Couscous

If you're anything like me, then it's only last week that you found out that couscous is technically a pasta. And if you had asked me last week what couscous was, I would have said with utmost confidence that it was quinoa and would have gestured vaguely towards the Middle East or Northern Africa. I would have been as confident about this fact as I was when I called someone out for claiming that "Bern" is a capital city (I then went on to furiously argue that Geneva is the capital of Switzerland and that everyone knows that. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life).

If it's true that couscous is a pasta, then that's disgusting. I hate really small pasta. I'm planning to write a post about orzo later on (I really hate orzo). Like, what is the point of eating such small pasta? Why not just eat regular size pasta? I guess couscous is never eaten in the way that what I consider to be "regular pasta" is eaten, but still. The way it is eaten seems really disgusting to me. Isn't it usually mixed like a salad? I'm not sure if couscous dishes are classified as salads or what, but I think it would be really gross. I have this idea in my head that couscous is eaten cold, and if it is mixed up like a salad, then... I don't know. Isn't it kind of spongy and gross? Based on the way couscous looks, I don't think the texture would appeal to me at all.

But now I have asked google whether couscous is a pasta, and the internet seems confused. The New York Times is telling me that it is not a pasta, but only closely related to pasta. A "question-of-the-day" blurb that popped up as the top hit for my search claims that it actually is a type of pasta. At the end of the day, do any of us really care? Couscous is not a food for me. It looks like those beads of silica gel that you get with clothes sometimes. I don't know what purpose either serve nor which one is less appetizing.

Grain? Pasta? What is couscous?

No one on the internet has been able to deduce,

But ingesting it seems like it's probably abuse.

Enveloped garment accoutrements is its only use.

The Grapefruit

If I was a committed reader of this blog, I might be inclined to believe that the writer of this blog probably hates grapefruit based on an earlier post on oranges. But I would be wrong. Because grapefruits are amazing and delicious. They suffer from many of the same shortcomings that oranges do: they have a thick skin that can be difficult to peel and they’re covered in the same gross layer of pith, and at the end of the day, they just might not be worth the effort. But where grapefruits really depart from oranges is that they don’t taste gross like oranges. They’re also called pamplemousse in French (pronounced: pample-moose).

It’s true: grapefruits are a frustrating and fickle fruit, but that’s why the loving women in your life prepare them for you. One time, as Christmas holidays were coming to a close, my mum cut up and peeled (including every single trace of pith) four grapefruits for me to take back to Montreal. I foolishly left them in my carry-on luggage, and a particularly harsh airport security person tried to take them away from me. I can only imagine that this security guard had a complex because she was a woman working in a man’s world. Thankfully, a more level-headed male security guard stepped in and appealed to the woman’s internal mothering instinct, and argued that my poor mother had probably spent hours slaving over these grapefruits, and wouldn’t it be a crime if I couldn’t take them home with me? The harpy relented and I boarded the plane, grapefruits in tow. 

One of the weird things about grapefruits is that they’re simultaneously one of the most beautiful and one of the most vile and repulsive foods on this planet. There’s something about the colour and those little moist globes of flesh that appeals to my sense of aesthetics. But on the other hand, those beautiful little globes of flesh also kind of look like literal human flesh (that has possibly been boiled or is for some other reason blistered?) or maggots or maggots that have eaten so much human flesh that they’ve turned a pinkish colour because they are engorged with blood. Sometimes I really like to push myself and actually try to hold that disgusting image in my head as I eat grapefruit, but it doesn’t even matter because it tastes so good that the thought of stinking, rotting corpses animated by so many swarming maggots doesn’t even put me off. 

I also used to really like Western Family Pamplemousse pop, and then I thought that Western Family stopped being a thing. I recently found out that is still very much a thing, but I don't think they're still producing the pop. Or else they are. I don't have access to Western Family in Ontario because Ontario is probably the very worst province in all of Canada. 

A pinwheel of globular drops of dew

Tinted a beautiful salmon hue?
Or a frenzied maggot feast,
Glutted on the recently deceased?  

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. 

Food Thoughtz Review: This All-Meat, No-Cheese, Corpse-Pizza

Look. No one is more understanding and respectful of picky eaters than I am, but even I must draw the line somewhere. And that line is drawn at no-cheese pizza. If you don’t like cheese, that’s fine: we all have our burdens to bear. But don’t burden me with the knowledge that there is a cheeseless pizza in our midst, slathered with various meat toppings. Cheese is an essential quality of pizza and you can't get rid of it just because you're afraid of being kidnapped by a Mexican quesadilla cartel.

Do you know that this pizza looks like? Like that disgusting, rare, corpse-flower, rafflesia arnoldii. I hate that flower. It smells like a corpse because it needs to attract beetles and flies in order to pollinate because it is the worst. Why can’t it just attract bees instead with a sweet, flowery smell like every other flower does? No wonder it's so rare. It’s also enormous. It’s the largest flower on earth. It can be 1 metre across and weigh 11kg, so approximately the same size as a pizza.

Disgusting.

Onion Salad

This onion salad enrages me.  I hate it.  I hate it so much, and my mum seems to make it about once a month.  I know it shouldn’t bother me because I don’t have to eat it or interact with it beyond having to look at it (and sometimes smell it), but it makes me so angry that this is even a thing that a person would eat.  It has absolutely nothing going for it, like absolutely zero redeemable features:

Later I will compare this to tapeworms covered in sperm, but it also kind of looks like fettuccine alfredo.  I guess if
forced, I would eat the fettuccine alfredo first, then probably the tapeworms covered in sperm, and then I would
kill myself before I had to ingest this disgusting mixture.

1. It’s a salad. Okay, I will let this one go because I know that most people eat salad in one form or another and that it’s pretty normal. But still, gross.
2. With the exception of the sauce/topping/dressing, it’s actually just onions.  Raw onions.  In a bowl.
3. Saying that they’re “raw” onions might have been a bit deceiving because they’re actually pickled onions.  They have been soaking in vinegar!  It’s disgusting.
4. There are other things involved in this salad that I don’t even know about.  Is it mayonnaise?  Is it sour cream?  Who knows!  But whatever it is, it’s white and creamy and I can guarantee that it doesn’t go with onions and I can almost guarantee that it’s probably mayonnaise (maybe).

Revolting.  Let me say it again, but this time like this: Re-volting. Revolting. This salad is revolting.

God, I hate this salad so much.  In addition to how disgusting it actually is, I always have to endure the inevitable conversation of how good it is, and how no one can believe how good it is because it looks like the aftermath of taking your cat to the vet because her body is riddled with tape worms. Did anyone else watch that episode of the Tyra Banks Show?  The one about girls who give themselves tapeworms to lose weight?  Because those tapeworms are almost exactly what this onion salad looks like, if you collected them all in a bowl and then stored them in your fridge.  I would include a picture of a tapeworm for reference, but I think it would be too stressful for me.  Tapeworms are very overwhelming for me.  Much like this disgusting salad.

Maybe once you get up close to it you can tell it's onions, but it really doesn't make it any more appetizing.

Should I have included this in the more general salad post?  Perhaps.  Did I?  I can't remember.  But in any case I am posting it here now because I am back in Grand Forks for reading break and I had to encounter this salad and it made me really upset.

Both the subject of onions and the poor quality of the poem that you're about to read reminds me of one of my earliest posts on the shallot, from all the way back in September 2012. 

Here's something that makes me puke in my mind:

Pickled onions in a bowl like a tangle of so many tapeworms

And if that isn't the word "revolting" defined,

Then imagine if those onions were coated in billions of sperms.

Pasta - Part II: Different Types of Pasta

Spaghetti: Spaghetti is what most of us have in mind when we think of pasta, and with good reason.  It’s quick to cook and it provides an excellent base for sauces.  Wrapping it around a fork is both fun and challenging.  Although it lacks some of the qualities of other pastas, such as crevices for storing sauce of cheese, it more than makes up for this because not only can you often trap sauce or cheese between the layers of pasta as you wind it around the fork, but because you never have to grab the pasta with the tines themselves, they're left free to pick up meat clumps.  Spaghetti provides a great opportunity to choose your own pasta-sauce ratio. 

Vermicelli: Some of you might find this hard to believe, but there was a time in my life when I wasn’t willing to eat spaghetti and would only eat vermicelli.  I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I guess I thought that spaghetti was too thick and too dense—essentially that it was too much pasta.  It’s really strange to realize that I thought this way because it’s not like I was pairing it with anything else at the time except maybe some parmesan cheese. 

Spaghettini: But then things got even worse when I went down another size to spaghettini.  Have you ever eaten spaghettini?  It’s really skinny, but I used to love it.  And then one day my mum overcooked it into a big mushy blob and it made me so sick that not only could I not eat it at that point, but I would never be able to eat it again.  I love having spaghetti bolognese, but I honestly have no idea what it would be like with spaghettini because I can’t go near that pasta again.  Overcooked pasta is bad at the best of times, but when you’re cooking a pasta as fine as spaghettini, you really must remain vigilant because if it’s overcooked, you might as well put it straight into the garbage.

Fettuccine / Linguine: I have no use for this pasta.  I can’t figure out why certain dishes require this type of noodle, but I don’t eat those dishes and I can’t imagine how this pasta could benefit me.  I don’t know anything about the history of pasta, but these noodles have always seemed like a totally unnecessary evolution of spaghetti.  Like one day a group of people were sitting around together and one of them said, “You know what would make spaghetti even better?  Flattening it!”  And everyone became really enthusiastic because it did seem like a good idea, but once it was done, no one could figure out how exactly it had improved on anything at all and eventually it was relegated to the sea food dishes because the only person stupid enough to eat sea food (in general, but here specifically with pasta) is also stupid enough to think that there is a benefit to a flat noodle.

My life will never be any better than it was at this
precise moment.

Radiatori: I have tweeted about this pasta before, and I stand behind that tweet: radiator pasta is, hands down, my favourite kind of pasta.  There is no wrong way to eat this pasta.  If you have it plain with a little bit of butter, it’s going to be great because droplets of melted butter will melt into the folds so that when you bite down, it will squirt out into your mouth.  If you have it with just melted cheese, it’s also amazing for the same reason that the cheese will melt into the folds.  I don’t know how serious you guys are about melted cheese on hot foods, but it’s really important that the food that you’re melting the cheese onto is porous or has folds so that there’s somewhere for the cheese to go.  There’s nothing worse than investing a lot of energy into grating cheese only to have it end up as a lump at the bottom of the bowl.  But if you pick the right base food, that cheese will coat it and seep into it, and it will be the best thing you’ve ever had.  The same goes for bolognese sauce, although admittedly bolognese is the most forgiving.  Even with a pasta like spaghetti, which doesn’t have any pockets to hold butter/cheese/sauce, the sauce is still going to coat it.  And if you’re twirling it around  a fork then you can usually trap some of the sauce between the coils of pasta, so you really don’t have to worry too much about your sauce-to-pasta ratio.  The main benefit of radiator pasta over other forms is that because of their ruffled and folded edges, radiators typically manage to have the largest surface area, which means there’s more to be covered by sauce or cheese.  But it also means that it’s dense, yet airy.  This is probably the best quality a pasta can have, and one that is shared by rotelle, fusilli, and rotini.  Radiator is the best at achieving this delicate balance by far, and that is why it is my favourite pasta.

  
Rotelle / Wagon Wheels:  This is probably number two on my list after radiator.  I love this pasta and I don’t know why!  There is definitely something magnetic about it because one time my niece was eating them and accidentally dropped one on the floor.  She was just little girl and I don’t know how much floor-dirt babies can eat, so I sacrificed the noodle to the garbage.  But then she had a major meltdown and refused to eat anything else, and eventually I just took her out of her high chair.  The first thing she did when I turned my back was go straight to the garbage, fish out that one noodle (it was literally in a garbage can, sitting amongst garbage), and pop it into her mouth.  And then she just stopped crying.  I realized at that moment that although my niece and I have almost nothing in common (she won’t eat potatoes), there is a little bit of me in her because losing even one wagon wheel pasta is a huge tragedy and it’s definitely something that warrants a tantrum.  But what makes this pasta so much better than others?  I can’t say for sure, but I suspect it has something to do with its wheel shape (duh).  What I mean is that when you consider a wagon wheel and how the spokes are there to maintain the circular shape and ensure that the wheel doesn’t just collapse, then you’ll understand what’s so great about this pasta.  It’s really sturdy, but because it’s also soft pasta, you exercise so much power over it.  You can break it at will!  One of my favourite things to do is to push a full wheel up to my top front teeth, hold it in place, and then burst my tongue through the spokes.  Admittedly this pasta is not the best for sauce because there’s not much to hold onto, but it still works really well with butter or cheese.  Obviously all pasta is good with butter, but the shape of the wheels gives something for the cheese to melt onto and stick to.  Unlike something like penne, where the cheese typically just slips off, the various spokes provide the cheese something to hold onto.  If you’re really lucky the cheese might melt over the entire surface of the wheel so that you end up with something that resembles a drum.

I put zero effort into this one, but it was still a great excuse to remember that 2008 USA Sista Road Trip.

Conchiglie / Shell Pasta: There was a time in my life when I refused to believe that anything was better than shell pasta.  It was probably around 2007.  By then I had probably already had radiator and wagon wheel, but for some reason shell pasta was just really doing it for me.  Shell pasta has a lot of really great design features (actually it only has one, but it’s really great).  Because it’s shaped like a shell, it functions as a pocket  to catch whatever you drape over it—it’s like eating a spoonful of spoons, but the spoons are made of pasta and are edible.  One minor complaint about shell pasta is that it can sometimes be difficult to spear them with your fork, but it’s not difficult enough to stop you from enjoying this fine pasta.  Life is always placing obstacles in your way, and you just have to learn to overcome them.

Conchiglioni: For anyone who doesn’t know, conchiglioni are those giant shells that you’re supposed to stuff with something.  You probably can’t eat them plain, although I have thought about it.  I’ve thought about these giant shells a lot, actually.  Whenever I am in the pasta aisle I spend a lot of time staring at them and daring myself to buy them, but I haven’t taken the plunge yet.  I’m waiting for someone to stuff them with spaghetti sauce, grate some cheese on them, and pop them into the oven to bake. *cough*  Probably delicious, right?

Here is some penne that I ate one
time. It's totally smothered in cheese.
Perfect midnight snack.

Penne Rigate: Penne is a difficult pasta for me and I never really know how I feel about it.  One thing that I definitely do not like about penne is that it takes a lot longer to cook than any other pasta I typically eat.  The pay off, I suppose, is that penne is a lot meatier than other pastas so it makes sense that it takes so much longer to cook.  Penne is a perfectly acceptable pasta choice, but because there are better shapes out there, it’s not one I often go for.  If I do have penne, I typically have it plain with cheddar cheese because I don’t think it’s really a sauce pasta.  Because it’s a hollow tube it seems like there’s a lot of potential there to catch sauce or cheese, but it never really works out that way.  It should go without saying that the only penne worth eating is rigate.  I can’t imagine anyone ever opting for the smooth penne.
*NB. I didn't mention penne lisce because I can't imagine anyone even eats that. 

Macaroni: Macaroni is another kind of pasta that while I really like, I don’t actually eat very often.  It never seems worth buying macaroni because the shape just isn’t as good as other pastas.  I usually eat them as the pasta component to macaroni and cheese, but just because they’re the expected pasta to have in this dish, that shouldn’t stop you from experimenting with other forms, too.  Shell pasta is particularly good in macaroni and cheese, and I bet wagon wheel or radiator would be amazing as well.

Orzo: What the hell is orzo?  Rice-shaped pasta?  I hate it.  In general I’m not a big fan of mini-pasta (there are also tiny shells or those star-shaped things), but orzo is the absolute worst.  It’s like a bunch of slimy maggots and has neither the good qualities of rice nor of pasta.  One time I had to eat it and it felt like reverse-vomiting.  Maybe you’re thinking that all eating is reverse-vomiting, but this actually felt like someone recorded a video of me puking up rice and then played it in reverse.  It felt like watching that.

Fusilli: This is the most under-appreciated of all the pasta shapes that I eat.  I really love it, but for some reason I don’t buy it very often and I certainly don’t praise it as much as I should.  It has a lot of the same benefits as radiator pasta because it has a lot of surface area as well as nooks and crannies for sauce and cheese.  Radiator is better only because it has a more satisfying texture to it, partly because there’s more ridges to it, but also because for some reason it’s just better if it’s slightly undercooked.  For some reason I think this has to do with it being kind of a cube-shape, but I can’t justify that logic in anyway.

Rotini: This pasta is possibly slightly better than fusilli even though they are very similar in shape.  The benefit is that rotini is slightly tighter, so it’s denser to bite done on, but there’s enough space between the coils to give the pasta nice bounce.  Again, I don’t buy this pasta nearly as often as I should.

Farfalle / Bow Tie: I’m all for novelty-shaped pasta, but this just doesn’t do it for me.  It doesn’t have enough body to it.  It's like cutting a square from a sheet of lasagna noodles and twisting it.  The little gathering of pasta in the centre is the only thing that gives this pasta any sort of shape, and I hope that by now that you have realized that one of the most important qualities a pasta can have is good dimensions.  Farfalle just doesn't cut it, but I think I have seen it used in soup a few times, and that would probably be okay if you're into that kind of thing.  

Lumache / Snail-Shell: This is another pasta shape that I don’t have too much experience with, although I have nothing against it.  Now that I’m thinking of it, maybe I should buy a bag because it seems like this pasta merges the best qualities of macaroni with the best qualities of shell pasta.  They would probably make an excellent base for macaroni and cheese.  So if anyone is wondering what I want for my birthday (it’s coming up, or will be depending on when you’re reading this), you could get me a bag of lumache and I’ll try it out and get back to you.

Pasta art in Barcelona.

Lasagna Noodles: The only reason to eat this pasta is if you’re eating lasagna.  There’s no other way I’m going to cut my pasta with a knife.  Now might be a good time to mention that I absolutely hate it when people cut their spaghetti in half.  The same goes for people who break their spaghetti in half before cooking it.  I can’t even eat that garbage.  No one is more spoiled or coddled than me, but it takes a special kind of uselessness to only be able to eat spaghetti that has been halved.  You wrap it around your fork.  In hindsight, this note probably would have fit better under the spaghetti heading.

Tortellini: Olivieri tri-colour three-cheese tortellini is one of my major weaknesses.  I cannot exist in the same space as this pasta without eat it all up immediately.  Sometimes I am so full that I can’t move except to bring another forkful to my greedy mouth.  This pasta is delicious, especially when smothered in butter.  I went through a weird phase when I was really obsessed with grating parmesan on top of it, but I’ve since outgrown that and don’t like it at all anymore.  The orange colour is my favourite, but I had to find out the hard way that even though the green ones are my least favourite, if you remove all of the green ones, it really takes away from the overall experience.  I have never had any other form of tortellini and don’t even know if they exist.

Ravioli: I think I have had ravioli once in my life—in Italy (yes, Italy)—and it was fine, but ultimately unnecessary. 

"Dear Food Thoughtz:" The Dangers of Dumpster Diving

A friendly Dear Food Thoughtz reminder that the garbage you're eating might be poisoned.  If you think you've been poisoned by garbage in the past, please write in at food.thoughtz@gmail.com

Dear Food Thoughtz

Is it acceptable to eat food out of a dumpster? I have a friend who is an expert dumpster diver. There is no limit to what he will find in - and pull out of - a dumpster. I mean, seriously, no limits. Cigarettes, gatorade, organic pineapples, rice flour, power tools, vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers, elliptical machines you name it. When we were younger I used to accept his dumpstered wares without a second thought - I was a broke philosophy student with no life prospects and no standards, who was I to judge or turn down free food? But now I have a job where the dress code is "business casual", and I have a kid, and a pension, and I wonder if it is okay to keep eating from the dumpster. I really need you to answer this now, because he just gave me a case of Campbell's chunky chicken noodle soup, the kind that is ready to eat, and I'm freaking out about whether I should be eating it. And feeding it to my child.

Sincerely,
Divided on dumpstering

PS We had chunky chicken noodle soup for dinner tonight. And also lunch yesterday.
PPS He said he checked with Campbell's and there have been no recalls on the soup...yet.

Dear Divided on Dumpstering,

Sometimes when I am walking to school I will see a bottle of Nestea just sitting out in the open, on a bench or on the edge of a planter or on a desk in an empty classroom.  Sometimes I slow down and pretend that I have to tie my shoe so that I can get a better look at the bottle.  Sometimes it is still sealed.  And sometimes I think about taking it, because free iced tea, right?  I mean, I’m not going to spend $2 on a bottle of Nestea myself, but sometimes I really want it.  Why shouldn’t I take it and enjoy?  Eventually someone is just going to throw it out anyway. 

But aside from the humiliation that accompanies picking up a bottle of juice off the street and drinking it in full public view, the main thing that always stops me is that episode of Criminal Minds.  I know you know what episode I’m talking about.  It begins with a father and a son driving back from a movie, and during the drive, the father begins to hallucinate and I think he ends up killing his son.  And then it turns out that there have been several similar cases, and somehow a bunch of random people with no connection to one another have been drugged with LSD (or something like LSD) because they all took a wrapped candy from a candy dish in a bank—some of which had been poisoned.  It was all a test run and the unsub’s primary target are all of the high-ranking members of a corporation that recently screwed this guy over somehow, but of course the team figures it out before the damage is done.  I mean, I think that boy still died and definitely a woman died.  But still.  BAU!  BAU!

And so I always think: what if?  What if the reason this sealed iced tea is just sitting out in the open, free for the taking, is because some asshole has drugged it with something?  Did you ever consider that maybe the reason Campbell’s hasn’t issued a recall is because they’re not the ones who injected their own Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup with LSD?  Did you consider that someone might have bought a case of it, laced it with drugs, and then put in a dumpster knowing that someone wouldn’t be able to pass up on that bargain?  Did you consider that?!

ps. Hope you don’t get botulism!  Or something even worse…

Adventures in Eating: An Uncooked Burger

On September 28, 2013, my bf(f) and I took a big step in our relationship when we rented a uHaul and moved in together.  To celebrate, we went out for burgs n’ beer at an untested restaurant.  The menu item was a burger & fries with a Hogtown Ale tallcan on the side — what could go wrong?

The beer, first of all, was delicious (and I even got a few extra taste tests in when the keg taps directly in front of me spewed beer all over my face and hair, a two-time mishap that resulted in a free milkshake).

R and I sat at the bar, chattering happily about what the future held in store for us as we waited for our food.  But when I saw the burgers coming toward us, my heart sank in such a way as to make me fully understand where the expression “my heart sank” even came from because I could physically feel my heart sinking in my chest.  The burger was rare. Like rare-rare.  Like fully pink-patty rare.  When my heart sank as low as it could sink, it triggered a wave of nausea (think of the game Mouse Trap) at the thought of having to consume meat so undercooked.  I tried to brace myself for the experience by telling myself that eating rare meat is common and even preferred in some circles. I chalked it up as a new burger experience for me, since I am typically used to eating well-done burgs.  But when I took the first bite, I knew it was going to be a struggle, and that while, yes, it would be a new experience, it would not be a new experience that I was going to enjoy.

Typically when I eat burgers and fries, I do one of two things: I either eat one or two fries first to whet my appetite, then eat the entire burger, and then finish off the fries, or I eat either all of the fries or the whole burger before moving on to the other.  It’s very rare that I would take one bit of a burger and chase it with a few fries, but that’s what I had to do that night because I was terrified I was going to repay that bartenderess for spraying me with beer by spraying her with vomit.

Definitely the idea of meat not being fully cooked is a huge obstacle for me, but I think the main thing I struggled with that night was the texture and structural integrity of the meat itself.  It was so moist that the burger was less like a patty and more like semi-solidified sludge that had been scooped in between two pieces of garlic bread (because the burger was served on bread, not buns).  I hated that every time I took a bit, the meat spilled forth into my mouth like really watery oatmeal.  Every bite was a challenge, but every bite also moved me closer to finishing the burger and being done with this horrific ordeal.

But you know what? I wasn’t done with it.  Even after I finished the burger I felt nauseated because all I could think about was how it was now in my stomach.  The only thing worse than looking at it and knowing that I had to eat it was knowing that I had just eaten it and that now it was inside of me.

We continued on to our (now) local bar, and I drowned my sorrows in beer and roommate banter.  But still, it sat heavily in my stomach.

When the night was over and I crawled into bed, I again felt waves of nausea pour over me.  At first I thought that maybe I drank too much, but it wasn't alcohol-nauseau.  It was the nausea that can only come from knowing that you've done something wrong, something so horrific and disgusting that your body's only reaction is nausea.  It was the kind of nausea that accompanies seeing a pile of corpses decaying and being eaten by freshly-hatched maggots.  Except that the pile of decaying, maggot-ridden corpses was actually the burger that I ate.

The silver lining here is that we got to share this great chocolate & salted-caramel milkshake.

Roomies!

UPDATE:

R & I were both under the impression at times that serving uncooked burgers was actually illegal in Canada. I was under this impression until about 3 days ago.

Haggis

I know that everyone else already knows what haggis is, and if you’re someone that is willing to eat it or, heaven forbid, actually enjoys it, then you’re clearly at peace with the idea of eating the most revolting combination of foods encased inside of a stomach, which is more than I will ever be able to say for myself.

Explaining why I would never try haggis seems pretty unnecessary: it’s organs stuffed inside of an organ, and one is supposed to put it inside of their organ, and then wait for it to come out of another organ (at which point it is presumably recycled into more haggis. And honestly, the idea of eating human feces might be less horrific to me than the idea of eating actual haggis, so I think I’m okay with this last step). The closest I have ever come to eating haggis is that time that something got through our back fence and decimated all of Huxter's sheep that had been grazing there and left all of the sheep remains scattered across our field. I found a sheep stomach and threw a piece of bark at it to ascertain what state it was in. The stomach was rock hard and the bark bounced right off of it. A shiver of horror ran down my spine.

Admittedly, I don’t know anything about the Scottish; I have always imagined them to be a breed of Irish, only less culturally relevant (no one cares about Robert Burns). But now I’m really interested in them, because can you imagine the depths of depravity a race of people have to fall to before they consider eating haggis? I am always so surprised by man’s desire to live, because I know that if I were in a position where we had eaten all the (acceptably) edible parts of our sheep and still we were starving, and someone said, “What if we gathered up all these organs and put them inside of the stomach and ate that?” I would say: “No. I do not want to do that.” And if I starved to death, then so be it. Because sometimes (read: always) dying is better than living with the knowledge that you just ate haggis.

Thank God I cancelled my subscription to haggis alerts. I never knew it would hit so close to home.

Obviously I am not going to include a picture of actual haggis. I just looked at some and I thought I was going to vomit. I guess the least visceral--I mean that in the literal viscera way--comparison I can think of would be a swollen bagpipe. But then I remember that that bagpipe would be made out of a stomach, and instead of being filled with air, would be filled with minced organs. Like, body organs. Not the music organs. And that's just all too visceral for me.

Haggis is one of those foods that is so vile that some of my readers might think that I would have tonnes and tonnes to say about it. But I don't. In fact, I shouldn't have to say anything at all. The only people who need to be explaining themselves here are the people debased enough to actually eat this.

Poetry has one simple duty:

To speak of truth and to speak of beauty.

But because haggis is ugly, vile, and wrong

It is impossible to sing of it in song.

Quinoa

Remember how in The Edible Woman Marian isn’t able to eat anything because all the food is alive and squirming around and it makes her sick? Well, that’s how I would feel if I would ever put myself in the position in which quinoa was a viable option for me (of course I would never punish myself like that. We must learn to love and nurture ourselves). I’m just waiting for someone to make a haggis-style quinoa dish that, when you slice into the stomach, quinoa bursts forth like the clumps of tiny flesh-eating maggots squirming around that I know it to be.

Here is some quinoa. The picture on the left was taken with a regular camera; the picture on the right was taken with a
super-duper microscope.

Look at this quinoa. What do you see?

A simple pseudo-cereal

Or writhing maggots on a binging spree?

The Bolivians ate it first? That's immaterial.

Maybe they produce it, but it's ours to take--

It's a process called "the Culinary Imperial"

Now they can't afford it? Then let them eat cake!