Moments of inspiration really can strike from the strangest of places. Whether you’re minding your own business in the shower, about to lay down for bed, or you come across something that ignites a creative spark, that sudden moment of craft is one of the most gratifying experiences. Especially when the end result ends up as good – or even better – than you had first imagined.
This is the story of one such moment I recently had. A moment when a joke made by MOP’s Eliot for an article suddenly activated my food-making neurons and I ended up with something magnificent. And I’d like to share some of that in this edition of Well Fed.
Last weekend’s edition of What Are You Playing was, as usual, a smile and laugh-inducing delight, but one joke among the lot stood out to me: the one about going to a McDonald’s and ordering a “wild double sloppy sloppy with BBQ sauce.”
This joke landed with me for a few reasons, and one of those was the fact that, being something of a connoisseur of good garbage-y food, I would absolutely eat a sandwich that was called that. That then led me to ponder just what that sandwich would look like. Obviously it wouldn’t be something that one might consider conventionally pretty as sandwiches go, but living in a part of New York where something called the garbage plate exists also taught me how sometimes messy excess has its own appeal.
Quite literally moments later, those two things – the joke and the garbage plate – collided in my mind. It was this weird, food-based epiphany where I envisioned the wild double sloppy sloppy in my mind, as clear as if it were right in front of me.
I had some shopping to do.
It would be easy to witness something like the garbage plate and presume that it was just… well, a plate of garbage: something that just housed a bunch of different things in one pile and dished it out as a sort of epicurean curiosity. Or a sales pitch. We’ve all been to a place that claimed to be the home of some intriguing-sounding menu item. But my years of self-taught cooking has instilled in me a sense of how even the trashiest looking dishes can have a more thoughtful balance of flavors and ingredients than expected.
It’s that thoughtfulness that drove my line of thinking in making the sloppy sloppy. First, the fact that Eliot said it had “extra BBQ sauce” meant that barbecue should be the primary flavor profile. There’s also the “sloppy” part of the name that suggests it’s something like a sloppy joe, and sloppy joe sauce can sometimes be on the sweeter and well-spiced side. And few proteins carry those flavors better than beef and pork. I wasn’t about to use any pork, though; this is concepted as a McDonald’s item, so that meant it was time to McRib it up.
Yep, you can buy McRib-style pork patty things. They exist in the stores around me. I’ve had them before as a straight-up sandwich when I was low on energy but had to make dinner. These things would serve my purpose perfectly.
So, I had the proteins, and I had the base flavor profile; now it was time to think about flavors that would counter and thereby hold hands with this sandwich. Once more I went back to some barbecue staples: pickles, onions, coleslaw. That, combined with some sharp yet kind of funky cheddar cheese, I reasoned, would all work perfectly as a single bite. Plus, it started to look more and more like the thing I had come up with in my head, as well as being something that would be a mess to eat. A glorious mess. Again, barbecue rules demand that if it doesn’t get all over the place, it doesn’t belong in your face.
Thus, the ingredients:
- One can of Manwich sloppy joe sauce
- One pound of ground beef
- One package of pork rib-shaped patties
- Some sharp cheddar cheese to shred
- A coleslaw kit
- Some hamburger buns
- A bottle of excellent BBQ sauce (this is most important; do not cheap out)
After shopping, I was unnaturally excited to put this meal together. I shared my line of thinking and the backstory of the sloppy sloppy with my family in what must have looked like a rambling mad scientist manner judging by their reactions, but they also trusted me enough to encourage me to press forward. And so I did.
The cooking – or the warming things up, if I’m being very honest – began, and the whole thing took only about 30 minutes or so. I slivered the onions, used half of the sloppy joe sauce and a significant pour of my chosen barbecue sauce when making my ground beef, and cooked the rib patties as instructed, though once they were done I pulled them out of that flavorless dreck that they were packaged in and tossed them in more of my chosen sauce. Salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, and cayenne pepper as wanted.
Assembly was vivid in my head and unfolded just as clearly: pickles and onions on the bottom, then the pork, then a couple of heaping spoonfuls of the sloppy joe sauce, followed by the shredded cheese, and then the coleslaw to top it all off. Of course I served this on a paper plate as well; nothing about this sandwich screamed for me to get the fine china. This is stuff you get from a joint that’s open until 1:00 a.m. after you’ve had a few. This is food truck stuff. This is garbage plate on a bun.
And it was delicious.
Thinking back that should not have surprised me – I wasn’t really reinventing the BBQ wheel here, just condensing it on a bun – but there was something primal and magnificent about digging into that thing. And my family must have agreed because we all went back for seconds.
So there you have it, dear readers. I turned the wild double sloppy sloppy into something you can actually eat in real life. And we all have Eliot’s throwaway joke in our weekly open thread to thank for making that possible. Thanks, Eliot.
Everyone has to eat, and that goes the same for MMORPG fans, so why not get Well Fed? Join MOP’s Chris Neal for a look at real-world cooking through the lens of MMO, multiplayer, and nerd fandom as we share recipes, thoughts, and finds from this cozy corner of the internet.
