of this ordeal and said, “You look kinda like what I imagine your brother would look like, if you had a brother.”

My doctors helped tinker with my medication and the swelling’s already gone down a fair amount, but Jesus, I do not recommend this experience. Unless you want to look like a sibling of yours that does not exist in this timeline.

Now that the initial horror and panic’s over and I appear to be mostly okay, feel free to start making fun of me—I might as well embrace that last kick in the nuts with some glee.

Dannis “Proboscis” Ree has a ring to it, don’t you think? Cool gangster nickname.

Today’s edition of the newsletter harkens back to something all the way from my childhood.

I’m sure that most of you have some kind of indelible memory from being a kid and experimenting in the kitchen mixing a bunch of nasty shit together, convinced that whatever you ended up with would actually taste good. I bet none of you turned this obsession into an actual career though, did you?!

Hey, I didn’t say it was a good choice. In fact, it’s a very lonely profession, being Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history. But I might actually be able to trace my superhero (okay, supervillain) roots back to one particular food.

Small Dannis was bored on a summer afternoon looking through the refrigerator for a snack, when he decided to make a sandwich. I ended up pulling out three things: an individually-wrapped slice of Kraft American cheese, grape jelly, and pickle relish. I put all of those ingredients between two slices of white bread and decided to eat it.

There’s not a lot of reviled food memories I have from being a kid (as you can tell, I clearly don’t have an aversion to much, including pet food), but there’s something about this sandwich that still haunts me to this day. As in, I took my first bite and the flavor seared itself into my brain and never left.

I still remember the flavor of it, super sour from the pickle relish and cloyingly sweet from the grape jelly, with the tacky and gummy layer of salty cold processed cheese in the middle. I immediately hated this thing so much I wanted to throw it away and never step foot in the kitchen again. I probably should have.

If I remember correctly, I handed the half-eaten sandwich to my dad, who wordlessly ate it. As you can tell, I come from a savagely powerful bloodline.

Through the trials, tribulations, and proboscis noses of this year so far, it’s been hard for me to stay focused on who I truly am. So I decided to revisit my childhood to recenter myself. To see if this memory would rekindle the brown flame deep inside my ass, and to recharge my spiritual energy to refocus on only the worst food imaginable.

It was time for me to exhume the sandwich that shaped my destiny. It was time to reawaken…the nasty destiny sandwich.

In order to best recreate this sandwich, I decided to use a genius culinary technique that only a child would use while making one.

That’s right. I grabbed a plate that was too small for the two pieces of bread. Also, I brought out my best friends, who are all stuffed animals, to watch.

I started by layering grape jelly on one side of the sandwich.

Back when I was a kid, we did not have this novel squeeze bottle technology for jelly dispensing, so I nodded deeply to myself, and silently appreciated the magic of modern times.

And knowing myself then, of course I’d have used an irresponsible amount of jelly, so I made sure to cover as much of the exposed bread as possible with the sugary shit.

Next came the most work-intensive part of the whole sandwich, which is adding the American cheese.

I say that this involves the most effort, mainly because it involves removing plastic from an ingredient, which, to a child, might as well be as complicated as skinning an entire dead animal.

It was finally time for the most questionable ingredient out of all three of them, which is the sweet pickle relish.

I decided to use what we already had on hand, which is the really weird neon green shit they put on hot dogs here in Chicago. I know that given the choice as a child, this is exactly the one I’d have picked off the store shelf. I mean, it’s the color of a goddamn Ninja Turtle.

Also, this jar is extremely old. It’s definitely been open for at least over a year, and I would not be surprised if it was actually pushing two at this point.

Later I discovered there was a mysterious black substance hanging out at the top of the jar, and I had to make a game time decision of whether or not I needed to run back out to the store.

The relish smelled okay, and honestly, if steroid complications, three eye surgeries, and proboscis monkey face can’t take me down quite yet, then fuck it, I can handle one scoop of aged pickle relish. I promise I am not currently writing these words from a hospital bed.

I figured I’d match the ratio of the pickle relish to that of the jelly, and I ended up using quite a bit of it.

Then I plunked the lid on and gave the thing a final once-over.

From the outside, the sandwich looked fine, but that’s just because all you see is the jelly peeking out from between the slices of bread.

Shit, if I made a sandwich this normal-looking as a kid, I’d have been plenty pleased with myself.

It was time to relive my childhood nightmare.

I took a big bite from the outside and started working my way in. The edges of the sandwich were pretty uneventful, because they were mainly just crust and a bit of jelly. Then the further I ventured inwards, I got thicker concentrations of jelly along with cold bites of cheese.

That’s when the relish hit.

And oh my God, it was the relish that really fucked my shit up. I enjoy sweet pickle relish just fine, especially on hot dogs here in Chicago, but that’s literally the only thing I ever eat it on, aside from maybe having it stirred into things like tartar sauce or secret burger sauce or some shit.

I was trying to pinpoint what it was about the relish that was bothering me so much when I realized that the combination of it, plus the grape jelly, tasted suspiciously like something we’re all familiar with: vomit.

Grape jelly’s tartness has that effect where it makes your mouth water a little (just like right before you’re about to spew), and something about the pickle relish sort of has a bile-simulating effect. Since both jelly and pickle relish are acidic, you’ve got that whole stomach juice thing being recreated as well, all between two pieces of bread. The cheese is just plain weird in this scenario, though the salt from it might be a bit of a saving grace.

Here’s the other thing. This is exactly the flavor combination I remember from when I was a kid, too, down to every last detail. Sometimes our memories get warped and faded over time, and we can’t quite remember certain things as they were, but in this case, it was a perfect match.

Too bad this wasn’t a memory I actually wanted to relive. I guess in retrospect, if this had been something good, I probably wouldn’t have remembered this nasty destiny sandwich exactly as it was. My memories of it would have had some saccharine Disney music playing in the background, which now that I think about it, sounds positively horrifying.

God, I probably would have turned into a really boring food and lifestyle blogger then. That memory would have turned into a recipe headnote that would have made your eyeballs roll so far back in your head they’d have come shooting out your ass. Now I feel like vomiting for a whole different reason. Suddenly the worst sandwich I’ve ever eaten has become the greatest one ever known to mankind.

Talk about an all-time comeback.

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Hopefully by next week’s edition of the newsletter, my head will be normal-sized again, which is something I never thought I’d be saying. Until then, as always, I love you all, and go have the best fucking weekend of your lives.