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Look, we know what you’re thinking: This is by far one of our worst pun-based ideas. But Greg gets real pissy if we don’t let him just go to town roasting something, both literally and figuratively, every thirty days or so. And so we present: fear.
There isn’t really an official Meat of Pumpkin Spook Season, the way there is for Easter (ham), Thanksgiving/Christmas (setting your house on fire deep-frying a turkey), or Hot They/Them Summer (anything grilled), but if you’ve ever seen a movie about teens in the 80s, or gotten dirty looks at the grocery store making an ill-timed purchase on October 30th, there’s something that comes close: eggs.
Eggs are basically liquid meat inside of a delicious hard candy shell, a kind of primordial meat-slurry from whence tendies eventually emerge, naked and howling for air. What they represent for our purposes, though, is the reason for the season: eggs are also a type of fear.
Obviously not in normal circumstances, but in the wonderfully deep roster of American Stereotypes (suburban conference, non-racist division), kids whipping eggs at your house is an all-timer. Fears are debilitating as the product of two factors – how likely they are to become a problem, and how bad it would be if it did – and egging is neither, but somehow looms large nonetheless.
On the high end of Fears To Be Respected, we have the continued slow collapse of the entire planet, socially and environmentally. It’s not good, but it’s fine, because nobody cares, at least in the sense that we’re continuing to go about our lives instead of moving to off-grid farming communes. No one in power is going to fix it, because they don’t want to: this is a you problem, not a them problem, which they don’t even hide anymore. The ruling class just openly lies and doesn’t even try to make it believable, which I honestly kind of understand at this point: what the hell am I gonna do about it? It’s not like there’s consequences. There has to be a word, probably in German, for the feeling of knowing that everything is transparently stupid and awful and self-defeating, but watching everyone go through the motions along with it, and since you can’t get off the ride, forging ahead and playing your own part in it. I asked what the word would be, and someone said it was “depression”, which is probably not wrong, as such. Another good fear is Skeletons.
On a practical level, none of this is worth worrying about, because you can’t do anything to prevent or mitigate the outcomes, but it is a really cool trick if you need to cure your somnia. All in all, “your house getting egged” isn’t exactly the biggest worry anyone should have – it won’t happen and it wouldn’t meaningfully impact your life if it did. On top of that, “the one being chucked at your house” isn’t even the scariest type of egg. No, that honor is reserved for the Cube Egg.
Cube Egg is what happens when science goes too far, and also when your wife’s friend, who is also your best friend’s wife, and also just directly your friend, decides that she has had enough of you being “the Joker of kitchen gadgets” and gives you a “gift” laser-targeted at ruining your life. Enter the Egg Cuber.
I didn’t bother properly cleaning up the edges on the image, because it’s hard to make Photoshop work on a laptop touchpad, and hell if I’m doing more than the bare minimum for this god-forsaken thing.
They weren’t wrong about the Jokerfication comment: the reason I don’t like kitchen gadgetry is that I’m a psycho. I have exactly one gadget that I use often, and it is: a big sharp knife. Not even a fancy one, just a Calphalon 10” chef’s knife from a set I bought years ago before throwing away all the other parts because I never used them. I do hone it and keep it sharpened, and it gets the job done with an almost callous disregard for what the particular job might be. It works because the dirty little secret of the culinary world is that 90% of cooking consists of breaking food down into smaller chunks and then putting heat under them. I’d use that damn knife to make smoothies, if only I could figure out a way to keep liquids in place on a cutting board.
Here are some other single-function kitchen gadgets I don’t use: measuring cups. All they do is measure what a tablespoon is. You know what else can do that, within my extremely wide margin of acceptable error? Using your eyeballs. The Egg Cuber also does only one thing. It malforms helpless eggs. In form, it’s a small plastic box with a screw to tighten The Egg Chamber, but in function, it turns a normal, pure, egg into a hateful perversion of everything good in the world.
Just to level-set here, part of the mise en place for this piece of shit, before anything gets cubed at all, is hard-boiling an egg, and I already don’t like hard-boiled eggs. It’s the smell, mostly. I will eat far too much of almost any other type of egg – scrambled, poached, beaten with milk and sugar into a rich creamy custard, fried – but I don’t get down with hard-boiled eggs and their derivatives. I’m thinking here of deviled eggs, which have amazingly powerful goth branding but otherwise can’t be recommended.
The Cube Egg, to reiterate, requires hard-boiling (strike 1: waste of egg) and peeling (strike 2: this is a pain in the ass) an egg, before dropping it into the crushing matrix and letting it cool and harden into its newly disquieting form (strike 3: Cronenberg). Unless you buy like ten of the damnable things you’re stuck cubing one egg at a time, and it has to be done while the eggs are still warm, at least to the degree that this has to be done at all. Making a platter of Deviled Cube Eggs, something I am absolutely going to get cyber-bullied into doing before the year is out, is going to take me several hours of boiling, peeling, cubing, and cooling each individual egg, one at a time. Note that I’m still going to do it, but I will be complaining the entire time.
This is deranged. I hate this product, for what it does and the decadence of a poisonous culture that it represents. Maybe with a jumbo egg it’d work better, but with a regular egg it doesn’t even fill the whole thing. No food gets smushed into the corners, so you can’t even stack them into a little egg fort because they aren’t square. It adds nothing to the presentation of Egg other than a sense of creeping unease. God only knows what kind of low labor standards or toxic materials went into creating it.
This is just a complicated way to waste food. I’d rather you skip the middleman, save some plastic, and just throw eggs directly at my walls.
Thanks for sticking around, and making this column what it is: a little-read corner of this website that exists solely for me to waste your time and get yelled at. If you have questions or comments, let us know at contact@goonhammer.com, or right here in the comments. Meatwatch is here to help.
