HOLY Broccamole, Batman! This fat-free fad is getting just a little bit out of control. OK, a lot out of control. And the proof is in the broccamole. How are things
in Broccamole?That's right, a disgusting conglomeration of mashed-up broccoli and fake mayo is being billed as a "healthy dip or topping spread" by its manufacturer.
These days, with everyone trying to avoid fat, anything that doesn't contain fat is being sold as healthy. But it's not. Hell, some of it isn't even food. And broccamole is a good example of that.
I don't know who dreamed up broccamole, but he or she is a sick, sick little puppy. First of all, no one loves broccoli. Even people who eat it only kind of like it. Sure, you get show-offs who will claim to love it, but they really don't. They are just trying to be interesting.
Broccoli, at best, is a side dish. It is never the focus of dinner attention. And even as a side dish it's usually doused with a heavy cream sauce that's intended to make the diner forget he's eating some tough, stubby little Fred Flintstone-type of plant that smells like pond algae, tastes like lawn hose and has the texture of ground-up pencil erasers.
To make broccamole, they grind up broccoli with some garlic, tomatoes and peppers and then they add - now avert your eyes if you have a sensitive stomach - fat-free mayonnaise.
A S leader of the Worldwide I Hate Mayonnaise Club, my aversion to the dreaded white gunk is well documented. And some have asked if I have the same hatred of fake mayo. No, it is not the same. It is worse. Why would anyone want to duplicate mayo, the scourge of the food world, in any manner?
God knows what goes into fake mayonnaise. Whatever they are mixing together to come up with the greasy, slimy texture of mayonnaise with none of the fat or calories cannot be anything that occurs in the natural world. Where are the tests on laboratory rats that show that fake mayo does not result in the growth of extra appendages, sudden blindness or propensity to worship small shiny pebbles? There are none. Because THE RATS DIED! And the fake mayo industry is covering it up. (My lawyer says maybe I've gone a bit too far here. So, let me just say that I have no proof that fake mayo kills laboratory rats. I leave it to your imagination to figure out what fake mayo would do to God's small, furry creatures.)
SO anyway, you blend broccoli and fake mayo together to produce a "creamy, healthful dip," according to the makers. I don't think so.
What is scary is that there are people somewhere inventing gunk like this. What are they working on now? Broccalsa? (A fiesta of flavors combining broccoli, tomatoes, chiles, cactus pulp and citrus peel. Ole!) Or maybe they are whipping up Broccaloaf. (Lean ground beef combined with broccoli chunks and a pack of onion soup mix to make a tasty loaf topped with a dab of fake mayo and drizzled with 30-weight oil.) Or maybe Brocc-o-bobs. (Shish kabobs made with pieces of broccoli, carpet remnants, cherry tomatoes, tofu chunks and hamster flanks.)
It's just too awful to ponder. If this is what people who want to avoid fat will have to face when they go shopping or out to dinner, perhaps we should rethink this no-fat thing altogether. Bring back the old days when the only battles we fought were to keep real mayonnaise off our burgers. When we could see the enemy plainly, and it was liver. Where we saw dips like guacamole only once a year (on Cinco de Mayo) and we knew at least that the only weird thing in there was avocado, which isn't bad as far as large tree seeds go but not something we'd want to eat a lot of.
Some things in the food world just don't go together and they are broccoli and anything else.
