When I was a kid, once in a very great while, my dad would take my sister and me to McDonald's. My mother was not much of a fan of fast food and didn't particularly approve of these outings, but we loved them and always looked forward to them. I would always get Chicken McNuggets with a little container of honey for dipping. It was total nirvana for me. As I've gotten older, I've given up my McDonald's habit (except for the two cheeseburgers I ate two days in a row last spring. I don't know what came over me) but part of me still misses those juicy, greasy McNuggets.

However, thanks to the folks at YumSugar, I don't have to pine away any longer. On Monday, they linked to a post over at For the Love of Food in which they make homemade Chicken McNuggets (following the instructions from this video). I am totally enamored (and I'm not someone who fries things often). I do believe I see these in my future.

We're not talking about real rules like "No double dipping." No, I'm talking about everything else, like what dipping sauces go with what kinds of finger foods, if it's okay to "embellish" a dipping sauce with salt, pepper, or Tabasco, or whether you can dip in one sauce and re-dip in another to make a "combo" dip. Obviously, if you're eating your own plate of chicken fingers, you can do whatever the hell you want. If you're sharing an appetizer platter, what do you do?

I do everything. First of all, when the restaurant offers honey mustard with the chicken tenders because that's normal and accepted, I still like to ask for Ranch dressing and BBQ sauce. If I recall from my old Chicken Nuggets days, breaded, deep-fried chicken goes with: BBQ sauce, Sweet & Sour, and Honey Mustard. So the Ranch dressing is a little off.

Watching UCLA stomp all over LSU tonight, I noticed that there were quite a few commercials for McDonald's. Now I'm quite certain that these commercials run fairly often, but my eyes and brain have somehow become numb to them. However, tonight, I actually took notice because I tried to think about the last time I went to McDonald's. Furthermore, I started to think about some other interesting questions regarding America's McClownBurger: what is the average length of time since someone has eaten at McDonald's? Would it be safe to say that, across the population, on average, it's been 24 hours?

I thought about it because I proudly thought to myself, "It has been a LONG time since I've eaten at McDonald's." In fact, I don't even remember the last time I let a Chicken McNugget pass my lips. Then I realized I was totally wrong. Just a few months ago, I was forced to stop at a McDonald's in the wee hours of the morning for coffee, long before any of the other places likes Peet's or Coffee Bean in my area were open.

Scary. I've been to McDonald's as recently as four months ago. (My pit stop at the mega McDonald's in Chicago doesn't really count.)