Tapas

Despite being Spanish appetizers, tapas just remind me of Kelowna and the type of Kelowna girls who would go out for them (you know what kind of girls I’m referring to) because they live in a ~*BiG cItY*~ and that’s what you do in ~*BiG cItY*~. That’s reason enough to avoid this culinary sub-genre, even though I have no idea what it consists of.

After a long shift at Orchard Park

Observe a haggle of Kelowna girls embark

On the adjacent parking-lot Milestones,

Pull out their Guess purses, pull out their phones,

And devour some tapas-inspired small-bites

Because, wooo!, ~*GiRlS nIgHt*~!! ;)

The Zucchini

The only interest I have in zucchinis is telling people that “zucchini” is the first real word that I learned how to spell. I learned how to spell it sometime before entering kindergarten, and I’ve been talking about that accomplishment ever since. Other than that, this vegetable is just not on my radar. I have no desire to try it. It has nothing to offer me. People keep talking about how you can just sneak zucchini into things—especially sweet baked goods—and you won’t even know it’s there. But there are a few things going on here. I mean, first of all, if you won’t even notice it, then stop trumpeting its presence. That completely negates your intended purpose. Stop doing that. And really, zucchini is not important enough to any healthy diet to warrant a “spoonful of sugar” approach. Second of all, if its presence in a baked good really is not noticeable, then why is it there? Is it really just to sneak some vegetables into an otherwise fairly unhealthy snack? Why can’t I just eat a normal serving of vegetables for dinner and then have a sweet snack without any zucchini in it for dessert?I think we’ve developed a pretty good system here, and I can never figure out why people are so hell bent on messing with it. There are so many healthy and sweet/delicious treats in this world that I really don’t think it’s necessary to come up with new, stealth ones. Like, you could just eat a strawberry. Alleged health benefits aside, I think it probably just comes down to the fact that zucchinis just won’t quit. Everyone is always trying to get rid of them during the summer because a single plant usually produces enough zucchini to feed an entire village—especially when you consider that zucchinis aren’t even a good vegetables, so probably only 5% of the village is eating them. If you find yourself with one hundred zucchinis on your hands, don’t try to deal with them by messing up an otherwise perfectly good dessert option. But also, by no means should you just throw them in the compost, because they’ll probably just thrive in there and produce ever more zucchinis.

Not unlike the mythical hydra defeated by Hercules,

The zucchini poses a similar self-rejuvenating emergency.

Just as when you rub a lamp, there appears a genie:

Discard of one in the compost, and out pops several more zucchinis.

It's not enough to cut off where the fruit and plant met:

The key to defeating it is to cauterize the courgette.

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.

The Jackfruit

A couple of days ago I posted a picture of a strange mystery fruit that I encountered in a large crate on the street in Chinatown. Each fruit was the size of a watermelon, a sickly yellow colour, and covered in soft spines like a weathered pinecone. This fruit, I discovered, is the Jackfruit—and I discovered this immediately because there was a sign directly above the crate of fruit labelling them as such.

Even though I saw this fruit in real life and subsequently read about 1/10th of the Wikipedia article on it, I have a hard time believing it is a real thing. First of all, it’s called a “Jackfruit,” which is just about the worst name for a fruit. Second of all, why is it so big and why is it covered in those weird spines? And thirdly, and most importantly, why, if it is the size of a watermelon, does it grow on a tree and not on a vine? Because this giant, monstrous fruit—that can weigh up to eighty pounds—grows on a tree, making it the largest and heaviest fruit that grows on a tree. How is this even practical in terms of spreading seed? Doesn’t all the fruit just fall off from the tree in one big heap (because the fruit can weight up to eighty pounds each) and then rot in a pile? I guess a lot of seeds are spread by animals, but what kind of animal—and this includes you, humans—would ever approach this monstrous fruit that kind of resembles an enormous, poisonous caterpillar and think, “Yes, I am going to eat this fruit. And then I am going to do it a favour by dispersing its seed throughout the land”?

At first I was going to write a comment like, “$2/lb!? Buying one of these fruits would
cost like $40!” as if that was a crazy exaggeration. But these fruits weight 80 pounds, so…

On the inside, the flesh looks like the horrific offspring of a rotten watermelon mating with an oversized pineapple. Apparently it tastes like a cross between an apple, a pineapple, a mango, and a banana—which sounds delicious, but unfortunately I will never receive any confirmation of this because I will never eat that putrid, rotting flesh. Also, it seems like the flesh comes out in weird clove-like clusters that resemble either garlic, cashews, or wisdom teeth.

This fruit is the worst and I hate it.

It tastes like an apple, banana, pineapple, and mango in one
But looks like a watermelon coated in hardened corn niblets
And it weighs anywhere between eighty pounds and a tonne:
It’s impossible to imagine that eating this fruit could be deliberate.

Pho

If someone cleaned out their rain gutter and served it to me in a bowl and called it pho, I would probably believe them. I also wouldn’t eat it.
I will never understand everyone’s obsession with pho, and I’m not even going to try. This food is not for me.

Dear Food Thoughtz: will you ever try a bowl of pho?
Nope. Absolutely not. No.

Oranges

When I was eight my mum put sliced oranges in my lunch. This must have been the first and last time she had ever done that. When I tried to eat them, I was only able to suck out the juice, but wasn’t able to tear the flesh from the skin. What was left were pulpy and stringy stalagmites, rising up from the orange peel. It was embarrassing and I have never tried again.

But even if I had been able to successfully eat an orange, I still don't think these are for me. I have never been particularly fond of orange juice, and have especially always really hated the pulp variety. I can’t stand orange flavouring in things—least of all chocolate or desserts. For some reason I've always found a zest of orange peel somewhat nauseating. I don't even remember being particularly fond of the bit of orange that I did manage to tear free that one time when I was eight. Which reminds me—of course that one time in grade 3 was hardly the only time I've ever tried an orange. I have had oranges plenty of times in my life, but always cut up in some sort of fruit salad. I think my mum used to put it in with our fresh cut up grapefruits in the morning.

This brings up the most horrifying part of any orange: the pith. It's supposed to be good for you, but I'll be damned if it's not the most vile and bitter part of any fruit known to man. The only explanation for the existence of something so gross is that it's a defense mechanism against consumers. Listen to nature, you guys. This is the orange's way of telling us that we should not be eating it. Look, I get it. From a distance, oranges are beautiful: they are perfectly round and bright orange—why wouldn't we want to eat this delicious looking specimen? But when you finally manage to peel back the tough skin, rather than the revelation of a delicious fleshy-fruit to be eaten, what we get is all the reason we need to abandon this as a food.

It is a bit embarrassing to admit this as a former English student, but I don't really like Jeannette Winterson. I read The Passion and didn't like it even though everyone else does, but bravely I forged on and read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The novel achieves title while the protagonist is in hospital, and her cruel evangelical mother doesn't visit her and only sends oranges upon oranges. Finally the protagonist tells her mother that "oranges are not the only fruit." We should imagine that she is also saying "this is not the only life" and that we should all canter off to the city and become lesbians. Or we could accept that she's really only talking about fruit and was correct in stating that oranges are not the only fruit, and with so many other options under the sun, why would we settle for this difficult and disgusting citrus abomination?

Somewhere between the pith and the pip

The orange fruit lies:

Brightly coloured; its flesh a-drip...

But the taste of the flesh does little to disguise

The ever-present,

The always-unpleasant,

The bitter reality of the pith and the pip.

"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Pooping the Rainbow

Dear Food Thoughtz, 

I, like you, ponder deeply when considering my food choices, and I appreciate your awareness of and respect for your particular culinary aversions. You see, years of study and many more years of personal experience have led me to believe that your own body knows which fuel it requires at any given time. So rejoice in your ravenous appetite for Ramen; let a slippery slink of spaghetti slide between saucy lips, if you so desire. 

Inexplicably, my body so craves those foods which have the unavoidable side effect of coming out the same colour they went in. If you know what I mean. Beets, asparagus, spinach - you name it, I want it. Should I trust my appetite and dig in? Or is this the type or inner body turmoil that I should avoid at all costs? 

Yours, 

Confused Craving Crusader 

This just in: my research tells me that my body wants to poop a rainbow. 

Dear Confused Craving Crusader,

First of all, a little known fact about me is that I actually used to really like beets. I don't anymore. It's impossible to know what changed, but I do still like to look at them from afar. I think I might like to see them in a hyper-realistic still-life painting.

That said, a lot of what I try to communicate here at Food Thoughtz is the importance of trusting your own appetite, rather than pandering to preachings of others. But your food choices are disgusting and obviously in conflict with mine, so while I encourage you to eat what makes you happy, you should do it quietly and not around me.

I will say this, however: It has always been my understanding that if the purpose of eating is to extract nutrients from food, the food that goes into your body and the waste that comes out of it should be somehow markedly different. The process of extracting all that is useful from those foods should fundamentally change them into an unrecognizable mass/stream of waste. I will be the first to admit that I know absolutely nothing about biology (with the exception of a story I wrote in gr. 11 biology that tracked Megan M's transition from a piece of food into diarrhea as she made her way through a human body), but it seems to me that something that should be happening in your body is not happening if food is coming out more or less the same way it went in. Everyone seems to agree that spinach, asparagus, and beets are all "good for you," but what if the reason that the resulting waste so closely resembles the original food item is because your body is trying to tell you to stop putting that inside of yourself?

I'm also a bit confused about your desire to poop the rainbow. I mean, I suppose it's a noble quest, but also so fleeting. I guess this is one of those "it's the journey; not the destination" type things, but do you plan to document each poop? And then stitch the photos together into a pride flag? Are you coming to Toronto for World Pride? Please let me know. I don't really want to see your multi-coloured poops, but it would be nice to see you.