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A What Now?

The Mild Wife and I both like to cook, but I don't immerse myself quite as much in the endeavor as she does. I will occasionally suggest an interesting combination of ingredients (grilled onions in a salad is delicious), but she just has a passion for it that I can't match. Why do I say this? Because she doesn't just enjoy cooking, she enjoys learning new recipes, looking at social media posts about food, and the like. To paraphrase the Batman villain Bane, I merely adopted cooking.

Now, to be clear, this does not mean that the Mild Wife does all the cooking. I put in my share of effort, to the point where we joke that I am the sous chef. Like I said, I enjoy the activity, and I do like to play with the ingredients to try to come up with something delicious. However, I find new recipes far less often than the Mild Wife. Most of the time, the Mild Wife will find something, and we will try to make it at some point.

One of the most memorable instances of this, however, involved a recipe that we'd never heard of before. I don't even remember what the Mild Wife was looking for, but her reaction was pure hilarity. I'm not entirely sure I can put it into words, but the closest description I can find for it is, "outraged disbelief." You see, she had been looking at various social media posts, and she came across recipes for "taco pop tarts."

On some level, I intuitively understand what people mean by that. Imagine something like a Hot Pocket, filled with something similar to the filling that you'd put in a taco. It's actually not a strange combination, since that filling can be used in a variety of dishes that all wrap it with bread of some sort. Think about it: a taco and a burrito don't differ that much in structure, it's just a matter of how much tortilla you used and whether you enclose the filling or not. It's a pretty sane thought process.

Of course, it's so sane that people thought of doing just that a long, long time ago. They just called it an "empanada." In fact, that Wikipedia article claims that one of the earliest recorded recipes was over 500 hundred years ago. So, yeah, it's been around a while.

The Mild Wife knows this last fact, so she immediately reacted in disbelief. I believe the exact words she exclaimed at her phone were, "you mean empanadas?!" I didn't know the context or her search history at that point, so all I heard was the tail end of it. It was hilarious to watch/hear, and it became all the funnier when I realized why she was objecting. Taco pop tart, indeed.

(To round out the story, apparently there was blog that promoted this, and the author seems to be genuine in her approach, at least based on someone's interview of her. That doesn't make it any less funny to me, but I'm heartened that this wasn't just out-and-out shenanigans.

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