"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Freezer-burnt placenta

Dear Food Thoughtz, 

Since you are clearly the expert on food related issues, I have a problem and could really use your help... 

I'm sure I'm not unique in the fact that my freezer is often crowded with foodstuffs that have overstayed their welcome. Normally it's no problem to make more room by simply chucking things out, but I have an item that is taking up a fair amount of space and creating a sizeable dilemma. What should I do with my placenta? There is just no simple solution as I see it. It is just so valuable and I can't in good conscience throw it away, but I'm a bit concerned about cooking it at this point. It's been in there for about 6 months now and is sure to be freezer burned. Do you think this will diminish the nutritional value? Should I just pluck up the $150 and have it made into pills, or can I still get away with making it into a stew or something? Any thoughts you might have on the subject would be greatly appreciated. 

Signed,Placenta Ideas Sincerely Sought

Dear PISS,

First of all, my sincerest apologies for not getting back to you sooner – even I’m surprised that your freezer-burnt placenta wasn’t enough to arouse my food thoughtz. And to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to get around to this if I hadn’t talked to my mum last night on the phone. She recently sent me a Valentine’s care package (which also had Midge Deak’s belated birthday present inside: two Microplanes), which included some homemade chocolate chip cookies. I had initially request sugar cookies because they’re my favourite and I can’t get enough of that icing, but she sent chocolate chip cookies instead because you don’t have to roll out the dough. Anyway, I called her last night to thank her for the package and she told me that she actually did try to make sugar cookies because she just happened to have some dough in the freezer “from about a year ago” when her and my niece made sugar cookies together. So she took the dough out, and I’m not sure how far she got beyond that. Maybe she rolled, cut, and baked the cookies, or maybe she didn’t get beyond thawing the dough. We’ll never know. But what we do know is that she had to throw all of it out because during its one year tenure in the freezer, the dough had absorbed some foul taste from something else, rendering it unedible.

This story was just the push I needed to respond to your query of over a month ago. My advice to you is to eat it asap. First of all, you might be lucky and maybe that placenta has absorbed the tastes of actual foods that surround it. But secondly, the longer you let that frozen mass of cells sit in your freezer, the more likely it is that all of your other foods are absorbing what I can only imagine to be the totally revolting taste of a human placenta.

I don’t know how you should eat it. Midge Deak suggests frying it up with onions and paprika. Although she has never eaten a placenta, she regularly eats substances that physically and gustatorily (no idea if that’s a word) resemble placentas. Your biggest mistake was probably that you didn’t initially portion it up, because I think that the best way to consume this would be in a smoothie, but it’s going to be a really big pain to thaw out the whole thing just to make one smoothie. Unless your planning to have a pure placenta smoothie, which I wouldn’t personally recommend. Under no circumstances should you spend $150 to have your placenta made into pills. If you have a placenta in your freezer, I’m guessing it’s because you have a child somewhere in your house, and wouldn’t you rather put that $150 towards that child’s education or some frivolous article of clothing for her?

Anyway, that’s about all I have to say. Thanks for your request. Please do let me know how it all turns out.

Greasy Breakfast-For-Dinner Dinner

On my last day in B.C.—which I spent in Kelowna, by the way—my sister prepared an outrageous ultra-greasy breakfast style dinner to celebrate me meeting her boyfriend, who has a similarly  highly evolved palate (devoted readers will know him better as the person who just can't get enough of my invaluable food advice). Anyway, the point is that she threw together this delicious meal that best represents where our tastes overlap (represented below by a Venn diagram).

This breakfast-for-dinner had everything that I could ever want in a breakfast/breakfast-for-dinner: greasy fried potatoes, properly-cooked high-quality bacon, and little sausages that are so small they could probably be described as nugs. My sister was initially going to serve broccoli as well, but I told her that would be disgusting and misguided and would probably ruin the entire meal. She acquiesced and proposed a plate of sliced pears instead—which I approved—but none arrived. I guess one complaint I have about this meal is that no coffee was served. I know that it was dinner and everything, but I like to drink coffee at all times, and it would have gone really well with this meal.

I know what you're all probably thinking: how could anything possibly have gone wrong? But it did. Just when I thought that I had finally made contact with the one person in this world capable of understanding me and my diet, Ben ruined everything by stuffing all of his bacon into a makeshift sandwich  and it was disgusting. It wasn't even the most disgusting sandwich I could imagine, but I really couldn't understand the motivation behind this decision. Bacon is so good on its own. Why would you want to take away its charm by smothering it in bread? Don't get me wrong, I like bread, but there honestly are not that very many situations in which bread actually improves a food. So, for instance, I love eating borscht with bread. In that case, the bread doesn't take anything away from the borscht—it just improves the bread. But when you actually envelope bacon inside of a baguette, you're drastically altering how you experience that bacon, and I can only imagine that it's for the worst.

The moral of this story is to never trust anyone because they will always find a way to disappoint you.

And finally, to round this post out, here's a picture of me and my dad. I'm making a really weird and unfortunate face.

The Burger

It’s January, 2009. I’ve arrived in Nashville after eating my entire box of Purdy’s hedgehog chocolates and half of the box intended for my sister (and then demanding that she share the remaining chocolates with me). Days later we were on our way to Atlanta, and during the drive I was haunted by a single thought: that I really, really wanted to eat a burger. Before this time, I don’t think I had ever actually eaten a proper burger. I had definitely just had a plain beef patty, possibly with melted cheese, but I don’t think I had ever had it inside of a bun. And so we did it. We found a burger place in the Little Five Points neighbourhood, and to this day, it remains the best burger I have ever tasted.

Here it is: the infamous Atlanta burger. The fries weren't much to look at, but goddamn was that ever a good burger.

After that first Atlanta burger, I was hooked. Six years later, I just can’t stop eating burgers. I eat them every chance I get and I eat them everywhere. I’ve eaten them all across Canada. I’ve eaten them in Spokane and, more importantly Colville.* I’ve eaten them throughout Europe (usually a pretty disappointing experience) and in various airports. I just got home from eating a burger for dinner, and all I could think about afterwards is when and where I would eat my next burger. In short, burgers are always my number one go-to choice in any restaurant. It should go without saying that I always get my burgers without any dressing: just a plain patty with cheddar cheese and the bun. Sometimes I wonder if the chef gets annoyed with my order. They probably do, but I always hope that they don't because I am never asking for weird additional items, just that most of the ingredients be left off the burger. At the end of the day I guess I don't care all that much about how the cook feels because going out to eat is all about being selfish and treating yourself, and not caring about the people who are catering to your whims.

I've been eating at Hero Burger a lot this year, mostly because it's so convenient, but also because it's
decent enough. My only complaint with Hero Burger, and the other burger chains like it (of which 5 Guys is
hands-down the best option) is that they're way too expensive for what you actually get. For the same price, you
can almost always find a much better burger, with the added bonus of better seating and service.

I was recently asked why it is I’m okay with eating burgers, but not sandwiches. After all, aren’t they the same thing? Doesn’t a burger meet the most basic requirements of being a sandwich? I guess they do, if your definition of “sandwich” is as basic and simplistic as just an item placed between two bread-objects. In that sense, sure, a burger is just a sandwich. But in that case, should it follow that just because I love spaghetti bolognese I should like fettuccine alfredo? They are both, when it comes down to it, just pasta and sauce. Does it make sense that because I like apple pie, I should necessarily also eat some gross meat pie? Don’t they meet the same basic requirements? I mean, they’re both pies. They’re both composed of some filling inside of a closed pastry.

Maybe these seem like unfair comparisons. “Pasta and sauce” isn’t really a category of food in the same way that sandwiches are, and there’s of course a marked difference between a sweet dessert pie and a disgusting savoury pie (although I would also like to note that I don’t really like very many other sweet pies, with the exception of strawberry-rhubarb, and even then, I would always go with an apple pie if the option is available to me). Another issue is that I have already voiced a strong opposition to sandwiches, but given my love for and devotion to burgers, maybe I ought to reconsider this. But should I? No. That would be ridiculous. You would have to be a mad man to consider a burger a sandwich just because its mode of delivery is a bread product.

This year in Toronto has been an especially good burger year for me, but I have yet to find a burger in this city that even comes close to that original Atlanta burger. The second best burger I've ever had was in Montreal, at Burger Ville (actually Burger de Ville), which is a weird chain restaurant in Quebec that serves truly delicious and truly affordable burgers. The only downside is that the interior is not very nice, and it's not a place where you would like to sit and truly savour your burger. There are other places in Montreal that are great, but their burgers aren't quite as good. I especially like Patati Patata, which serves mini burgers (I always get two and a basket of fries). In a lot of ways the burgers aren't actually that good. They're thin and kind of dry and there's too much of a bun-to-burger ratio (to be fair, this might be fixed with more fixings), but overall it's a great little restaurant with adequate burgers.

Here's me eating the first of two baby burgers at Patati
Patata in Montreal. This picture was taken during
my sister's visit. For some reason this was a
really ugly time for me. Not, like, emotionally trying. I
just looked really ugly that week for some reason.

There's honestly not a whole lot I have to say about burgers. In a lot of ways, they're the perfect food: they're fast, they're portable, they're delicious, and they're filling. But it should be mentioned that burger quality is never assured. I have eaten some terrible burgers in my life. As a general rule, I hate seeing anything in the burger other than plain ground beef (such as chopped onions or seasoning), even if I like additional flavours (such as chopped onions or seasoning). I don't like to see any red meat. One time I ate a treacherously undercooked burger and it was traumatizing. But when they're good, they're great.

Here are some different burgers I have eaten.

Here are more burgers that I have eaten.

*Important because as everyone should know, even though Rancho Chico’s is also in Spokane, it is generally considered by all to be the only place to eat in Colville, whereas Spokane also has The Onion, which has pretty decent burgers. So imagine my surprise when Rancho Chico’s in Colville was actually closed on Independence Day and we were forced to go to that weird … what is it? Ronnie D’s? Sandy’s? That weird drive-in fast-food place in Colville. It was great! It was so American!

A burg is enough when my hunger needs sating

And my tum has no voice but the voice of complaining
So many tastes for my tongue to discover
Ground beef, melted cheese--marinating thereunder 
Some burgers I've tasted, some still a wonder
Some were delicious, others better pass'd over
Yet my hands shall not tremble, my bite shall not falter,
My hunger shall not weary, my tastes shall not alter
Those buns and these lips of the loved and the lover.

Brains

Distinguishing between what parts of an animal you will eat and what parts you won't is, I guess, a pretty arbitrary decision. But I'll be damned if anyone ever convinces me that eating a brain is an acceptable meal. I am sorry to all you brain-eaters out there, but that is disgusting. That is where thoughtz live. In the brain. They are created and live there. Even in animals. I don't think we should be eating animal thoughts.

Did you know that what of the prion diseases associated with eating brains is Fatal Familial Insomnia? It's a thing. Look it up. Symptoms include "progressively worsening insomnia," but the science is still out as to whether this is a symptom of the disease or just because you're so horrified with yourself that you just ate a brain and now you will never be able to sleep again because you're haunted by your own depravity.

The picture quality is terrible and I can't even be bothered.

Aside from how deeply disturbing I find brain-consumption, I also don't think I would like the look, texture, or smell of a brain. I have no idea how they're typically prepared (although I guess it would depend on the culinary culture), but I always imagine just a full brain, boiled, and sitting on a plate as a steaming mass, oozing some liquid (probably liquid thoughts) onto a plate. Maybe smelling like damp, old sports equipment? I don't know why, that's just what pops into my brain.

Brains are where our thoughtz live.

I think eating them is really unattractive. 

A Bucket Full of Raw Animal Organs (Pre-Sausage Version)

Pig slaughter season continues in Hungary, and things are only going down hill following the previous post on the pig head in a bucket of its own waste. Note on the pig head: the Hungarians involved have provided some additional information about its preparation: "they smoke the head and eat the flesh from it and they also put head-flesh into kocsonya which is a very disgusting thing. Sally, trust me, you dont want us to go into details!" Kocsonya, which it turns out I really didn't want to know more about, is apparently some sort of disgusting jellied dish made from preparing a soup with a strong cartilage base so that it will jelly when cooled. It is also worth noting that the brain evidently is not eaten raw, as I initially assumed, but is fried and served on toast with onions and, although not explicitly mentioned, probably paprika because they are Hungarians. 

But what appears below can only be described as a horrific massacre. After chopping off the pig head, smoking it, and then tearing the cooked flesh off with your teeth (unconfirmed), the most disgusting organs are harvested and thrown into a large plastic tub. These include kidneys, liver, and lungs (lungs!). These organs are then ground up, stuffed into sausage casings (which for all we know are pig intestines, but might be synthetic, but let's face it, probably aren't), and then people willingly put them in their mouth even though they already saw the raw organs sitting in a heap in the tub. 

I'm sorry that I am making you all look at this in such a large format, but it really haunted
me when I had to see it for the first time, and there's really no reason why I should
have to suffer alone. At first I thought it was a bucket full of slightly unhealthy lobsters.

I'm sorry, but I just could not do this. I couldn't be involved with this. I don't know if this means that I shouldn't be eating meat in the first place, but this bucket of organs is not for me. I can't imagine being involved in this process start to finish. I have no idea how to pull organs out of an animal carcass. Do you wear gloves? Aren't they slippery? Are they surprisingly heavy? Do you drop them in the bucket with a thud, or lay them gently because bruising is a concern? Do you have to cut them into smaller pieces to stuff into the meat grinder? Do you hose them down first? I was told that these organs were being made into hurka sausage. Is it called hurka because you kind of naturally make that sound when you vomit? I don't know if I even want to know the answer to most of these questions. I feel like I already know far too much.

This post about raw organs

Took a lot longer to write because—

Oh wait, hold on, I have to go puke again.

A Skinned Pig Head Cut in Half and then Dumped into a Bucket

Someone I know just ventured out into the wilds of rural Hungary to slaughter a pig. Good for them! I've always kind of agreed that if you're going to eat meat, you should probably be okay with and able to perform the processes required to procure that meat. I say "kind of" because I'm actually not okay with the processes and would never be able to perform them. Case in point: this skinned pig head that has been cut in half, presumably to extract the brains, presumably to consume it:

Okay. So this is what it looks like if, after slaughtering a pig, you cut off
its head, skin the head, cut the head in half down the centre, and then
dump it all into a bucket full of its own fluid.

Umm, this is gross. This is GROSS. I hate this. This pig's brains have been extracted from its skull (probably; still waiting for confirmation*) so that one person or several people can put those brains in their mouth and swallow them. As FOOD. I wish there was a more extreme italics, but there's not.

This is one of the most gruesome things I've ever seen, and yet I cannot look away. Can you imagine touching it? Like, most of it is surely skull, but then there's sinewy muscle fibres laced over top? And it would probably be really slippery? So the only way you could hold onto it is by tightening your grip, and then you had to feel the hardness of the skull even more as it dug into your fleshy hand? You would probably grip it around the jaw because you could easily reach your hand around the bone, and perhaps it would bump against you, and you would feel its dead teeth push against the top of your hand. And maybe even still you would drop it, and it would land with a thud on the muddy ground, and you would pick it up, but it would be speckled with bits of grass and dirt, matted into the flesh that is still clinging to the skull? Or, like, can you imagine cutting a skull in half? I don't even know how you go about it. Personally I would just swing an axe down on it (although then imagine all the little pieces of flesh and bone that would fly back and hit you, and would maybe speckle your skin so that you have stringy little pieces of pig flesh hanging off your face), but I have a feeling you probably can't do that if your entire purpose is to pull the brain out still intact. And imagine pulling the brain out. Like, isn't it still attached to something? Even if the head has been cut off, surely that little brain stem is still attached to some neck vertebrae, and then, like, you have to tug on it and feel and hear it snap apart. And then you're just left holding a brain! And you have to look at it and know that you're about to eat it! And who knows if there's still some shell of skull plastered onto the top of the brain. Probably. I wouldn't have any idea. I've never done this before. I hope I will never have to do this.

Before I wrap things up and hopefully put this horrific image out of my mind forever, I want to stress that I obviously do not have a problem with killing pigs and eating them. Pig meat is probably the best kind of meat there is, and it's probably even more delicious in Hungary because the Hungarians have squirreled away a secret breed of pig that has taken on mythical proportions (and which also seems to be out of mythology because it looks like a bizarre pig-sheep hybrid that Ovid might have dreamed up). Rumours have it that this rare and elusive mangalica is more delicious than any other breed of pig. None of this really changes the fact that the above picture shows a pig skull cut in half with the brain pulled out though.

It has been said that slaughtering your own meat

Is so much more humane.

But in order to do so, you have to crack open the skull

And haul out the brain.

And throw into a bucket of slop 

The bloody and gruesome skull-and-muscle remains. 

And it is this act that separates a mere captain 

From the heroic kapitány.

* It has been confirmed. This is what happened.

"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Oily Italian Bodies

Dear Food Thoughtz,

I understand that the Romans used to use olive oil in lieu of soap because they had not yet discovered the latter. Thinking of this does not give me a very good feeling. How does it make you feel? Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Not-feeling-so-clean

Dear Not-Feeling-So-Clean,

Oh boy. I bet you now regret not writing “…because they had not yet discovered the lather” – am I right!?

Anyway, thank you for your interesting albeit somewhat irrelevant query. The Romans did in fact wash themselves with olive oil. At first I thought this was disgusting because I am opposed to any type of edible object coming into contact with any part of the human body that isn’t the mouth. And then I thought that it was ridiculous the Romans were advanced in so many ways (especially in the areas of day beds and gruesome entertainment, and likely a combination of the two) but didn’t have access to soap and instead had to rely on olive oil. And then I wondered why they didn’t have access to soap because they were all over the place, so why didn’t they just pillage it from some Celts (or Babylonians?)? And then I lost all sympathy for the Romans because of course that Empire failed—who could ever afford to bathe exclusively in olive oil? It is so expensive? I can’t imagine being in charge of the Roman budget; it must have been so stressful.

But then I actually bothered myself to find out a) what soap is and b) how the Romans actually washed themselves with olive oil, and now I’m kind of on board with it. First of all, soap is just animal fat mixed with burnt things or something. And secondly, they weren’t just, like, rolling around in a pit of oil and hoping it would clean them. They would lather it on their bodies and then a slave, presumably, would scrape it off of them. Which kind of sounds great—especially the part about the slave. But, right? Don’t you think it would be nice to scrape oil off of your body? Don’t you think that sounds like a great way to clean yourself? So now I’m confused about how I feel about it. I guess I think it’s fine. I’m not sure if I will try it any time soon, but if you were looking for my blessing to pour extra virgin all over yourself and scrape it off, you had it like five years ago. I know you’re somewhere in China right now, but there have been a lot of good olive oil sales here the past few weeks.

But since we’re on the topic of Romans: I have long been fascinated by the concept of lounging on a day bed while someone drapes a clump of grapes into my mouth. Have you ever tried this? It’s not actually very relaxing, it’s certainly not convenient, and frankly, I think it might be a choking hazard. Not recommended.

The Romans also had a reusable communal poo-sponge, so make of that what you will.

Honey

Like any other reasonable person, I really like honey. But a lot of people will probably disagree with me when I say that there are only two applications for honey: one is to spread it on English muffins so that it sinks into the little holes and the second is to add it to Earl Grey tea with milk when you’re feeling a bit sick or want a delicious evening treat. I really can’t think of anything else I would do with honey. 

But what I can think of is an atrocious article that appeared in the Gazette several years ago that was meant to highlight Grand Forks’ most prolific bee keepers, interchangeably referred to in the article as both the Huxters and the Huxleys. The article focused on the Huxterly’s breading of bees. Presumably the author—who, by the way, once wrote an entire article using only baseball metaphors—meant breeding, but the term “breading” was used throughout the article, leading any seasoned English major to assume that the article was actually about two rival bee keeper camps in Grand Forks who sabotaged the other’s stock by breading their bees. Like a chicken breast. That article was truly terrible, like most other pieces in the Gazette, but what isn’t terrible is Huxterly honey, which as far as I can recall, is the only honey I have ever had in my life. I store it in a blue cheese dressing jar (disgusting) because it comes to us in unmanageable plastic buckets.

 I don’t have much else to say about the topic. I guess I could add that I think vegans who don’t eat honey are ridiculous and that we used to have bee hives on our property and one time the bees swarmed in a massive clump and sat on a tree for several days until they were moved because bees do that. I might also add that while Lil Kim has consistently used the moniker “Queen Bee,” I don’t think she has adequately made use of honey references, which I think would fit nicely with her sex-heavy lyrics. 

None is less tolerable than the self-righteous vegan
Who considers consuming animal products a social disease.
But honey is nature’s greatest gift to all man,
And by not supporting the keepers, they’re really only hurting the bees.
As they wax-poetic about all the wrongs and the rights,
They might as well be infesting these gentle insects with a plague of mites.

 

"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Urgent Query

Dear Food Thoughtz,

Attached is a picture of a leechee nut. I think it looks like a testicle. My g-friend thinks it looks like a fetus. It is delicious. 

Obviously we have a dilemma: should we eat this? 

Sincerely, 

Bewildered in the backyard

Dear BiB,

No, you shouldn't eat it. For a lot of reasons. But for the sake of brevity, here's a scene from We Need to Talk About Kevin, which follows immediately afterwards the psychopathic son Kevin burns out his own sister's eye using household cleaners:

Whether it more closely resembles an eye, a peeled testicle, or a fetus, it definitely resembles something extracted from a human body and should be avoided at all costs. I'm also pretty sure it's spelled lychee.

Midge's Addendum:"Obviously they should eat it. They are not different from grapes. I mean, in terms of looking like a body part. A grape could be a human egg or something. Just because you are more used to grapes -- this is a cultural bias, or whatever. Colonizing the lychees. Especially because they can't even spell the name correctly, just like English people can't spell foreign peoples' names."

Hákarl

For the most part I have nothing but good things to say about Iceland: it’s a beautiful country with beautiful people and has one of the most consistently impressive musical and literary outputs of any country. But there’s something rotten in the state of Iceland (the quotation is relevant because Iceland didn’t become fully independent from Denmark until 1944), and that something is shark meat that is intentionally buried in the ground left to rot because the meat itself is poisonous because it’s bloated with urea and the only way to safely consume it is to let it rot first. All other reasons for disgust aside, there is something seriously wrong with a food when the only way to eat it without dying is to ensure it is thoroughly rotted through first.

It goes without saying that I would never try this food, but the question still remains: why is anyone else eating this? I get that when you’re living on an isolated volcanic island with very limited contact with the outside world and not the most extensive list of edible food readily available, sometimes you have to do what you have to do. And I guess, one of those things might be eating shark meat that you’ve left to rot underground for a few months, but… is it? Look, I would never advocate eating any kind of seafood, but I just feel like if you have access to a shark brimming with urea, you probably also have access to a lot of different kinds of fish and shellfish and whales and that, as disgusting those things are, they aren't quite as disgusting as this rotten shark and also do not have to be consumed rotten. And furthermore, Iceland clearly isn’t the isolated volcanic rock it was in the sixteenth century, so I really can’t understand the continued consumption of this revolting dish except as a misguided commitment to a culinary past that is no longer relevant today.

Does it look like I am driving this forklift? Whatever. I don't even care.
This food is too disgusting to waste any time on a picture.

I've been thinking about hákarl for the last few months. I kept planning to write a post about it, but I couldn't see the point. Of course this is something I would never eat, but I'm also not even totally sure that this can be classified as food. It's just weird, slimy, chunks of urea that for some unknown reason a very, very small percentage of the world's population sometimes puts in their mouth. Additionally, based on the Wikipedia article, it seems like no one else can stomach hákarl, so it's probably time for Iceland to own up to the fact that this gross Greenland shark was not meant for consumption. (Like, really, it was not. Because it is poisonous. I really want to get that point across: it is poisonous because it is so full of urea that if you eat it fresh, it will poison you.)

One of the most important things that a nation can do is to hold itself accountable for its mistakes in the past—to bury them in the sand and let them rot, so to speak. The most important thing that Iceland can do now—nay, the only thing Iceland can do now—is to admit that it was wrong and to move on. The sooner Iceland does that, the sooner we can all forget that this horrific rotten urea-shark ever existed in the first place.

The beautiful nation of Iceland

Once plucked from the sea a shark of Greenland.

Poisonous when fresh,

So they rotted the flesh,

And hákarl has since been universally panned.

Review: Azores Food Round-Up

About a month ago my sister and I embarked on an ill-conceived journey to the Azorean island of São Miguel. If, like me, you have only heard of the Azores but have no idea where they are, the short answer is they are in the middle of nowhere, and the even shorter answer is that you can just google them. Initially I thought I would write a diary post every day about what I had been eating but that plan failed immediately when I decided instead to spend all of my spare time reading in front of a raging fire.

São Miguel was a pretty nice place. Sometimes it looked like this:

And other times it looked like this:

Portuguese cuisine has never been something I’m even remotely interested in it. I don’t know much about it beyond that they have a lot of roast chicken, custard tarts, those ceramic rooster that probably are not for eating, and fish. But the Azores seem to be a bit different. I don't recall seeing any roast chickens or even very many custard tarts or ceramic roosters, but they did have piles and piles of disgusting fish-products and a few other things that made me sick to even be in the vicinity of.

I think the best way to tackle this post will be to divide up the food I encountered into two categories: the food that I ate while I was there and the food that utterly repulse me. So here we go!

The Food I Ate:

When we first arrived at out cottage—which was the absolute best—out host greeted us with some Easter chocolates and a delicious Easter cake, which was so delicious that we waited until Easter was over and then bought a second, discounted Easter cake which we couldn’t finish and ended up throwing in the garbage at the airport.
At first I was kind of hesitant to try the Easter cake because it looked like a small turkey covered in cloves and waiting to be stuffed. My sister tried it first and we were both pleasantly surprised that it was just a mound of sweet bread dotted with chocolate chips and some chocolate cream filling. It was delicious. That said, I wouldn't put it past the Portuguese to sell small turkeys as "sweet Easter treats" based on some of the other things they tried to pass off as Easter delicacies.

For our first dinner we had silly ronis with meat sauce. I have to be honest here. Even though my sister was kind enough to cater to my every need on this trip, which more often than not included feeding me, this was not my favourite thing. I love the silly ronis of course—they were as silly as I could have ever dreamed of—but the sauce was just too sweet. I can't even remember what went in there, but I guess maybe there was too much red pepper? I'm not sure. It was just too ... tangy. And I really don't like that in a pasta sauce. But it also definitely was not the worst thing, and the pasta shape was so novel to me that it almost made up for the tangy sauce.

One experience definitely worth talking about is that I had a kiwi for the first time in over twenty years. I seem to recall eating kiwis at my dad's when I was very little and I had probably had them once or twice since then if they were in a fruit salad, but kiwis are fruits that I typically avoid. I'm not exactly sure why, but I think it probably has to do with the labour involved in preparing them which, admittedly, is quite minimal. The kiwi I ate had been peeled by my sister, presumably for my benefit, but I honestly don't think I would mind eating the skin. It seems like it might be a bit thicker and tougher than peach skin, but I really like peach skin and think it's disgusting and wasteful when people eat the peach without. Anyway: the kiwi. The kiwi was just fine. I don't really feel comfortable saying much more about it, and I'm not convinced that I will eat another kiwi in the next twenty years. It was certainly good, but it just wasn't good enough to warrant eating again. I'm so used to eating the same thing over and over again that I have never felt the need to really change up my diet, so I would never eat a kiwi just because I wanted a change from the regular fruit I eat. But whatever. I guess it wasn't really worth talking about. Anyway, it looks pretty great sliced up here:

Because the island was so small (so small: it was only 15km wide and 60km long), we never really found ourselves in the position of needing to eat out very often. We typically ate in our cottage. In addition to the pasta on the first night, we also ate rice with some sliced up ham coil, roasted cauliflower, buns, those delicious chocolate flutes, and pineapples.

The rice was fine. I specifically requested that we have rice with pepper and onion fried in a pan, but once again it was just a bit too sweet, and once again I am blaming the red pepper. It's my understanding that if you want to have rice with pepper and onion, there has to be a bit of jalapeño because red bell peppers are just too sweet on their own. The rice was served with roasted cauliflower, which my sister assured me would be the best cauliflower I had ever tasted. But it wasn't. I didn't really like it. It was at once too crunchy but also too mushy. It just didn't work for me, although I will admit that when it came out of the oven, it certainly looked like something I would like (the picture of it looks disgusting).

We had the ham coil cut up and fried with the rice, which was probably the best part. But later I tried the ham coil on its own, and I didn't like it. It was too salty and too something else.

I will probably go out and buy a pack of these right now.

By far the culinary highlight of the trip were these chocolate flutes that you can find everywhere but that I have always associated with "Europe," probably because they're often marketed as a European delicacy in here. They did not disappoint. I love these things. If I could stop gobbling them up for just one minute, one day I would like to see what it's like to use one as a straw for drinking coffee. They're probably one of the best cookie-foods that are on the market today, second only to Dad's chocolate chip cookies (the ones made by Mr. Christie—definitely not my dad's cookies, which if they exist, probably have zucchini and cayenne in them).

 We did go out to eat a few times on this trip, but usually only for a quick lunch or for multiple galãos, which are essentially just lattes. A fun fact about our linguistic adventures in the Azores is that galão is the only Portuguese word either of us bothered to learn on our entire trip. I guess my sister probably ate a few different things, but I only ever had fries and one time a burger. The fries were pretty hit and miss in Portugal. The first plate I had was in the town of Furnas, which is famous for its geothermal activity. One thing I learned about myself is to stop being lured to a place by the promise of geothermal activity. I hate geothermal activity. It stinks and is disgusting. Someone described it as "earth farts," which is 100% correct. At one point we drove through an unexpected cloud of sulphur with our windows rolled down, and I was certain that I was going to throw up. All of this is relevant because each time I brought the fries to my mouth, they seemed to smell like sulphur and it made me sick. I still ate all of them. The second plate of fries I had was in Ponta Delgada and were delicious precisely because they tasted almost identical to McDonald's fries, but with the added bonus a delicious pint of beer on the side (the Portuguese seem to be pretty into lagers, which is great for me because generic lagers are pretty much the only beer I'll drink). Last, but certainly not least, on our last night on São Miguel we went out for a great dinner at a restaurant recommended to us by our host. I must admit I had my doubts about this place: it looked like a weird and not very good beach snack-hut, but it turned out to be really great. I had a burger with fries, and was relieved when the burger came just as I ordered it: totally plain with cheese. By no means was the burger great, but it was pretty solid and I don't really have any complaints about it.

Left to Right: sulphur fries, McDonald's imposter fries, and the best fries of the trip.

 Before moving on to all of the gross food that I didn't eat, I want to speak briefly of the pineapples. I don't want to spend too much time on them because I am tentatively working on a separate post for them. For whatever reason, the Azorean islands grow pineapples. Not because they grow naturally there, but because they used to grow oranges, but then some mysterious orange-plague wiped out the entire crop on the islands, so they switched their focus to greenhouse pineapples. And you guys: these pineapples are no joke. The Azorean pineapples are, hands down, the absolute best pineapples I have ever tasted in my life. Maybe this has to do with filling the greenhouse with smoke, which has the exact same life-restoring qualities as an eighteenth century tobacco enema. These pineapples were so sweet, so juicy, and so adorably round and small that we couldn't even bring ourselves to care that they were twice the price as the imported Costa Rican pineapples.

My sister tried to rouse me from my slumber with this plate of freshly slice pineapple - and it worked! I would get
out of any bed just to taste that delicious pineapple once more.

 That pretty much covers everything I ate on this trip. I had a bag of chips once and some yogurt, but they didn't seem work talking about. I also tried a bite of my sister's Mister Corn chocolate bar, and I wasn't sure whether to put it in the "Food I Ate" category or the "Gross Food" category, so I'm going to opt for the latter because it is actually pretty gross.

The Food I Didn't Eat / Was Afraid Of:

Turns out Portugal in general and São Miguel more specifically has a tonne of really disgusting and frightening food on offer, most of which we observed at the grocery store and some of which I observed my sister eating.

The first gross food I encountered was this horrific bread loaf with whole eggs in it. It's called folar and is eaten in Portugal during Easter because bread was served during the Last Supper (also: every other supper) and because the eggs are supposed to be a symbolic representation of the Resurrection of Christ. Except it's not really all that symbolic of anything and I would rather take a bite out of the literal body of Christ, even after it had been sitting in that dank cave for three days, than to be unpleasantly surprised by an entire egg in my bread.

We also saw these pig heads on display in the grocery store, and I'm going to be totally honest with you here: I have absolutely no idea how one would go about actually eating the head of an animal. Do you just scrape the flesh off the skull and onto a plate? Does each person get their own head and you just gnaw at it like one of those giant jaw breakers? Does anyone actually eat them at all, or are they just for decoration? I really don't understand. It's not even that eating flesh off of a skull disgusts me that much more than eating ribs or a drumstick, but I just can't understand how it's done, and I am too afraid to watch a Youtube tutorial of it, although you can be guaranteed that one exists. If any of you know, please don't tell me because I think I am happier not knowing.

The grocery store also had a huge fish display, and each day the display was more disgusting than the days that had preceded. In addition to the consistent offering of what appeared to be dumb and revolting group fish, there were also daily specials, like silver eels, some giant yellow python-eel, squids, and on one day, two giant rays layered on top of each other. Every day that fish display was a more grotesque parade-of-horribles and seeing it had a really profound effect on me. I have always known that I hate everything that comes out of the ocean, but I don't think I had ever seen this kind of sea garbage on display before, and certainly not as something that could possibly be edible. What does one even do with a ray of that size? Do you grill it? Will there be a crab inside of it? And if there is, do you have to pay extra for the crab?

My sister and I more or less ate fairly similarly on this trip, but on our last night (when I had the burger and fries), my sister ordered a disgusting, fat tuna steak covered in pumpkin seeds. She said it was good, but I'm pretty sure it was disgusting. There's something about "steaks" of fish that just doesn't sit right with me, and not only because I hate all fish. I guess I don't like thinking about how some fish are large enough to actually provide a slab of meat that could for all intents and purposes be referred to as a steak. Anyway, here is a picture of it. The potatoes did look pretty delicious though. I was too afraid to try them because I couldn't be certain they hadn't touched the fish at any point.

Finally, my sister bought a Mister Corn chocolate bar in the grocery store. It really was just a chocolate bar with corn nuts inside, in the same way that you might get a chocolate bar with almonds or hazelnuts inside. I did actually try a square of it, and it wasn't half as disgusting as I expected it would be, but it still wasn't for me and I still think that the idea of combining corn nuts and chocolate is a mistake. I get that some people like sweet and savoury together (I think it's a disgusting combination, with the notable exception of salted caramel), but ... I don't know. Corn nuts?

The good news is that they really didn't skimp on the corn nuts.

A Few Stray Thoughtz:

We also went to a tea plantation. I think the Azores are the only (or at least one of the few) places in Europe with large-scale tea plantations. The Portuguese even brought over two Chinese tea masters to teach the locals how to farm tea, and then I believe they had them build a massive rail system and then sent them on their way. The tea really wasn't very good. I'm not sure if that's because tea wasn't meant to be grown here or because the Portuguese have never been able to manage it properly, but the safest bet is probably to blame the two Chinese tea masters who clearly weren't very masterful at all.

I wore this military for the duration of our trip, and it was great.

So... anyway. That's it. That was the trip. At least in terms of the food I ate and the food I avoided. It was pretty good. I would recommend it if you can find a $300 return ticket.