The Kids Ate their Oreos Like Barbarians, in Great Smacking Bites, No Disassembly

Today in feature writing we prepped for the restaurant review by bringing in food to sniff, caress, taste and then practice upon, finding verbal equivalents for our sensory experiences. Kids brought sushi, raspberries, jelly beans, sour sticks(?), cheese, Oreos, chocolate kisses, donut holes and (bless Matt's heart) homemade salsa.

We don't cook, one kid said. We don't have kitchens.

My lady wife contributed a champagne cake, which was somewhat slumped to the side and prone to collapse because it was a first effort and -- contrary to her good judgment -- she followed the recipe exactly, the insane proportions of which doomed the presentation if not the taste.

Explicit aim was to loosen the youth up, to encourage wordplay and to show off my own lightning wit. (As it turned out, the sky of my mind was cloudless. So it goes.)

Kids did good. Kids made me smile a lot. The witticism that I decided to steal present to a wider audience was the comment -- okay, John Usher said it -- that the tastiness of Jarlsberg cheese, falling as it does just short of bland, made it a "gateway cheese."

One second you're munching like a mouse, next second someone is saying, "Do the blue, man, do the blue."