These things are wondrous. First off, they allow me to drink chai tea without having to pay $2-$3 a pop from a shop. Second, they already include all the things that would otherwise cause making it tasty to be super-complicated for me. I.E. the cream and sugar is included. This allows me to make boba tea smoothies from these things super easy as well. I struggled with the proportions for making taro tea not too long ago, lacking the sucrose and the non-dairy creamer, resorting to dumping in vast amounts of sugar and milk (no non-dairy for me, thank you!) in a haphazard fashion to get my desperately craved taro bubble tea smoothie. It eventually worked, at least, but I feared having to begin the process anew with the chai tea. No need, though. I just dumped in a packet (or two packets, for those of us who like ginormous smoothies) plus some hot water to dissolve, and blended it up. Once that was done, I added in a respectable amount of ice, wherein ‘respectable’ means enough to make it slushy but not so much as to dilute it, so around 4-5 cubes.

The result? So freaking good! Totally worth the almost 400 calories!

Here’s now it’s done now: 24 hours before the store opens (at 5:30am or thereabouts), if there are more then 100 people present, a raffle is held, and the winners get to sit around for the next 24 hours waiting in line. And by ‘in line’ I mean that you get a space assigned in the parking lot, where you set up a tent or chair or whatever else you brought with to be comfortable and out of the elements. Aside from bathroom breaks and grand opening events (like games and such), you’ve gotta keep your place in line, or you shall lose it and person #101 that shows up shall be a very happy person indeed. In any case, there was an opening in Fort Collins, CO, and Drew and I, being unemployed/underemployed, decided that sitting outside for 24 hours to get free chicken would be a sweet deal. It calculates out to being a bit more then $12 an hour which, while isn’t exactly fabulous, sure beats $0 an hour. Plus, Chick-fil-a is delicious and I appreciate having 52 excuses to eat it.

I had read an article online anticipating there being as many as 300-400 people there when the raffle would be held, so Drew and I got up at the bright and early hour of 3:20 am to drive an hour north in what turned out to be snowy weather. We brought along a tent plus sleeping bags and blankets, to help combat the weather. Now, at the time I thought we were going to get about 6 inches of snow. At some point or another that amount pretty much tripled. It probably happened around the point that we realized our tent was designed for summer camping, and that it was indeed possible for it to snow *inside* a tent that was ventilated like ours was, and that I simply could not sleep with cold feet, and that it was pretty much impossible to make my feet anything but cold. It was super fun.

Here’s Drew, doing something or another to our tent (Entering? Leaving? Battening the hatches, perhaps?):

To be quite honest, the first 12 hours were pretty miserable. I got approximately 20 minutes of sleep the night before, and thus spent most of 6:00 am to 6:00 pm attempting to catch up, and failing. There are a few highlights of that first 12 hours, though. For one, I got interviewed by someone from Denver’s Channel 4 News. Oh wait, this wasn’t a highlight at all, See, I think I was so lucky as to be interviewed by a morning show guy. He had this weird exaggerated morning show attitude, and seemed to view everything going on, and everything I said, with a ‘this is nutty!’ air. I got very little response from what I felt were reasonable answers. Or rather, what I realized several hours after the fact were reasonable answers. At the time I just assumed my IQ had disappeared. But no, as other reporters showed up and I got to eavesdrop on other interviews later (apparently camping out in a blizzard for chicken is newsworthy around here), I heard answers rather similar to mine repeated, and the reporters actually engaging the other people in conversation. I think the morning show guy targeted me because I was wearing a silly hat (a mudkip hat, to be specific). Silly hat got removed after that, for I feared the wrath of more reporters.

Around noon, we struggled out of the tent for free sandwiches and a line count. Drew and I were #7 and #8, respectively. We were #8 and #9 until some poor woman who came with just a backpack and a chair realized what she was about to get herself into, and got out of there before she froze. At 6:00 pm, it was dinnertime, and we got to enjoy the benefits of a full menu (I got a chargrilled wrap, fries, Dr. Pepper, and a brownie, if anyone cares). Even better, we got to enjoy the benefits of sitting inside a warm building. Someone in the upper levels of CFA was there from North Carolina, and he gave a talk about the company’s history and answered questions and such, and we also got a tour of the building. It was pretty interesting. For one thing, the back was significantly more organized then the McDonalds I was once employed in. They have great big bags of oreo pieces for their cookies and cream milkshakes, and I seriously wanted to grab one of said bags and bury my face in it. No frozen precooked meat either: they have chicken on hand and bread it and pressure cook it there.

Realizing the potential for frozen people, they brought in three large gas heaters, which did wonders at providing some decent warmth. Here’s a before picture to give you an idea of the snow at that point:

And, the after picture with the fire ablazing. This baby was affectionately dubbed the “fire umbrella”:

So the rest of the evening was spent hanging out in front of said fire umbrella, combined with many strategic bathroom breaks as well as some Chick-fil-a provided hot chocolate, complete with marshmallows, mint chips, whipped cream, and bonus cookies. Rumor has it that these openings have all sorts of games, along with a DJ, but due to that whole “blizzard” thing, the games were minimal and no DJ for us. Rumor also has it that they also do ice cream parties, but they made a rather wise decision to replace that with hot chocolate.

And, in contrast to the first 12 hours, Wednesday evening was really enjoyable. Free meal plus heat definitely helped. I also met a lot of really interesting and fun people, and that specifically makes me really want to do this again (well, that plus the chicken, I suppose). See, it takes a certain sort of person to want to hang out in a blizzard for free chicken, and I guess it’s pretty rare for us to come in contact with each other in day to day life.

So Drew and I had been in the habit of clearing off our tent of snow when we entered and exited it, but others not so much. Someone even commented that it looked like we were at base camp for a major hike. Somewhere under these mounds of snow, there are tents:

Anyhow, we crashed around 1 or so. Or rather, Drew crashed, and much to my and his amazement slept pretty soundly. I, however, tossed and turned and was generally pretty miserable. A smarter me would have accepted defeat and hung out at the heaters all night, but no, I was convinced I could sleep. I may have even gotten 30 minutes or so, who knows? So we got up at 5, packed all of our stuff up and dumped in the car (which, incidentally, was extremely hard to find as it was concealed in 1.5 feet or so of snow). We got our gloriously free coupons, along with little stuffed cows and a commemorative t-shirt for the event. We drove home, very slowly, in awful conditions where the sky was about as white as the ground. Or more specifically, Drew drove home while I muttered in a sleep-deprived and incoherent manner. Lucky we were headed south to Denver, as the interstate was shut down north of Fort Collins up to the Wyoming border due to snow.

Anyhow, it was fun. Or rather, several parts of it were fun, and the rest I can choose to block out. If nothing else, memories of the misery will make the chicken taste oh so much better.

Incidentally, if you’d like to see more pictures I took of this exciting event, feel free to check them out on facebook!

So I started first with the dough, following the recipe until I got all the ingredients in, whereupon it was not so much dough as a powdery glob of flour with a few moist spots attached. Now, if I was super hardcore with dough-making, I would have quashed that dough good with a fork until it was forked into submission and appropriately dough-like. However, I am a pansy (and a lazy one at that), and opted for the easy way out, involving adding water and squishing it around with my fingers until the dough was actually doughy.

Next came the filling. I opted for a potato filling, and decided to look at the ingredients list, then look at another ingredients list from some other recipe, and improvise. So I boiled five potatoes, all chopped up, then dumped in some chopped onion and parsley, along with salt and pepper. After failing to mash all of these together with a large fork, I then added in butter and milk until everything finally decided to get appropriately squishy. Then I added an impulse egg for good measure. I had the original thought of “hey, I can totally make these healthy and leave out the oil/butter/etc”, but that just wasn’t happening. I globbed butter onto those potatoes like crazy, and I even lubed up the dough with some vegetable oil for good measure.

Anyhow, once the filling was done, I rolled out the dough and plopped some filling in. I made the first couple too small and fat, but the rest were larger after I realized that the dough was super enthusiastic about being stretched really far over a big pile of fatty potato. Before baking them, I rubbed some egg on the tops of the knishes for purposes of shininess.

I managed to keep those two fish in the background from plowing through these babies after they came out of the oven. They tasted…pretty good. Now, I grew up with the idea that potatoes desperately needed to be paired with something else to be edible, be it ketchup, gravy, or butter, so I found that I just wasn’t completely satisfied with these guys unless I had something to dip them in. So I zapped some butter in the microwave and dumped some garlic powder on top, and dipped away. It was magical. I even have the tighter waistline to prove how magical it was.

Here is a dynamic and moving closeup of a knish in action!

Turned out I had more dough then filling left, so I got to improvise with the last three knishes. I filled one with Muenster cheese, and while the cheese did melt all over the place, the knish was delish. As was the melted cheese that ran all over the place, for that matter. The second one I filled with chocolate chips, which chose to not really melt as well as they could. I mean, it was still good and all, being filled with chocolate. However, a smarter me might have chosen to, say, mix in some sugar and cream cheese, for some chocolate cheesecake knish action. The final chunk of dough got rolled into a tube, with some butter, cinnamon, and sugar on the inside. Tasty, but a tad too crispy for my taste.

Look, dessert knishes!

Now here’s a secret: I’ve never had a knish before in my life. As a result, I had no idea if the final product of the knish-making was in any way authentic, or folded correctly, or tasted anywhere close to what knishes are supposed to taste like. They tasted pretty darn good though, and I suppose that’s the important part. As to whether I’ll make this exact recipe again? Not sure. See, I have little experience making dough, and what little experience I have has only taught me that making dough is a ginormous pain in the unmentionable places. However, upon locating some cheap and premade dough (from the Cheap And Premade Dough Store, perhaps), I look forward to stuffing many more items into said dough, as there are few things more delicious in this world then items baked inside dough.

I’m kinda serious about the “logical” part, actually. Below the pictures and descriptions, there is a handy dandy little chart that lays out in a very concise fashion the ingredients, what order they go in, and what is done with them. Takes up very little space and does away with all the pesky text and repetition that a traditional recipe has.

And speaking of logic, this pie is really burbley when it comes out of the oven! Bubbly *and* burbley, to be precise! So much so, that I just had to film it. Check it out!

Anyhow, the pie definitely succeeded in that whole “as many calories in as small of space as possible” thing. It was so rich and overwhelming, I had a hard time eating an entire slice of it! It was really tasty though. If I had actually had any vanilla ice cream on me (or rather, in the fridge), it would have complemented the pie fabulously.

Anyhow, their stuffed crust pizza is magical, whereupon they lay out the dough, dump on sauce and toppings, then press “repeat”. This would be the chicken and bacon variety of the stuffed crust pizza:

Incidentally, 1/12 of one of these babies would be 440 calories, bringing the entire pizza to 5280 calories total. Meaning one could live off of a single chicken bacon stuffed crust pizza for about 2.5 days or so. This pizza also contains 440% of your daily recommended sodium intake, along with 420% of your saturated fat for the day (score!!). Then again, if you’re actually worried about any of these numbers, I recommend skipping the pizza and hitting the Salads R Us next door or something.

The next time I get one of these pizzas, I’m going to have to get the traditional red sauce rather then their signature “creamy garlic” sauce. Now, I know that some people are super into these white sauces, but I’m a bit ambivalent. It’s not that I dislike a white sauce on a pizza, it’s just not my ideal pizza situation. You see, I feel about white sauce pizza the same way I feel about North Carolina vinegar-based barbecue – they’re both pretty good, as long as you add some red sauce.

Albeit, with this much cheese, I can be distracted from the lack of proper sauce:

Incidentally, I checked Google Maps, and there are approximately 7578347394875 Papa Murphys locations in the US. So much for this being a local chain, eh? They’re pretty much everywhere but the East Coast. There’s one in Charlottesville, VA, and one in Georgia, and that’s it. I imagine they’ll start sprouting up along the Atlantic soon enough though, in a giant wave of tasty. Now, all I need to do is start rooting for the much beloved Ledo Pizza to move it’s way out west, and then I can die happy, drowning in glorious heaps of cheese.