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Food for Thought: How to 'Aunt Pat' a hamburger

Nancy Leson
/
KNKX
A Dick's burger gets the Aunt Pat treatment

The buzzards circling over the restaurant gave me pause, but we went in anyway. I figured we were all in search of the same thing, namely dead meat, so I looked at them as a kind of endorsement. Like seeing a line of semis parked outside.

In a moment of hubris, I ordered a Wretched Excess burger. You know the kind: six inches high and packed with extras. A burger that if you tried to pick up and eat the usual way would dislocate your jaw.  "DeGroot," I told my wife. "I've gotta Aunt Pat this thing."

I had two Aunt Pats.  One, my favorite, was from Wisconsin and looked like Dennis the Menace's mother.  My other Aunt Pat was very much the old school European lady. I once watched in wild surmise as she daintily ate a hamburger with knife and fork. I rolled my eyes at the time, but the architectural burgers of today make a knife and fork the only tools of survival.

In this week's Food for Thought, Nancy Leson and I reminisce about the unusual eating strategies and idiosyncrasies, including our own we have observed and practiced. Please free to contribute your own.

"The world was my oyster but I used the wrong fork." – Oscar Wilde

Dick Stein joined KNKX in January 1992. He retired in 2020 after three decades on air. During his storied radio career, he hosted the morning jazz show, co-hosted and produced "Food for Thought" with Nancy Leson and wrote and directed the Jimmy Jazzoid live radio musical comedies and 100 episodes of Jazz Kitchen.