Let’s Eat Dumps For Dinner: I Finally Cooked From that Dump Dinners Cookbook

I hope all of you clowns had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!

I went on a romantic date with your mother. We ate hot dogs, crammed a few up our asses, then talked about food blogs for two hours straight while practicing advanced Greco-Roman wrestling moves on each other. I ended up with a sprained penis, but in the end, it was worth it. I learned that your mother is fantastic at this one move called “The Fishhook.”

Turns out I’m good at wrestling too. Wrestling with my inner demons. Who won’t ever go away. All I see is the devastation of a world ravaged by darkness, death, and mortality. Life is hopeless.

Hilarious.

Anyway, just about a year ago, I undertook a harrowing cookbook journey deep into unknown territory, when I cooked a cake called The Dump Cake Dump Cake, inspired by a book called Dump Cakes.

Yes, Dump Cakes is a real book.

I still get at least one tweet, text, or Facebook link about these books every week. Despite their name, dump cakes do not involve taking a dump into a cake pan then baking it to perfection. In fact, there is no poo involved, which is quite a disappointment. In fact, there aren’t any cookbooks that involve cooking with poo.

Oh, shit. 

There is, in fact, already a cookbook called Cooking With Poo. Well, there goes my million dollar idea.

Anyway, a dump cake is just a cake where you just dump a bunch of ingredients together (usually involving a cake mix), and turn it into a lazy kind of cake.

My dump cake was full of ingredients that make your poo interesting, including corn, peanuts, and beets. It tasted horrible, but that’s what you get for putting corn, peanuts, and beets into a cake (yes, that is a wooden penis on the right side of the picture).

But I left that post with a cliffhanger. You see, I also own the book Dump Dinners. And I threatened to cook from it someday.

Someday is now, bitches.

As I was sitting on the toilet taking a dump, I said to myself, “Dannis Ree, you are currently taking a dump. You will not be eating that for dinner. You own a book called Dump Dinners. Maybe you can eat dumps for dinner and tell the two people who read your website all about it.”

I think I’m falling in love with Cathy Mitchell.

I picked two of the most horrendous-looking recipes in the book, Lasagna Soup, and something actually called Doritos Cheesy Chicken.

Almost all the recipes in Dump Dinners are very simple, mainly containing canned, dry, or frozen ingredients. In theory, cooking like this is very easy, and it saves a lot of prep time. But the tradeoff is that you’re eating something called Doritos Cheesy Chicken, which is essentially like eating your own dignity.

I started with the more or less straightforward-sounding Lasagna Soup.

It contains chopped onions (the only fresh vegetable), Italian sausage, Italian dressing seasoning, crushed tomatoes, chicken stock, lasagna noodles, and evaporated milk, along with Parmesan cheese for garnish. That’s it. I suppose that’s almost lasagna, though I don’t remember the last time I made lasagna with an Italian salad dressing seasoning packet.

You’re supposed to start by browning the sausage while cooking the onions at the same time.

Your mother is an expert at browning my sausage. This is a thinly veiled metaphor for buttsex. We are dealing with dump dinners today so you cannot get angry at me for saying vulgar things about poo and sex.

Once the sausage is done cooking, sprinkle the Italian dressing packet into the mixture and listen to light Christian rock, because I imagine that’s what people do when they are cooking dump dinners.

My mother makes this Italian dressing marinated shrimp for family get-togethers sometimes. It’s actually very good. She uses seasoning packets to make it, so I cannot be a dickhole about this particular ingredient.

Once the Italian seasoning has been stirred in, just dump the chicken broth in along with the crushed tomatoes, and bring the whole thing to a boil.

Dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dump dinner.

I’ve never seen a pasta soup recipe call for broken up lasagna pasta pieces, but we’re not really going for molecular gastronomy today.

I learned that lasagna pasta pieces fly all over the place when they are busted up manually. A piece of it ended up in your mother’s pubic hair, but it may have been there to begin with. She should really think about wearing a codpiece when she’s in the kitchen.

After the noodles soften, you’re supposed to add in canned evaporated milk, which is kind of a curious ingredient for soup, but it keeps longer than refrigerated whipping cream, so it all fits into Dump Dinner territory.

The red soup will turn into a shade of reddish-pink (the photo doesn’t do it much justice), and it’s ready to coat the inside of your mouth now.

Does it pass the Dannis Ree taste test?

Interestingly enough, it totally does. It’s really a glorified version of Chef Boyardee, and not in a bad way. The Italian sausage helps the soup taste like lasagna, and the tomato-evaporated milk base is actually pretty pleasant. The thick noodles stand up to cooking in the soup and stay nice and chewy for a long time. It’s calorie-dense and satisfying for a winter’s day. And the longer it sits, the more the starch thickens the soup, turning it into more of a sauce than soup — just like the ol’ Boyardee.

Is it an accurate depiction of lasagna? No. Is it something I am happy eating? Yes.

I ate eight different types of cat food for dinner once, so you’re probably asking the wrong person for his opinion.

The next dish I tackled was the Doritos Cheesy Chicken.

My life has taken some interesting and stupid turns, but this is new culinary territory for me. There’s no actual fresh food in this one; it includes canned chicken (you read that correctly), sour cream, condensed cream of chicken soup, canned tomatoes or salsa, canned corn, shredded cheese, and…Nacho Cheese Doritos.

Man, I love Nacho Cheese Doritos, but I’m kind of a purist. I generally try to avoid putting them into an atrocity resembling a casserole. Some of you will disagree, but I generally despise casseroles. When you think about it, casseroles are pretty much dump dinners already.

Canned chicken is a very interesting ingredient.

By interesting, I mean horrible. Canned chicken has the same smell as canned tuna — which is fine, if it’s canned tuna, but it’s fucking chicken. It does not smell like chicken. It has the same texture of canned tuna too. What’s strange is that I am obsessed with eating gas station chicken salad sandwiches, and eating a piece of canned chicken is very difficult for me. I tried six pieces and I got angry. Chicken does not usually incite rage deep within my heart, but good job, generic grocery store brand canned chicken, you did it.

The rest of the ingredients are fairly innocuous, except for the condensed cream of chicken soup.

Condensed cream of chicken soup has a sulfuric smell to it, and I don’t mean sulfuric in a farty way, I mean, like Yellowstone springs sulfuric. Boxed chicken broth also has a sulfuric smell to it, but this is pretty intense. Canned cream of chicken soup is an ingredient in many casseroles and quick dinners, but you guys must not have noses or something.

Spread the vomit onto the bed of Doritos and just stare at it for 15 minutes.

Remember not to breathe. The sulfur smell from the canned chicken and the condensed soup may actually overwhelm you. Champions like me persevere, but I understand if you wish to sit this one out. Go learn how to knit something. Play jai alai. Watch the debates. Start a mommy blog.

Do not become me.

Dump the rest of the Doritos onto the top, and take an actual dump on the casserole.

I omitted the feces, then I baked it for 25 minutes at 350°F.

Once the whole thing is heated through, sprinkle more cheap shredded cheese all over the top and bake that until it is melted.

The entire thing should smell like a burning fart, and you will probably not want to eat it. Look deeply inside your heart. Dump Dinners is a food blog gang initiation rite. If you complete this rite, you will fail. If you do not complete this rite, you will also fail.

As Paul Newman says in Road to Perdition, “There is no guarantee. None of us food bloggers will see heaven.”

Holy fuck.

Do not make Doritos Cheesy Chicken. The canned tomato salsa adds a tinny acridity to the mix, the farty smell translates into an actual burned farty taste with sulfur, and the Doritos, which should be your main source of joy, become stale from being in the oven. Eat Doritos like a normal person, late at night, drunk on the couch, watching bad television, while your significant other is sleeping. Or enjoy it as a Doritos Locos Taco from Taco Bell, the greatest restaurant on the face of this planet (eat my ass, Noma). Avoid canned chicken in your lifetime if you can.

Cathy Mitchell, I wish I knew how to quit you.

No matter what, Cathy, you’re still my cowboy. You’re my Brokeback Mountain. That puffy dyed hair that looks like a microphone, that Home Shopping Network grin, will always live deep inside my heart.

But your Doritos Cheesy Chicken is one of the worst things to come out of my kitchen. And you all have seen the war crimes that have come out of my kitchen.