Every Monday night Joe and I would head to our favorite neighborhood bar for $1 oysters and their delicious chicken nachos. The bartender was kind enough to put on Monday Night Raw for us and our tradition of Monday Night Nacho was born.

Sadly, our Monday night hang out closed permanently due to Covid late last year. We knew early on it wouldn’t be coming back, because what bar is able to put on a weekly wrestling show for two customers when there’s Monday Night Football?

Like everything else we’ve been missing over the last year, we were really missing our Monday Night Nacho date nights and wanted to recreate it at home. My idea of nachos is sour cream and cheese piled tortilla chips heated up in the microwave, but I’ve been informed these are not nachos, and Joe set out to prove this point by tackling Nacho Man Randy Savage as our first recipe.

Randy Savage is one of the most recognizable wrestlers to come out of WWE. Despite his popularity, he only won three championships and King of the Ring while with WWE. Along with a slew of other wrestlers, Savage jumped ship to WCW in the early 90s falling in with the NWO faction, reuniting him with his former Mega Powers tag team partner and racist, Hulk Hogan.

Savage is one of my favorite wrestlers of all time. His brightly colored, glittery robes themselves were worthy of Pomp and Circumstance, which was, of course, his entrance music. His match at Wrestlemania 3 with Ricky Steamboat is a clinic in technical wrestling and excellent story telling. It was the match that made me an enthusiastic Macho Man fan. He also gave us high stakes dramatic moments like his retirement match with the Ultimate Warrior at Wrestlemania 8 and the reunion with Miss Elizabeth that came after. His promos with Mean Gene Okerlund were delightfully nonsensical and wildly entertaining. Savage conquered the wrestling world, but did you know he released a rap album in 2003 entitled Be a Man? I give it 5/5 stars solely for his Hulk Hogan diss track. You can listen to the album on Spotify or pay $901.82 for the CD from a market seller on Amazon.

Of course, Be a Man, was the soundtrack to our culinary adventure.  Joe made a trip to Whole Foods to pick up the ingredients we didn’t have on hand and returned home with a bag of groceries and a fist full of Slim Jim’s, because you can’t make a nacho recipe as an homage to the Macho Man without snapping into a Slim Jim – OH YEAAAH! Also, the recipe calls for it.

While Joe prepped all the other ingredients, including Mick Foley’s Guacamole (Coming Soon), I was put in charge of chopping up the Slim Jim’s. They’re rough, chewy, and grease oozed out all over the cutting board. I have no idea how people eat these in their natural form. The idea of using this processed, dried tube meat grossed me out and I was prepared for these to be disgusting. Joe’s choice to use fake meat in place of actual meat was meant to either complement or counterbalance the Slim Jim’s, I’m not too sure.

Ew, you’re thinking, this sounds disgusting. You’re right, it does! But these were some of the best dang nachos I’ve ever had. The Slim Jim’s added the perfect amount of spice to the fake meat and were undetectable as they did not hold their rubbery, skinny tube shape. Joe was right, I was not making nachos. Would we make these again? OH YEAAAHHHH (I know he had other catch phrases but this one really encompasses it all, you know?).

This was the perfect recipe to honor Macho Man’s wild, colorful nature. Savage officially retired from pro-wrestling in 2000, but made a brief return to Impact Wrestling in 2004, where he had his last match teaming with Jeff Hardy and AJ Styles. For years fans wondered when Savage was going to inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, a subjective honor given to whoever the company really likes and feels like inducting on that particular day and time and factors in what solstice is upon us.

Macho Man Randy Savage was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2015, four years after his death, by Hulk Hogan, the man Savage rapped “Used to be hard Hulk now ya done turned soft, doin’ telephone commercials I seen ya, dancin’ in tights as a ballerina, I knew all along you had those tendencies. Cuz you’ve been runnin’ from Macho like I got a disease.”

I love  pro-wrestling.