Friday Fiver: Sam I Am

Remember the announcer in the club in Purple Rain? "Ladies and gentlemen...the Friday Fiver."

1. What do you normally eat for breakfast?
Brains! No, really it's usually either cereal or wheat toast, sometimes with all-natural peanut butter, sometimes with fake butter. I'm trying to get more fiber in my diet (Remember the SNL skit about Colon Blow cereal?), so the cereal I eat tends to be the high fiber "My grandfather ate that." kind of cereal. I've found that Fiber One with the little honey cluster things has the best balance of high fiber, low sugar, and lack of a certain cardboard-like quality. It's actually decent stuff. Quaker Corn Bran tastes better and is decently low in sugar but doesn't have as much fiber. That's my "junk food" cereal. The past couple mornings the kids have been enjoying Pirates of the Caribbean cereal. It's nothing more than rebranded Cocoa Puffs with "pirate-shaped" marshmallows in it. Somebody should really blow the whistle on the lack of originality in movie tie-in breakfast cereal. It's pretty tasty, though.

2. Are you more likely to drink coffee or tea?
I'm more likely to drink tea. I only like coffee when it has an absurd amount of sugar in it, like the amount you'd put in someone's coffee as a practical joke. I'm diabetic, so that pretty much rules out coffee for me. I've found that I don't mind herbal tea sweetened with Splenda, so I drink that occasionally. The days of me starting off most M-F mornings with a 20 oz. Dunkin Donuts French vanilla capuccino are dead and gone. Better them than me.

3. Would you consider yourself a good cook?
Sweet fucking Christ, NO! Like Charlie Brown, all I can make is cold cereal and maybe toast. Actually, I can also follow simple directions for the preparation of canned soups and boxed pastas. And frozen foods. My wife would argue that I make great baked potatoes, but really it's all in selecting the right potatoes. Any asshole can wrap 'em in tinfoil and stick 'em in the oven for an hour. And that asshole is me.

4. What is your favorite meal?
Thanksgiving! That's the best meal of the year, as far as I'm concerned. The turkey, the gravy, the potatoes, more gravy, rolls, gravy, corn, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and wash it all down with a shot of hot gravy! Then a nice refreshing 12-hour food coma.

5. Green eggs and ham: would you eat it?
Since my pre-school years I've been fascinated by artificial food coloring, so I'd have to say yes, as long as the eggs were prepared to my liking, scrambled, maybe with a little green cheddar mixed in. I would also eat blue Canadian baccon and hash browns, or orange sausage gravy and biscuits. No more brown pancakes, though. I tried those once at IHOP, and it was one of the worst dining experiences of my life. Do not eat at IHOP.