"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Night Snackin'

Dear Food Thoughtz

I need your help determining whether or not I have a problem. My boyfriend has started night eating. After we go to bed - and sometimes even after he has fallen asleep - he announces that he's hungry and asks what kind of meat I have in the fridge. He's very thoughtful, always asking me if I want a sandwich, or a drumstick, or a big slab of ham, but it's weird...right? I can't tell if it's problematic, mostly because his earnesty and determination are really funny. Yesterday I brought him a piece of dry-cured sausage and left it on the counter specifically for his night snack. Was that the right thing to do? The pro is that it made him really happy. The con was that he got back into bed smelling like Spanish chorizo. Should I enable this behaviour? Ignore it? Resist? I have a no-food-in-bed rule, but if he gets back into bed with a chunk of meat in his mouth does that count? Honestly, I'm at a loss.

Sincerely,
Amused but confused

Addendum:

Ok seriously. I need an answer here. Last night when my boyfriend came over for dinner, he brought 3 baguettes and 2 sausages SOLELY for the purpose of being well-equipped to night-snack (we were having tacos for dinner, so there was no way to pretend that the bread had any other reason to be there).

Dear ABC,

I regret to inform you, but I'm not sure there's much I can do here. I think this is something that your boyfriend has to work through on his own. Honestly, the best thing he could do is chart his night snackin' in a journal. And then to scan that journal, and submit it to Food Thoughtz. A few titles that might suit the topic are:

• From Sleep to Snacks: One Man's Journey
• Somnambulant Snacker: One Man's Journey
• Snacking While Sleeping: One Man's Journey
• One Man's Journey: One Man's Journey
• Midnight Journey to the Kitchen: One Man's Journey to the Kitchen
• Awake and Dreaming ... And Snacking: One Man's Journey

It would probably be beneficial to stop snacking throughout the night because if he's not brushing his teeth afterwards, it might lead to cavities. I am basically the queen of cavities, so I should know.

Dr. Oetker Microwave Mug Cakes Baked in the Oven

Over Christmas my sister gave me two Dr. Oetker Mug Cakes to be made in the microwave that I don't own. Since then, they  have been sitting on my shelf, taunting me. It's really frustrating to be so close to a mug cake, and yet so far. I thought about taking them to work and using the microwave there, but it seemed so embarrassing. What if someone asked me what I was doing? I would have to say that I was making a mug cake in the microwave. I couldn't go through with it. Tonight I finally broke and decided to try them in the oven.

I guess it ultimately went fine. I'm not sure what I expected from these mug cakes. They definitely weren't the best cakes I've ever had, and as far as easy-bake cakes go, I would have preferred a Betty Crocker or Sarah Lee cake in a big pan because those cakes are actually delicious. The best parts are the burnt corners. The mug cakes definitely took a lot longer to bake than they would have if I had made them in the microwave: they're advertised as taking only 1.05minutes in the microwave, but took over 25minutes in the oven. My sister suggested I use the oven for another purpose at the same time, but I didn't. I just put two tiny little Pyrex dishes, each with half of one mug cake in them, in the oven for over 25minutes.

I have nothing else to say about this experiment. I was expecting something to go terribly wrong, like that the little glass dishes would break. But nothing went wrong. The cakes came out tasting, presumably, as they are supposed to taste (which is subpar). Here are some photos of the process:

Everything you need to make your very own 1 minute mug cake,
minus the microwave and plus 25 minutes.

Here are these little cakes, ready to go into the oven. I kind of wish I had
stopped here and just drank the batter because it actually tasted better
than the finished cakes.

I wanted to take a picture of how, after 20 minutes, the cake was still liquid,
but I really struggle with holding the camera steady. The end result
might be ... art?

This doesn't look very appetizing, but it looks just as appetizing as the
finished product ultimately was.

Anyway, there you have it. Would I make this again? Yes, because I still have one more box to get through. I'm going to make it tomorrow. I am going to try it as a single cake baked in a slightly larger Pryex container. We'll see how it goes.

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?  

"Dear Food Thoughtz": Failure to Thrive

Failing to thrive is a frequent experience for me. This edition of Dear Food Thoughtz will explore whether or not food is a useful tool to dig yourself out of a pit of misery.

Dear Food Thoughtz:

I have lost the will to live, do you have any food recommendations this?

Yours respectfully,
Failing-To-Thrive

p.s. I have a potato, will that help?

Okay, well first of all, “a” potato is not helpful to anyone. One must have at least (at least) four potatoes on hand in order to be of any help. Like, even if it is an enormous potato, one is never enough. Don’t be ridiculous.

A basic flowchart will help us narrow down the scope of this question.



So it looks like we’re going to forge forth with “too lazy or apathetic to thrive.” Here are a list of food experiences I’ve had in the past relevant to your needs:

• One time, after wrapping up a long semester, I bought myself a large pizza and went home with it. I tried to watch a movie, but was so exhausted that I fell asleep with the pizza in bed with me. When I woke up the next morning, I rolled over and stuffed some of that cold pizza in my mouth. I felt like I never needed to leave the bed again. I did, but only to get another pizza.

• Sometimes, when I expect I won’t make it through the week, I buy a bag of frozen fries and eat nearly all of them in one go. After eating that many fries, I then feel like I physically cannot go on. Usually I do not. I pass out in a food-coma.

• When I lived in Montreal for the first time, I barely ate anything at all. This was mostly a result of laziness and extreme frugality.  But every once in a while I would feel like I was on the verge of passing out. Instead of making myself something to eat, I would just go to the corner store and buy a box of Oreos or a big bag of Miss Vickie's jalapeno chips and eat the entire thing at once.

I will say, however, that if you want to turn your life around and start to thrive, one of the best things you can do is actually make something worth eating that won’t make you feel like you’re slowly (or rapidly) transforming into the garbage you’re eating. I mean, who knows! Sometimes all you want is to feel like garbage! In which case you should refer back to this beginning of this discussion. But if you want to turn yourself around, you should go out and get yourself some fruits or vegetables and then prepare them in some mildly time-consuming way that will not be too overwhelming but will make you feel like you’re actually doing something. It's important to note that you can do this in a bathrobe, or whatever your preferred uniform of failure may be. Buying some broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, cooking them, and grating a bit of cheese on them makes me feel like I am really doing something with my life—even if it takes more or less the same time as ordering a pizza or buying and baking a bag of frozen fries. I guarantee you that even if you take the five minutes required to make a serving of apple sauce, it will make you feel like like you are poised to take over the world (when you realize that you are not in fact poised to take over the world, you will falter, flounder, and sink back into a bag of frozen french fries. The beautiful cycle of life continues!)

Eating poorly generally makes you feel pretty terrible, and it makes it more and more difficult to pull yourself out of a failure-riddled slump. But sometimes that feeling of total failure and no longer caring about what your body looks or feels like is kind of satisfying. So if this is the stage that you're at right now, I would recommend stocking up on crappy frozen foods or several pizzas and curling up on the couch and watching so much tv that you feel like you're either merging with the couch itself or that your eyes are about to burn out of your skull. Ideally both. (Pro Tip: there are usually a lot of good Criminal Minds marathons on, especially during Christmas. They typically last for days.)

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.

Remembrance of Tacos Lost

Remember that time I tried a taco and really liked it? Well, within a week of that positive experience I tried another taco and it was disgusting. I recently found pictures of the experience.

 This is what they looked like. Gross, right? Raw onion and cilantro?

And here's a picture of me eating one.

And here's another. I think I ate three in total.

Food Thoughtz Review: Coastal Cheddar

Even though Coastal Cheddar comes from Dorset, I assume the “coastal” refers to the Salish coast where all of those feet washed up on shore, because that’s exactly what this cheese tastes and smells like. This cheese was so disappointing because I love cheddar cheese so much. The sting is always worse when you’re betrayed by those you trusted the most and those you held the most dear. Finishing this block of cheese was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but last night, with a heaping bowl of wagon wheel pasta and spaghetti sauce, I did it—and I have never been more proud.

This actually is one of those mystery-foot shoes.

New Year, New Me: This Green Vegetable Smoothie

Continuing the inadvertent 2014 trend of trying new things that began with a walnut, over the holidays I tried a sip of a smoothie at the Wooden Spoon Bistro.  No big deal, right?  Wrong.  This smoothie had kale and avocado in it and I even knew about the kale before I tried it.  (The taste, in case anyone was wondering, was neutralized by agave nectar).  To be fair, had I known there was also avocado in it, there's no way I would have tried it.  But things get stranger: I actually really enjoyed it.  I'm not sure if I would have wanted the entire smoothie for myself, but luckily my three year-old niece guzzled the whole thing down before anyone else had a chance.

Since trying this smoothie, my what had hitherto been an unquenchable thirst for trying new foods has kind of petered out.  But still, even if that's it for me in 2014, I've had a pretty good run.

Hungarian Cold Fruit Soup

Wow.  I don’t even know how to start this post because I still can’t get my head around this.  Cold fruit soup?  At first I thought that perhaps the name didn’t translate very well from Hungarian.  But it does.  “Leves” means soup.  And then I thought, well, okay, this is just an unfortunate instance of poor naming that doesn’t really capture the essence of the food itself.  But it kind of does.  It actually is just cold fruit soup.  My relationship with this soup has run the gamut of emotions, from total revulsion to piqued interest to disappointment, and finally to indifference.

 Although I had all the opportunities in the world to try this soup during my many sojourns in Budapest, I never did.  The reason should be fairly self-evident (it's marketed as cold fruit soup), and I long considered it amongst the most depraved of all Hungarian inventions--of which there are many, and if you ever have the pleasure of meeting a real-life Hungarian, they will undoubtedly list them all for you.  I have never considered food to be a meaningful way by which to engage with a culture, but every time I was reminded of the existence of cold fruit soup, I had to stop and wonder what kind of miseries a people must endure to bring them to this dish.  I imagined a starving family, huddled together over a small fire in the midst of a harsh winter, with nothing to eat but some left-over fruit preserves from the fall and doing what they had to to survive.  The image did not appeal to me.

Okay, well, here it is.  The blobs are chunks of cherry.  At first I was pretty excited because I thought it would be like
the chunks of cherry in Activia yogurt (JLC: if you're reading this, hi!!), but it was not like that at all.

I also could never quite understand when one is expected to eat this soup.  I get the impression that it is often served as a main course, but because it's cold and because it's made of soup, it didn't make any sense.  Shouldn't it just be a post-meal dessert or a poor substitute for ice cream?  It really should not be a meal unto itself.  I don't know how many times I will have to say this in this post, but it is quite literally cold fruit soup.

By imagining how it might first have been developed and by trying to figure out when one is supposed to eat it, cold fruit soup slowly wormed its way into my brain, and I became obsessed with trying it for myself.  This was a pretty new phenomenon for me, because even though I am often intrigued by different foods, I almost never want to try them.  I'm not sure what made this instance different.  But I did try it.  I happen to live about two minutes from one of the few remaining Hungarian eateries in town.  I went with a real Hungarian, who described the soup as being "okay."  I was less generous in my evaluation.

Whenever I take a chance on a new food and try it, I always think it warrants a long post about my experiences.  But the bottom line is that this is a cold fruit soup, and it really doesn't warrant any discussion whatsoever.  Actually, I believe it is a disservice to culinary culture to give any more attention to this food than it deserves, which is none.  To quote one of my (few) instagram followers and real-life Hungarian:

There is nothing left to say about a food that is composed of three elements, the most crucial of which being "soup," and as nagymarcipan correctly pointed out, a soup must be hot and it must be savoury.  The Hungarian cold fruit soup is, then, composed of contradictions, and the second two elements--that it is cold and that is made of fruit--seems to negate the possibility that it is even a soup to begin with.  This food might have been more successful with me if it had been marketed as something else, like a compote or a sauce.  I mean, maybe you could drizzle this over some ice cream and it might be okay, but as it stands, this is not a food I will try again.

I'll leave off on one final note.  In John Hawkes' moderate masterpiece Travesty, the narrator claims that "the greater the incongruity, the greater the truth."  Before you get excited by the prospect that Hungarian cuisine can be justified by literature, it bears mentioning that this very same narrator makes this statement while recklessly driving a sports car at top speed through the French Riviera with the end-game of murdering his daughter and his daughter's lover (who also happens to be the narrator's best friend and the narrator's wife's lover) by crashing into a metre-thick cement wall, and is guided by the life-philosophy that willed destruction is the purest form of poetic expression.  So while Hungarian cuisine cannot be justified by this text, it nevertheless is hauntingly analogous to the current state of Hungary.  Sometimes unreliable narrators are the most reliable of all.

When I married a Hungarian I was not told

That one day I would eat a fruit soup served cold.

Had I known about this in advance,

I probably would have called off the entire romance. 

New Year, New Me: Trying Walnuts

Today is New Years Day.  Today is also the day that I tried a walnut for the first time in my entire life.

I had been pretty dismissive of them in the past, but I must admit, they're not the worst thing I've ever had.

Pictured here is the walnut that I tried in my sister's palm.  Let's hope this launches her long-awaited career as a hand model.

The Future is Now

Today I learned what a gif is and how to make one.  I also learned about the lovestruck feature in PhotoBooth.  Clearly I am not very good at making gifs, but sometimes the first step towards success is failure.

The Watermelon

In 2008, the Hungarian farmers took to their tractors and stormed Budapest with carts full of their own home-grown watermelons—but these watermelons were not for sale. Instead they took them to the doors of the supermarkets and dashed them against the pavement, destroying every single one.  It’s hard to believe that a Hungarian, who for whatever reason has such a strong emotional bond with the watermelon (so strong that watermelons are called “Greek melons” in Hungarian), would intentionally destroy a watermelon.  But it happened, and it happened as part of a protest against the supermarkets selling foreign (from Spain) watermelons for less than the Hungarian farmers could afford to sell them to the supermarkets.  I know: you’re wondering how it is that Spain is managing to undersell Eastern European farmers, but when you think about it, it just makes sense.

I don’t think I have ever been so divided on an issue,  or struggled so much to choose a side.  On one hand, of course I have to applaud the Hungarian farmers for destroying so many useless watermelons, but on the other hand, I want the big supermarkets like Auchan and Tesco to continue paying the farmers practically nothing in hopes that the farmers will eventually stop growing watermelons all together. How can one choose sides when both are heroes?

I first started working on this post last year.  I can’t remember when exactly, but it was when we were reading The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil* in my Modernism class, because I then tried to model this entire post on Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, without having even read the Wikipedia entry on the book.  At the time, it really did seem to me as if the watermelon was a fruit without qualities (and I bet if given the chance, would have sex with its sister, probably the honeydew? And why not? The honeydew is a good looking melon. That instance of incest is, I believe, in The Man Without Qualities… not just a totally random mention of incest, although, I mean, there are worse things in this world than random mentions of incest. Like incest.)  After all, the watermelon kind of straddles the line between liquid and solid.  Like the tomato, it’s held together by a skin, but once you puncture that skin, there’s not much keeping the innards together.  But it would be a mistake to say that the watermelon is a fruit without qualities: it has several qualities, most of them bad. 

Here I am on the famed 2008 Victoria - Nashville road trip.  I think we encountered these
watermelons in rural Arkansas,which makes so much sense.

But let’s get the one good one out of the way first.  I will be the first to admit that there have been times when I wish I could join in on the summer fun of gathering around a platter of watermelon.  It seems like such a quintessential summer experience, and everyone is always enjoying themselves as watermelon juice dribbles down their chin. 

And now onto the bad.  But one time I did get in on it, and I hated it.  The texture of a watermelon has always been troubling for me.  I guess maybe it sort of reminds me of wet sand: it can be molded, but pressing a finger into it will make it sink down and lose its structure.  I didn’t realize how much the texture troubled me until I put the tiniest tip of a triangle in my mouth and immediately spat it out.  It was like… I don’t know, biting into that icy part of a slushy from Shell?  You know, what’s left after you’ve sucked all the syrup out?  It’s something that appears to have a certain form, but once you come into contact with it, that form totally evaporates?  Like if you bit a ghost.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning cradling
a slice of watermelon.

What else is wrong with watermelons?  Well, they’re cumbersome and large.  Or, when they’re not, they’re square, and just … no.  I don’t care one way or the other about modified foods, but I can’t get behind some scientist coming up with a way to make round fruit square to ease the packing and shipping process, just so that we’ll end up with even more watermelons over here. Related to their size, they’re always taking up too much room in a fridge, and there always seems to be a lot of pressure to “eat the watermelon” before it goes bad.  Why not just not buy watermelon?  Or, if you do, couldn’t you go halfers with someone else in town?  Oh, and they’re also at least partially responsible for watermelon-flavoured candies, which I’ve always hated.

I guess that’s about it.

 
*By the way, I loved that book.  I can’t imagine a book more perfectly suited to my interests: secret adolescent sado-masochistic gay sex in an attic at an all-boys boarding school in the remote outreaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?  Written by an Austrian and probably modeled on his own life?  Duh. 

Watermelon— How do I hate thee?  Let me count the ways.
I hate thee for thine depth and breadth and height
My arms can’t reach around, carrying thee is a plight,
And thine consistency is hard to place.
I hate thee, no matter what everyone else might says—


That “in the summer you are a most cool and refreshing bite.”


I hate thee freely, as is my right


I hate thee purely, in the face of others’ praise


I hate thee with a passion bordering on abuse


My hatred for thee is as strong and pure as others’ faith


I hate thee with a hate I shall never lose


It shall be a hatred of you whispered with my last breath


But if the Hungarian farmers should choose,


Then I shall only love thee after thine death!

Has anyone ever actually read this Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem?  Because this was the first time for me, and it’s really, really bad.

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.

Rice

Hot damn! The rice at Rancho Chico's is SO GOOD. One time I asked what
rice they used and where they got it from, and the waiter was obviously
uncomfortable and said he didn't know, but I know that he just wasn't willing
to tell me. I don't even care if they won't tell me. I am more than happy to
pay $3 for this mystery rice, and going to Colville is a pleasure in itself.

When I was about four or five I came up with a great joke that drew on all of the important elements of my life and wove them together into what seemed at the time the greatest comic query ever produced:

Q: What did Michael Jackson say to the bowl of rice?

A: Let’s eat!

Black or White was my favourite song at the time and I guess we were having rice for dinner. Who knows. Rice is such a boring food that it’s impossible to remember when you’ve eaten it. I had a 10kg bag of rice in my closet and now it’s gone and I guess that I ate it because it’s no longer there.

But the charm of rice lies in the ease with which it is forgotten. Like an undervalued friend, it’s always there for you. But unlike the undervalued friend trope, you won’t learn a valuable lesson in taking things for granted once they’re gone because rice will never ever desert you because there is so much rice in this world and it is so cheap. It's a food that, until now, I have never really had to think about. I eat it because it's filling and cheap and doesn't really taste like anything.

Here is a delicious plate of plain rice that I enjoyed in
Bogota. I was with my mum at the time and we had met up
with a girl I met in El Salvador a few months before who was
now living and working in Colombia. She took us to this
restaurant where both she and my mum ordered really
outrageous and enormous dishes, while I happily consumed
this and contented myself with the knowledge that I was
not a disgusting human being who hate disgusting things.

Honestly I don't know what else I can say about rice. I realise now that a lot of this post is about me eating rice in Central America. I guess that's because that was the time in my life when rice really took the centre stage of my diet. By eating almost nothing but rice, I was able to forget about food and stop worrying about what I would eat that day and focus on the important things, like learning how to smoke and, for the first time in my life, really enjoying casual drinking. Rice allows for great things to happen in your life without ever taking the credit for them.

Some Ways that I Like to Eat Rice:

• With cheese sauce. Not with cheese sauce, obviously--that would be disgusting. But my favourite dinner is white basmati rice, sausages, and broccoli and cauliflower smothered in cheese sauce. I eat the sausages first so nothing touches them/is touched by them, and then I eat the vegetables. But once the vegetables are gone, there is still a pool of cheese sauce on the plate, and I like it when some of the cheese sauce touches the edges of some of the rice, but I don’t think I would ever like to push the rice onto the cheese sauce because that would be too much. It’s just nice to get a hint of cheese sauce with your rice because then you can remember and savour how delicious that cheese sauce was.
• White basmati rice with mixed frozen vegetables and soy sauce. I don't know if there is anything else to say about this except that it's a relatively new development for me. I had always relied on fried rice if I found myself in a Chinese restaurant, and one day I finally realise that I could just more or less make it myself and avoid Chinese restaurants all together. Eating rice with vegetables and soy sauce makes me think that maybe I am growing up and broadening my horizons.
• 1 part brown rice, 2 parts butter. When I was little and my mum was doing some baking, I used to lick the butter paper after she was done with it. Eating rice with tonnes of butter tastes like butter but feels like rice. It's like licking butter paper without the guilt of actually licking butter paper.
• Plain. Eating plain rice with no butter or salt is a sneaky way of tricking yourself into having an ascetic experience without actually committing to asceticism. It’s like learning something meaningful from the Orient by looking up Buddhist prayers on Wikihow.com--which I just did because I thought I would be able to make a joke about Edward Saïd, but then I lost interest.
• In a restaurant. I love going into ethnic restaurants in big, bustling cities like Vancouver or Colville, because I know that there must be at least one person who sees me enter and think, She must be a good person. She must really care about the world. Why else would she be eating at an ethnic restaurant? Ethnic restaurants always serve plain rice, and it's always the cheapest thing on the menu. And for some reason, it's usually way better than rice that I can make at home. Must be all that ethnicity.

This was kind of a weird moment for me because while I do (now) enjoy rice
with vegetables, I definitely don't enjoy rice with these vegetables. I don't even
remember what was in here... Corn, obviously, and I think some crushed tomatoes
that had cooked into the rice so it wasn't really very traumatizing, and, I don't know,
carrots? Anyway, like all of the other pictures in this post (with the exception of the
first one), this was taken in Central America and I was really hellbent on
experiencing new things.

Something to Keep in Mind:

 

Of the food I eat, I never expected that rice would be the one to betray me. But betray me it did. During my trip through Central America, I was too busy finding myself to ever even question where I was finding my rice. I lived almost entirely off of rice, and I never worried about how it was prepared because it's rice and it's really hard to mess up rice. But did you know that rice can go bad? You probably did because no one was surprised when I told them that I got rice poisoning and was so miserable that I wished only for death.

In Rio Dulce (or should I say Rio Not-So-Dulce?) I ordered a plate of rice from a street vendor just as I had done countless times before and would continue to do countless times afterward. I watched as the woman scooped out a large portion from a stainless steel bowl that was sitting on a counter and heap it onto my paper plate. But I had no qualms with eating relatively cold rice that had been warmed only by sitting out in the sun all day and was of questionable freshness. None of this was of any concern because with my restricted diet, food poisoning had never even entered my mind as a possibility for me. I ate the rice in the same way that I eat any rice--as a simple means to an end--and washed it down with a litre of beer. The afternoon and evening passed as any evening in Central America passed: lazy hammock reading followed by a rousing game of gin rummy, and this specific night, with a bag of hickory sticks which I did not enjoy in the least. When I was in bed, I broke out in a sweat and began to feel the waves of nausea wash over me. Convinced it would go away by morning, I committed myself to the task of falling asleep with great success. I was awoken at around six in the morning with an immediate need to vomit. So I jumped out of bed with the grace and agility of gazelle and ran down multiple flights of stairs to the bathroom on the main floor, certain that I would make it in time. And I did--sort of. Just as I breached the threshold of the bathroom door but had not quite made it to the stalls, I projectile vomited everywhere. And I mean everywhere. I was like a veritable fountain, spewing hickory sticks in all directions. When I had expelled what I believed to be everything that had ever been in my body and surveyed the pool of vomit that now surrounded me and covered the majority of the bathroom floor, I calmly asked the hostel receptionist to provide me with a bucket and mop to clean up the mess. I showered, I brushed my teeth, and I went back to bed. Mere minutes after crawling back into bed, I was once again on my feet and rushing down to the bathroom. This time I managed to make it to the sinks and clogged not one but three sinks with hickory sticks. After scooping the puke out of the sinks and into the garbage, I again showered and brushed my teeth and went back to bed. The third time I didn't even make it out of the room and instead just dry heaved and dribbled bile into a garbage can which, in retrospect, would have made more sense to use in the first two instances.

Upon arriving in Livingston, I remained in bed in the fetal position for one
day and one night until I finally felt well enough to greet the world, at which
point I was told by a nurse that I had suffered from rice poisoning because,
duh, rice goes bad.

The next morning I had to take a boat to Livingston and it was one if the hardest things I've ever had to do. I arrived at the hostel and immediately went to bed. Until I had an eye-opening conversation with a British nurse the following night, I had been under the impression that the hickory sticks had made me so sick. It was the first time that I had ever tried hickory sticks, and they gave me the distinct impression of being rejected McDonalds' fries that were too old, dry, and crusty to sell. But, you guys, it was the rice. It was that Rio Dulce rice that had been sitting in that stainless steel bowl in the sun for God knows how long. And what followed this revelation was an existential crisis almost as painful as the rice poisoning itself. I was force to reevaluate my life and the decisions I had made. Could I still eat rice? What would it mean to give up something that had, for so long, been such a central staple of my diet? How could I continue a trip in a region that depended on rice as much as I did and not eat it? Ultimately I abandoned all of these difficult questions and resumed eating rice with the same reckless abandon as before.

A plain bowl of rice

No one cares about it.

They're missing out. *

* See what I did there? That's a haiku. Get it? The Orient?

The Taco

I ended my tour of Central America with a three-week sojourn in Mexico, the majority of which was spent in Mexico City. Determined to get to the root of Mexican culture (see: The Function of Food at the Present Time), I set myself to the task of eating a taco, and if you’re a dumb white girl with nothing to go on but your guide book, the only place to do this is Plaza Garibaldi. I was certain that if I just tried one taco, all of my failure to even try local cuisine (with the notable exception of the copious amount of rice that I consumed throughout Central America*) would be forgiven.

It was Swine Flu season: everyone was canceling their trips to Mexico, the hostel was practically empty, and the streets--considering the population of Mexico City--were more or less deserted. But I had recently received a (probably illegal and definitely ineffective) flu vaccine in the wilds of rural Colombia, so I had nothing to worry about. I had also recently picked up a sassy swatch of Kuna fabric in a sketchy underground shop where everyone had handguns in Panama City, which I wore from time to time as a face mask. And I felt like this was my time to push myself to the absolute limit: the city had been abandoned, and now it was mine.

There’s a strange adrenalin that accompanies certainty; a kind of energy that carries you through as you hurtle towards the inevitable. And this is what I felt as I prepared to leave the hostel, as I approached Plaza Garibaldi, and as I stood by the cart waiting for my chorizo taco (the ordering of which was a total blur). I was so fully committed to eating this taco and getting the whole thing over with, that it never even crossed my mind that I could back out of the agreement I had made with myself.

I have spent a lot of time wondering why it is that I am totally incapable of trying new foods or why I’m unwilling to give foods I have tried a second chance. The main reason is because I am adamant that certain textures or flavours or even colours should not go together. This is why I won’t eat sandwiches or salads, and is best left to future posts. But the other reason is because I made peace with my diet long ago, and I have no desire to change it or add to it, and I don’t believe that I am missing out on any crucial life experiences by having an extremely limited selection of food that I will actually eat. I know that it’s possible for me to travel to any of the places in the world that I am at all interested in and maintain more or less the same diet I have at home. And yet curiosity seized me, clutched at my heart, and would not let me go. Somewhere within myself I knew that I could not leave Mexico without trying a taco--even if I hated it and even if I knew I would never try one again (...or would I? More to come). So I told myself that this is something I was going to do and I did not entertain the possibility of not following through on it.

I had spent a lot of time observing people eating tacos, and I knew exactly what I was in for. I had studied the size, the texture, and the amount of time it would take me to eat one. There are a lot of different kinds of tacos with different kinds of toppings, but I was going to go for the plain chorizo in the small soft shell, and with that knowledge I knew I was setting myself a goal that I could reach. When the man gave me the taco, I walked over to one of the patio tables and sat down as if this was the most normal thing in the world for me to be doing. I didn’t hesitate or question whether or not this was something I really wanted to do; I just ate it like I would eat anything else. And you know what? It was delicious. That night I went to bed with a feeling of self-satisfaction and elation that I have rarely experienced.

In case any of you might doubt that I actually tried a taco, here's proof of me doing so. You can also tell that I had a blast on
my trip because I'm tanned and have two wrist bands. Maybe you think I went to some sweet festivals, but actually one was
for the hostel and the other was from Torre latinoamericana. So... there you go.

Every time I recount this story, I am asked the exact same thing: if I tried this and liked it, then why don’t I try other things because maybe I will like them too? But that’s not the point. I know that there are other foods in this world that I have never tried and would surely enjoy, but I’m still not going to try them. If reading Candide has taught me anything it’s that we can travel the world searching for new experiences and ways to make ourselves happier, but if you can’t be happy in the space that you already occupy and by all the things that make that space your space, then you’re going to be miserable and you’ll probably get syphilis in the process. Of course we must cultivate our garden, but we must cultivate it as we see fit. I don’t have room in my garden for green peppers or tomatoes or tacos; my garden contains peas, potatoes, rice, and pasta, and I don’t cultivate it myself because I am western and entitled and I can pay someone to do that for me.

Two final notes: I actually did try another taco while I was in Mexico City. Shortly after my experience at Plaza Garibaldi, I left the hostel in favour of couch surfing, and our hosts (for I was traveling with a girl that I had met at the hostel) took us to some fancy taco restaurant. I’m not sure what exactly I was thinking. I don’t know if I just felt too much pressure to fit in or if I genuinely believed that because I had already had one, tacos were suddenly a new part of my diet. But whatever the reason, I ended up ordering three chorizo tacos in small soft shells. They were served with pineapple and cilantro and I was horrified. I can’t even remember what they tasted like. I just remember stuffing them into my mouth as quickly as possible and swallowing them without chewing as hot tears of shame streamed down my face.

I also tried natural carbonated water from a spring in Catemalco. It was okay, but slightly flat and not nearly as good as what can now be bought in a store. I had therefore determined once and for all that nature is rudimentary at best, perfected only by man (holler at your girl, Beerbohm).

*I arrived in Guatemala knowing only Hola, Gracias, Por Favor, and crucially, Arroz. Si, solo arroz. I quickly armed myself with ¿Tiene un cenicero? and a brief explanation that I don’t like my food to touch other food.

Porque en el pasado yo como un taco naturel

Entonces ahora, yo no quiero Taco Bell 

En realidad, no más tacos para mí

Pero lo comí? Sí, claro que sí.