Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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I’ll Stop The World And Melt With You [Celebrating National S’mores Day At The Office]

Posted Aug 12, 2010 by Jeff Houck

Updated Aug 12, 2010 at 06:19 AM

When you write about food, you sometimes have to bring the mountain to mohammad. So when events like National Pancake Day happen, it is incumbent upon me to bring the party to my desk at work by making pancakes and bacon for co-workers.

Which explains the photo of my colleague Pete above.

Pete is a kind, gentle, soft-spoken man. Very easy to work with. A pleasure to consider a co-worker. Over the years, we have broken bread over conversations about football and NASCAR and offspring.

But you assemble the makings for some indoor s’mores (as I did on Monday on the file cabinets next to my desk) and hidden personality traits begin to emerge from people like Pete. Sometimes it’s an inner child. Sometimes it’s an inner pyro. For Pete, there was a death metal headbanger eager to emerge.

The results, I must say, were predictably spectacular.

Instead of a great tidal wave of humanity descending like locusts or sharks or overused metaphors on the foodstuffs, there was a much more casual partaking of the gooey treats.

I tried not to read anything into what each creation looked like. I avoided the temptation of turning s’mores into rorschach tests. But it was inevitable.

Luckily, they indicated no irreversable mental illness.

Other than my own, of course.

One bite seemed like a guy who sticks a toe into the water on the day everyone does the Polar Bear Plunge into the Arctic Ocean. Two bites was more of a swan dive.