Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Campfire Burgers And The Downfall of Wisconsin

Over the holiday weekend, I had the opportunity to get up to the castle for a couple of days.

In an extremely rare concurrence of events, I actually had a couple of hours of free time and few extra dollars, so I decided to drive up to Nueske's.  It had been a couple of years since I had been there, so I had a hankering for a couple of things in particular.  One was I was hoping that they had their off-cut smoked ham steaks on sale (it goes great with mac and cheese).

I was also hoping to get a few packs of their campfire burgers.  Their campfire burgers was basically just lean ground beef with their world famous smoked bacon ground into the meat.  Every bite was filled with bacony goodness.  Just the awesomeness of the thought should set the gentle reader's mouth a-watering, even the vegans.
An inferior bacon cheeseburger

If one grilled them and then topped them with onions (fried or raw), real Sconnie cheddar cheese and some Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce, well, friend, that was pretty darn close to heaven.

When I got to Nueske's store, the first place I went to was the freezer chest where they kept the campfire burgers.  But there was none there.  I looked in the other freezers, but none were to be found in any of them.

I asked a clerk if they had any in the back.  She told me that they don't make them anymore.*  As I felt my heart breaking, she told me that they hadn't made them for more than two years.  She said that they decided to stop making them because people kept thinking that the entire burger was smoked, not just the bacon, and so were not cooking them properly.

I looked at her in disbelief.  How can one not know how to cook a burger?  How can one not know that you need to cook a burger?

After I made my purchases, I sat in the car for a few minutes thinking about the loss of campfire burgers.  I realize that there are the occasional story about how foolish people can be.  Stories like a person that didn't realize hot coffee is hot or other similar nonsense.  But to have a whole group of people to show that level of inanity?

Then I remembered that the clerk said that they stopped making them more than two years ago.  Something else happened about that same time when Wisconsinites were overcome with mass idiocy and voted against their own best interests, making Scott Walker governor and giving ALEC the Republicans majorities in both houses.

I don't know what happened back then.  Maybe we were invaded by aliens that zapped the state with stupidity rays, terrorists put something in the water, we just got lazy and too comfortable in our progressiveness.

Whatever the reason, we need to get things in check real soon and start turning things around, or we won't have any nice things left by the time we do.

*The good news is that I have the recipe for the campfire burgers.  Where there is a will, there is a way.  It also goes to show that one should never give up.

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