Hello, and welcome to another rousing round of Saturday Steals, where what you get is what you see and what you see is cheap or free!

To participate, simply:

1) Steal a steal.

2) Write a post about it on your blog, mentioning that you’re participating in Saturday Steals (you can steal the above image if you so desire), and

3) Add the link to said post to the list at the bottom of this post.

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Have you ever met that woman who is obsessed with figuring out secret restaurant recipes for her own personal recipe file so that she can make all her favourite restaurant dishes right there in the privacy of her very own kitchen without spending the time energy effort and don’t lets forget money on driving all the way to the restaurant to have her favourite foods?

Not that I’m judging.

But have you met her?

Hi, I’m Camille. I am that woman.

Or at least I’m becoming that woman.

Or at least a semblance of a sort-of her.

The main difference between me and that woman is that she seeks after the very best recipes from the most illustrious restaurants—you know, the thirty-dollar plates and the fifteen-dollar appetizers from the choicest restaurants in town, the ones that actually use tablecloths, and clean ones at that—while I set my sights slightly lower.

Leap years lower.

Friends, my newest obsession:

The Spicy Buffalo Grilled Chicken Snack Wrap from McDonald’s.
(Image from here.)

I feel a great deal of real American shame in admitting that I do actually like McDonald’s food on the more-than-rare occasion [because of course every average American is allowed to confess with token humility that she likes McDonald’s “on the rare occasion,” a sort of guilty-pleasure admittance, but any more than that is just too cliche and embarrassing to admit] which fact (I have on honest-to-goodness French authority) amuses my European brothers and sisters to no literal end.

(Make what you will of the fact that this very post represents not the first but in fact the second Saturday Steals dedicated to the infamous fast-food chain.)

Yet also like every good American, said shame stops me exactly not at all from indulging in my favourite guilty pleasure on my way home from school on the days I feel I deserve it.

A treat, I rationalise, after a long and tiresome day crunching numbers (or letters, as it were, if letters are in fact crunchable).

It started out innocently enough. During the final month of classes back in December, I woke up late one morning and rushed off to school without eating breakfast or packing a lunch, but after making up for lost time on the miraculously bare highways, I found a few extra minutes to swing into the McDonald’s drive-through near campus to purchase a breakfast burrito for $1.39, for which I paid in change.

A few days later, my last class of the day let out a little early and I celebrated by picking up a Grilled Chicken Snack Wrap on my way home from school. And it was delightful—the juicy grilled chicken, the crispy lettuce, the trace amounts of cheddar, and all sauced up with Frank’s Red Hot—not uncomfortably spicy, just enough to bring a couple of tiny tears to my eyes—all combined to become my newest guilty pleasure.

And of course, December was just so full of ups and downs that I found a lot of great excuses to swing by Ronald’s place on my way home from school, either in celebration or consolation. Paper submitted, what a relief! Snack Wrap! Miserable finals coming up, what a bummer. Snack wrap time.  Weeks past, and I got into a really nasty habit of stopping by McDonald’s after every tiresome day instead of just the occasional one.

All that had to stop, I knew, once classes ended and took my lazy rationalisation with them.

Plus also too even though they are only two dollars a pop, two dollars a pop can add up in a jiffy when you have addictive tendencies such as my own. (Just ask the garbage bags full of empty DDP cans cluttering the back of my garage.)

So I quit the snack wraps cold turkey this semester, but a few days into my withdrawal process, after I’d gotten through the worst of the shakes and the sweats and my mind was once again free to think (somewhat) clearly, it occurred to me:

This does not have to be the end. Snack wraps cannot be that hard to make.

Enter whole wheat tortillas. Enter shredded iceberg lettuce. Enter grated cheddar cheese, grilled chicken breasts and Frank’s Red Hot™ sauce.

(All of this is, of course, not pictured because I was in the state of mind I like to call Recovering Addict About to Unrecover, and of course it didn’t occur to me to photograph the process.)

Enter the exact homemade replica of my beloved fast-food favourite.

Enter bliss.

And at 1/4 the price of Mickey D’s, I’m calling it a steal.

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Now it’s your turn! What have you stolen lately?

Add your steal to the link list below. It will be open from now till Sunday at 11:59 p.m.

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