I am a Fatty McFatterson

There is too much good food in San Francisco, and it is becoming a problem. I have plenty of food at home, and probably enough to not buy any more food until I leave. But the fresh fruit at the local Mexican grocery stores and all the taquerias, cafes, and bakeries have such delicious food that I pass by and have to go in a buy something. It is making me a huge porker. I'm really worried that I'm going to go to Tajikistan in a week and still be huge, and all the Tajiks will think I'm a fat lazy American.

Anyway, one of the banes of my existance is this place called The Jelly Donut. They sell donuts (if that wasn't clear). From the outside, and even the inside, the place looks like an average doughnut place that probably sells really crappy, dry donuts. I made the mistake of buying a doughnut one morning when I was in a hurry, and from then on it has been an obsession. I tell everyone I know about these donuts, and I think about them all the time. Every evening I plan on which type of doughnut I will buy the next day. Planning which doughnut to buy has actually turned out to be very strategic. I have to weigh my curiosity to try different doughnuts against my desire to eat what I already know is a fabulous doughnut.

My favorite doughnut is the old fashioned. I think this is a standard name for this type of doughnut, it looks like this:

I don't know how the owner manages to make these doughnuts so delicious, but this is the best doughnut I have ever devoured in my whole life. A million times better than Krispy Kreme. They are crisp on the outside, and moist and rich on the inside. But they don't taste heavy at all, in fact they taste incredibly light. The man who sells them every day, and who I think is the owner, is a goofy, friendly Filipino man. At least I think he's Filipino, he might be Cantonese, it's hard for me to tell. Here he is behind the doughnut counter:

Whenever anyone buys anything, he grabs a handful of doughnut holes and adds them to the bag for free. He gives away so many doughnut holes! Every day he gives me 4 or 5. And they are delicious too. I never thought a doughnut hole could be that delicious. They are soft and doughy, and have just the right amount of glaze. They also somehow taste moist and light at the same time. And they are irregularly shaped, so you can tell that he makes them from scratch.

My second favorite doughnut is the cruller, which looks like this.

The way he makes them, they are sweet and crispy on the outside, and the inside is ridiculously fluffy, eggy and moist.

One day I wanted to try a different doughnut place that gets a lot of hype, called Dynamo Donuts. I feel like I should play the song "Tempted" by Squeeze now, because this experience showed me how it is not worth it to be unfaithful. Dynamo Donuts is an indie donut shop that sells weird flavors. There is always a huge line in front of the store, and weird flavors can be fun sometimes, so I thought it might be good. But it was TERRIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!! I had a chocolate spice doughnut, and I should have known it was nasty because I read a yelp review before I went there saying the chocolate spice doughnut was not good, but I usually really like spices with chocolate so I tried it anyway. It ended up being a chocolate doughnut coated in sugary-spice. But the doughnut itself was super greasy, so much that if I squeezed it I could get liquid grease out of it. It stuck to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter and tasted like I just gulped olive oil. And the spice they used on the outside included barbeque spice!!! Bleh, it was incredibly nasty, I threw it out! And then a couple days later as I was taking the subway, I noticed a half-eaten dynamo chocolate spice doughnut on the floor. It must have been thrown down in disgust.

On a similar note, there is an indie ice cream place down my street called Humphrey Slocombe that also gets a lot of hype and long lines. They have crazy flavors like "peanut butter curry" and "balsamic caramel." One funny one is "secret breakfast," which has bourbon and cornflakes. I taste tested the "balsamic caramel" and another one that was "salt and pepper." Both were way too weird for my taste, so I got the ginger flavored ice cream, which was pretty good, although very strong. I don't think their ice cream tastes that great, but it's still fun to try.