Day One of our hiatus was a total success! We cleaned out our freezers. It had to be done. We’d stocked up at the beginning of the pandemic madness, had been cycling through the contents, but realized that some serious reorganization was needed. We are eating older, humbler fare (so as not to be wasteful) as we begin the process once again.

We’re at halftime here, folks. We hope that you are also getting prepared.

Serendipitously, I happened to stumble across this.

It’s a hamburger. It only costs $6000. Yes, I double-checked the number of zeros. Yes, that’s real gold dust encrusting the bun. I assume Bethel Church had a sale.

If you ever find yourself in the Netherlands, and find yourself in De Daltons Voorthuizen, and can read Dutch, and have a spare six grand, and can call ahead (0342-473291), you are in for a treat. Order yourself The Golden Boy.

The list of ingredients is… intimidating. I don’t mean to be crude, but I’m not sure our regular ceramic toilet would be able to handle such glorious input. I imagine the commodes in this restaurant are carved from ivory, have diamond handles, and sport absolute cutting-edge Japanese water closet technology. I imagine they mine Bitcoin when in use.

So what exactly are you getting for a couple month’s salary?

Ingredients (Translated from Dutch)

• Dom Perignon Champagne Bun
• Smoked Duck Egg Mayo
• Little Gems
• White Truffle
• Pickled Tiger Tomato in Japanese Matcha Tea
• Pickled Cucumber in Japanese Matcha Tea
• Wagyu Burger A5
• Best Cheddar Cheese
• Macallan Whiskey, Kop Luwak Coffee BBQ Sauce
• Joselito Bellota 100% Iberico Vintage Jamon
• Dom Perignon Batterd Onion Ring
• King Crab cooked in Puligny Monrachet
• Beluga Caviar
• Whiskey infused Smoke

Huh.

Ingredients don’t tell the entire story. The cooking process is vitally important. You or I could throw all that into a food processor, hit the ‘destroy’ button, toss it into the oven (at 400°), and end up with incredibly expensive burger-like goo. De Daltons Voorthuizen probably employs a chef or three who know their burger business.

Created, Not Cooked

The restaurant includes this helpful picture of the high-tech burger mastering process. The ingredients have been assembled, but they now have to infuse it with a mythical substance known as Moderna Serum v3.3. What’s that? Nobody knows. I understand, though. Trade secrets make the world a more mysterious and expensive place. How could you charge that much money if any peasant knew the real secret formula?

Now we know why they’ve shoved a knife through the entire burger, pinning it to the plate! Good thing, too, otherwise it’d crawl off and start a career as a Eurocrat, rather than being eaten like normal hamburgers.

The Alternative: A Humble Burger

We wanted to recreate this monstrosity using nothing but the humble ingredients found in our own kitchen. We can do better. We must. Can the world afford $6000 hamburgers? Maybe in a couple of years, but certainly not today.

The Humble Bun

We’re not encrusting our bun in gold dust. That sounds… insane. Like the opening line a dentist would use at an upscale party: “So, my patient bit into a gold-encrusted bun, and the dollar signs flowed like honey…”

We Ran Out of Lettuce

Photography was planned a day ahead but… things happened. We ate a healthy salad for dinner. By the time we could photograph our process, we realized we’d used all the lettuce. Except for a couple of pieces destined for the compost heap. That’s Romaine Lettuce though. The good stuff. We’ll only put fresh lettuce on our real Humble Burger. We promise.

The Meat is Everything

Let’s face it: Meat is the key ingredient. Key! Anyone can shape ground victuals into a wheel-like shape. We wanted to do something different. If we’re going to survive in the apocalypse as a species, we’re going to have to get creative. We happened to have an oldish bag of Trader Joe’s meatballs we needed to consume.

Those are made of ‘turkey’. For those reading a few years from now, the order of acceptable meat for consumption is: cow, fish, chicken, turkey, pigeon, rat, and bugs. You’ll have to backtrack from whatever they served you last night.

We tried various arrangements until we got something that seemed tasty.

The third one worked. Cut the meatballs in half. That means you can make two burgers out of five meatballs. That’s what we call savings!

Breaking the Bank

We had to add bacon. We know this breaks the bank, costing about $32 per slice, but come on… it’s bacon! It adds 10x the deliciousness. Each! Two slivers makes our Humble Burger taste like a regular $320 Red Robin sandwich.

The Shrimp Dilemma

The original Golden Boy contained King Crab meat. We wanted to add some seafood into our Humble Burger. Fortunately, we found a bag of shrimp.

Unfortunately, it had expired in September of 2016. The conversation that ensued was… interesting.

Codex: “Hey, we have a bag a shrimp!”

Q: “It expired in September of 2016.”

Bag of Shrimp: “We’re still good! We’re still good!”

Q: “Yeah, I don’t think so lads…”

Bag of Shrimp: “No, really! We want to know about heat! We’re 5 years old now. We won’t stab you with our freezer bushcraft spears. We certainly haven’t coated them with tetrodotoxin. We haven’t even coated our jabs with Astrazenca Occultic Formula v6.66!”

Codex: “Yeah, sorry boys. We are on a quest to introduce our Humble Burger to the world. An early death would hinder our plans.”

We expect headlines in the next couple of weeks about a District 9-like outbreak of spear-wielding killer shrimp at a Waste Management landfill in Washington State, near Seattle. We aren’t worried. The rest of America will simply say, “Seattle. It figures.” and everyone will laugh.

Except for the shrimp, who are really, really dangerous.

We had to go for these, instead.

Canned meat never goes bad.

The Colby-Cheddar Game Changer

We needed to add cheese, and frankly this is the weakest point for our competition. “Best Cheddar Cheese”? C’mon. That could be anything.

Colby-Cheddar is like two cheese in one. It halves the cost and doubles the pretentiousness. It’s coded language for all of us everyday folk because we know it’s both delicious and affordable.

Spices. Even More Important than Meat.

Let’s face it: Spices are pivotal for making anything edible. Ever tried to eat cat food? Dog food? Subway mystery meats? They go down much, MUCH more easily with the right spice. If you plan ahead, they come back up even smoother. It turned out we had a variety of substances to choose from.

In the end, it was simply pragmatic.

It had the oldest expiration date.

The Final Form

Our Humble Burger was beginning to take its final shape. We carefully placed the top bun on our creation. It was missing something. The original Golden Boy was coated in gold dust. We needed something practical. Something delicious. Something that would show up on camera so we could bring you our entertaining tale in visual form.

We found some candidate spices.

In the end, there was really no choice at all. The chili powder was the only spice that could be seen through the lens.

Capitalism, Ho!

Look, we can’t let De Daltons Voorthuizen go unchallenged. Our overlords are the hardest-working oligarchs in history. They deserve a choice. A pure Capitalist choice. In three weeks, we’re backing up our food truck and taking our Humble Burger to Jackson Hole, where we’ll go head-to-head with a ridiculously overpriced $6000 hamburger. We’re going to charge the cut-rate price of $3500. Maybe $4500, depending on the price of gas.

—————— The Spork Speaks ———— tempestinateardrop.com————