With Facebook's Scrabulous application in jeopardy, Erin Zimmer, Serious Eats' DC correspondent, and I hurried into a game of food word-based Scrabulous—what we've dubbed Scrabufoodulous.

For the non-Facebook savvy, Scrabulous is one of the social networking site’s truly brilliant applications, other than sheep-throwing, super-poking and of course, the Serious Eats Facebook group. (Cough, join right now). But a culinary-minded Scrabulous? Not one of the options. We agreed on some basic rules, like proper nouns related to food (acceptable). Vitamins and minerals found in foods (also acceptable). Booze and booze-related terms (fine). But limited by the official Scrabble dictionary, some delicious words weren’t playable.

"S'mores" [S M O R E S] got a blunt “invalid word” response. Hating on apostrophes, Scrabulous? Ouch. More game details after jump.

EZ v RB Game Highlights

[B I L E]
RB: Stomach-churning acid!

[S O L E]
EZ: Bottom-feeder fishies!

[S U E T]
RB: Mmm, animal fat.

Erin questioned my play of "blitz" [B L I T Z], a professional kitchen term used when blending or pulverizing food, as in "Got no time to mince garlic? Just blitz some in the Robocoupe!" She was also dubious of "gnawer" [G N A W E R], ostensibly "one who gnaws." Use it in a sentence today, it’s a great, underused word.

International food words in other languages weren’t accepted by the official dictionary, eliminating “tej” [T E J], Ethiopian honey wine, and “caj” [C A J], Czech for tea. We really could have used that “j” to open up the board, but Scrabulous gods didn’t agree.

Luckily, we got them back by sneaking in proper nouns such as “Flay” [F L A Y] and “Yogi” [Y O G I].

Raise your hand if you think Scrabufoodulous should be a real thing? For the record, Erin made a valiant effort but is begging for a rematch. You can figure out the rest.

Erin Zimmer assisted in the writing of his post. And is going to get clobbered in the rematch.