I could have known; I chose not to know.

Ha! Just kidding!

(At least it seemed funny after a few pints of Rainier Ale.)

Their bold experiment is fraught with peril. For some reason that I fear involves an absence of lard, gringos just can’t cook Mexican food very well. It’s not a problem for me, since my laboratory is within walking distance of many excellent taquerias.

Last night, Drs. Wahlberg invited three dear friends and me to dinner at their lab to for a test chile relleño dinner. I decided to contribute to the experiment by bring the hors d’ouvres: a couple of chile relleño burritos from a local Mexican restaurant.

We all enjoyed burrito slices as an appetizer, although Marge was a bit uncomfortable with the audacity of my unscheduled experiment.

“The burritos were David’s idea,” she nervously repeated two or three times.

Fortunately, Drs. Wahlberg had clearly done excellent, rigorous research; their chile relleños were every bit as scrumptious as the Mission imports. Without lard, even.

I told her that she was missing out on the lucrative opportunities in the emerging meditainment field.

“What’s meditainment?” she asked.

“Are you serious?!” I replied. “Medication and entertainment, it’s all they’re talking about in LA. I can’t believe you’re not in on the action.”

I lied; I’d invented meditainment only a couple of minutes earlier. Scammers are surprisingly easy to scam.

Kolenikov dismissed one of his political rivals as “a stagnant pile of stale air wrapped in meat.” The west, of course, is run by politicians who are just the opposite: stale piles of meat air wrapped in stagnant air.

Invite guests for dinner at 19:00. At 18:30, put two diced onions and some olive oil in a large skillet over a high flame. Stand by the stove with a spatula in one hand, a glass of wine in the other, and an open bottle of wine in the other. (Although the three-handed approach seems counterintuitive in theory, it comes naturally in practice.) Drink wine, chat with guests, and pour some wine in the pan when the onions start to burn.

By 19:30, the studio will be permeated with the smell of onions, the guests will be salivating both because of the odor and because they expected to eat a half hour ago. By now, the onions are just a carbonized glob of brown vegetable matter, so throw them in the compost and start preparing the real dinner. By the time the guests finally get some food on their plate, they’ll be so famished that they’ll inhale anything you serve and declare it’s one of the finest meals they’ve ever had.

Try it. It works.