Mad Cooking Skillz: It looks like parasites!

I has 'em.

Granted, the last three things I made didn't really turn out, as such. But this one is awesome, I promise! And healthy, which is a huge step out of the ordinary for me. It's just wrong, though, that Whole Foods has cheaper orzo and kalamata olives than the local generic grocery store. On one level it makes sense: Orzo = specialty item, Whole Foods = specialty store, therefore Whole Foods = better orzo selection. But the idea of anything being cheaper there is an alien concept.

I needed the orzo to make salad for the celebratory end-o-finals potluck my class is holding. We have a competition for pathology/parasitology themed foods, and orzo...I mean, have you seen it? It looks almost exactly like little lucilia bots, without the hint of ridges.

I wanted kalamata olives to simulate cuterebra, although really I just wanted kalamata olives because they are tasty. And then I added so much spinach and tomato that it doesn't really look frighteningly parasitic at all. But my main goal is to bring something that people will eat, which never seems to happen when I bring cookies. Even the cross-section-of-the-pons cookies I brought last year completely failed to disappear, and they were delicious in addition to being neuroanatomically correct. Well, correct-ish. It's hard to prevent refrigerator cookies from getting a little lopsided. Those would have been neat to do this year--I could have added red hots and called it nigropallidal encephalomalacia.