Serious, serious subject here: nachos. They’re the topic of big debate in our household. And it’s not like we kick back on the couch eating nachos and drinking beer every night, but on the odd occasion they’re required. Like Oscar night, The Bachelor After The Final Rose, or Friday night Ultimate Fighting (which is clearly not my preference, but as we all know, marriage occasionally involves compromise).
Like the Gestalt notion that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, nachos can be transcendental, but only when the piece parts are systematically thought through.
And here’s where Rodney and I argue. I won’t go into detail about our nacho discussions, but a few major categories we tackle on a regular basis include:
1. Fake cheese or real cheese (you will be very surprised to find out which side of the debate I fall on there). OK, I won’t hold out on you. FAKE! Yes, I love it, in certain situations. Not all the time. In fact I’m disgusted by it most of the time, but in the case of nachos, it’s essential.
Fake cheese works best here because it melts, and stays melted. So, long after the nachos have cooled off, the cheese is still gooey. Unlike shredded cheddar, which tends to clump. And we all know the result here. Several highly covetable compound nachos that are stuck together with the bulk of the toppings. You pretend that you’re not interested, you play hard to get, but really, you only have eyes for those welded clumps and silently curse your nacho eating partner when he (and it’s always a he) takes those first. Leaving the dry chip fragments at the bottom whose only hope is to be scraped against the salsa/sour cream blob that is now starting to harden on the side of the platter.
2. Style of tortilla chip, again critical. I prefer to buy organic white corn (they somehow go best with aforementioned fake cheese), but Rodney likes the big GMO-based restaurant-style Tostitos. He thinks they’re a perfect match for his favorite Tostitos salsa. To me that stuff tastes like chunky tomato sauce and would make my post-nacho digestion experience even more nauseating than usual. I generally try to convince him that the jar in the fridge is unuseable. Like I found a shard of glass in it. Or it’s got some kind of spore growing on the surface. Usually that’s enough to convince him, although ever since he came home drunk 10 years ago and ate a full jar of moldy salsa without consequence, he’s been less deterred by the second reason.
