Tag Archives: salad dressing

MacGyver Snacks at the Office

Posted by: Josh

I’m fairly sure that I’m breaking the rules with this one, (i.e., no one cares what you had for lunch), but for some reason I feel compelled to tell everyone about the snack I had yesterday.

I try to bring my lunch to work as much as possible, cause we’re poor and all, and usually it’s got a snack in there too, for that lonely stretch of time between getting to work and having lunch, when I can feel the tumbleweeds blowing through my stomach.

But because of the Passover preparation Wednesday we neglected pretty much every daily chore, including the one where I make my lunch at night, and because it is physically impossible for me to wake up before the absolute last minute, I of course didn’t make lunch in the morning either.

So I’m at work and now it’s around 10:30am and it slowly dawns on me that I’m STARVING and it’s too early to go buy lunch and there’s nothing leftover in the mini-fridge and there is no free junk food hanging around and I’m getting a little desperate, so desperate indeed that I’m scouring my desk and really considering doing SOMETHING with the mustard and salt packets when I run across one solitary piece of whole wheat bread.

Okay, but why do I have a single piece of whole wheat bread in my desk? Well, generally, lunch is a sandwich of some variety (actually there are really only two varieties: egg salad and tuna, and they gross me out at this point, god someone help me eat something different PLEASE HELP ME). So I tend to keep a small store of bread in my desk and then I just bring the innards each day. Well, now that I’m eating the healthy bread (since we are feeding it to Eleanor), I find that I don’t actually want to eat more than half a sandwich worth of this thick, hearty stuff. Seriously, half a sandwich of it and I’m done, I can’t imagine eating more of it. So eating a slice at a time all week left me with this, the last hope.

But this bread is like stuffing a sweater in your mouth. Its not an appealing prospect as a stand-alone. So I went to the office mini-fridge, real casual like, to see if I could find anything that would send the bread down right.

Immediately my MacGyver-like instincts for cobbling random, ordinary food items together into something explosive (edible) flared.

Expired mixed-berry yogurt? No, not mine (and expired).

Lonely stick of string cheese? Again, not mine (though tempting).

Salad dressing? Salad dressing. Still not mine (nothing was of course or I wouldn’t have had a problem in the first place), but who would miss a little dressing? I lit upon the twelve or so bottles crowding the bottom of the fridge.

Each was older and emptier than the last, some with no more than a drizzle left in them, leaving me to wonder, who would put such a thing back in the fridge? Who ate exactly-less-than a bottle of salad dressing, and then just stopped? But I didn’t have time to consider writing passive-aggressive notes. I needed something large enough that nobody would miss, and there it was: Ralph’s brand “Lite Asian Dressing”.

A little in a bowl, and voila, bread goes down nice. MacGruber would’ve been proud.

Okay, so it was a pathetic snack as snacks go, but listen to this: I wasn’t hungry anymore.

I win.