"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Freezer-burnt placenta

Dear Food Thoughtz, 

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

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

Signed,Placenta Ideas Sincerely Sought

Dear PISS,

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

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

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

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

"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Why Are Kiwis Hairy Fruits?

This installment of Dear Food Thoughtz comes from a four year-old. She is also my niece.

Dear Food Thoughtz/Auntie Sally,

Why are kiwis hairy fruits?

Eleanor.

Dear Eleanor,

Kiwis are hairy in order to test our resolve and commitment to the fruit. Nothing in this world is free. You have to work if you want to gain access to that sweet, sweet kiwi flesh. Also, you have to actually pay for the kiwis first. And also, you should know that kiwis are not really that good.

But at least kiwis are hairy on the outside. So are we. Why should fruits be any different than us? And like us, a kiwi’s skin can be removed—if you so choose—before you eat the fruit. A better question to ask would have been: “why are mangoes hairy?” Because those fruits are hairy on the inside, and that really doesn’t make any sense at all.

Please write in again. Your question is better than most others. 

Brains

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

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

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

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

Brains are where our thoughtz live.

I think eating them is really unattractive. 

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

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

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

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

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

This post about raw organs

Took a lot longer to write because—

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

"Dear Food Thoughtz": Binging to Deal with Sexual Malevolence

This installation of Dear Food Thoughtz deals with Jian Ghomeshi, but not really. It's pretty directionless.

Dear Food Thoughtz

With the nation reeling from the intimate details of Jian Ghomeshi's wild and crazy sex life, no doubt people are turning to food in order to cope with having to wait for the full story to break in the press about what really happened. What foods are you relying on to sublimate your anticipation about what really happened? I need some inspiration here, because all I have is a giant jar of fermented corn, and I don't know how long I'm going to have to wait for this news to be released.

Sincerely,
Someone who thought for way too long about how to make a sign-off name that was an acronym of BDSM

Just when you thought sauerkraut couldn't get any worse.

Dear person who aspires to be known by the acronym BDSM,

Might I first of all suggest "'Bout to Dig-in to SauerMaize" as a future sign-off name that would translate to an acronym to BDSM? I haven't put much thought into it yet, but this is what came to me first. Also, I have no idea what "sauer" actually means, unless it just means sour. Which it might.

The good news is that you have your choice of any food to eat while watching how this whole thing shakes out, unlike all of those other idiots who initially rushed to his defence (I'M LOOKING AT YOUR TORRAH JANG) who now have to scarf down a bunch of crow baked into a humble pie.

Something about Jian Ghomeshi's facebook post
being a ferment-crock of shit.

Personally, I guess I would have to say that I've been eating a lot of potatoes. Not because I think they're well designed for scandal-binging (although ... they are. They are well designed for any kind of binging; they are delicious) but because they keep showing up in my oven when I get home. So, I don't know. I've never really considered that certain foods are better than others when waiting for a horrific story about violent assault against women to unravel before your very eyes. You know what? I'm going to go with potatoes. I think a lot of people would say popcorn, but popcorn is too light. This is the kind of story that only gets worse and worse as more information is revealed (but also more and more satisfying), so you should match that with a food that makes you feel heavier and heavier the more you eat of it, but leaves a taste of satisfaction in your mouth. Eventually you will get to the point where you feel so sluggish and worn out from all those potatoes and all of the terrible, skeezy revelations about Jian Ghomeshi that you can't be bothered to pick yourself up off the floor again. But at least you'll also have the sweet, sweet taste of potatoes and justice lingering on your taste buds.

Something-something, Jian Ghomeshi is as revolting as this sauerkraut.

I certainly would not recommend eating fermented corn, no matter what the scenario. I mean, unless you wanted to prove to everyone how disgusted you are by Jian Ghomeshi. I guess you could induce vomiting by eating that corn. I guess that is something that you can do with fermented corn. If you're going for BDSM food-bingo, the fermented corn would definitely cover the masochist aspect. For me, potatoes definitely cover the B, D, and S: I am bound to them through love, they dominate my diet, and the ferocity with which I devour them could probably be described as being sadistic (toward the potato).

Mustard

It goes without saying that the views expressed here do not represent my own. Mustard is disgusting. I found out that I used to eat mustard-glazed hams, but now I don't do that anymore.

If living with Food Thoughtz has taught me anything it was that I can't do things my way. It has also taught me some things on the mysterious and sacred nature of tea- and other towels, but that is a subject that should be tackled on my own blog, where I discuss the wonders and mysteries of the created and the eternal world.

Point is that Food Thoughtz has been tugging at my ear until I just gave up resistance, sighed and sat down to my computer to compose an essay on the genera and species of mustards. I love mustard and hot sauce, and condiments in general, especially if you count yogurt as a condiment. (FYI: I do) Although my parents' came from fairly different backgrounds they have always agreed about one thing: dry food is for fools. When I was a kid, we used to eat deep-fried things (I don't anymore, and neither does my sister and my mum. My dad does, but maybe that is the reason why he divorced my mum and married someone who is fond of schnitzels.), but always combined with something juicy or creamy. If we had schnitzels, we had them with mashed potatoes, if we had croquettes, or fried potatoes there was always some kind of sauce or condiment to balance dryness and crunchiness. Later on, when my sister and I went through adolescence we have discovered that the addition of yogurt enhances the quality of EVERY SINGLE dish. It was also around this time that I have discovered mustard and horseradish, and ten years later I have completed my gastronomical education by embracing hot sauce. 

This post is solely about mustard and the different kinds of it, I might write a review on hot sauce in five years, when Food Thoughtz has accumulated a sufficient amount of CAD to buy me a variety of them.

Plain old mustard

I am the direct descendent of a man who ate baloney, bread, mustard and mayonnaise horseradish for dinner every day, for fifteen years, while watching this.

At first I thought my grandpa's choice of dinner was somewhat boring and not very nutritious, but after having lived with him for three years, I have accustomed to his diet, and I would eat baloney with horseradish and mustard any time! Or maybe the love for baloney, mustard and horseradish was already in my genes? Nature vs. nurture! I'll let you decide.

Anyway, my grandpa always bought plain old Univer mustard, which is an excellent choice. It's not cheap store-brand grade mustard, which has most probably been died yellow by sulphur-dioxide or something, but it isn't too expensive to eat with suspicious-looking baloney either. Univer as the name says is universal, and can be put in everything to improve its quality.

Hot recipe tip: Mix it with yogurt, salt and a pinch of sugar, and dip some carrots and apples in it. Also put it in your béchamel sauce, along with nutmeg. Use it to marinate beef. Eat it with boiled beef and vegetables. I could go on....

Dijon mustard

At home, we call Dijon mustard the variety with coarsely ground grains. But one thing the I have learned as a French major was that us Hungarians are fond of naming foods inaccurately.
Hungarians hold a grudge against France because of the treaty of Trianon, and they took their revenge by naming baloney "Parisian" and a gross mayonnaise-covered steamed vegetable medley "French salad" (known as macédoine by the French). Anyway, the coarsely ground mustard (moûtarde à l'ancienne) is not the Dijon mustard, actually it is called old-fashioned mustard by the French, and just one among the varieties of Dijon mustards, which are instead characterized by the addition of white wine. The more you know.*

Dijon mustard is actually my favourite. It is the perfect mixture of heat, saltiness and tartness. It's delicious, it complements pork, beef and cold cuts perfectly. It's so good that you should not use it as an ingredient but as a condiment unto itself, or just serve it as dessert. Desserts are a waste of time anyway.

Hot recipe tip: eat it with a spoon. Put it on everything.

*I have discovered the true nature of French mustard around the time I have discovered my unending love for it, upon devouring a whole jar of Wendy's Maille mustard. Thank you, Wendy for the time I got to spend in your house and your fridge + and for buying me an extra bottle of Maille before my arrival to Canada this year. I don't think I would ever buy it for myself, so really, this post could have never been written without your contribution.

Sweet mustard

Sweet mustards are quite disgusting. Mostly because they are sweet. Sweetness belongs with fruits, drinks and desserts, it has no business in bread, meat and vegetables or mustard.

The Bavarian sweet mustard is apparently based on the idea of substituting sugar for vinegar as a means of preservation. Well, why would you do that, when you could have just used vinegar, or wine? As far as I know vinegar is actually just sugary water in the final stage of rotting, so I assume it must also be cheaper than sugar. It makes no sense whatsoever, unless Bavarians were just too lazy to mix the sugar with water and then let it rot (which actually makes sense, because they are also too lazy to get up from the table to go pee).

I am not sure whether I had this mustard when I was staying in Germany, but if this was the one I had, then I guess it was OK. It looks like diarrhea, but it's fine with rye bread, tomato and (obviously) baloney.

This President's Choice mustard on the other hand was vile and disgusting, it tasted like a tub of sweet earwax, much like the barbecue sauce that was served at McDonalds in the nineties. I put it on the street, because I assume that people in need need nothing more than a tub of earwax. Something like that will greatly enhance the quality of the actual food they already have.

Hot recipe tip: Avoid it.

Flavoured mustard

Why do you want to improve something that is already perfect? You cannot. (cf. Republic 381b-c, this is why Christians later denied that God actually got mad at Adam and Eve or at the idolatrous and faithless israelites) What is even worse, while you cannot spoil God, you can spoil mustard with your foolish attempts. Just don't do it. (Maybe redcurrant mustard would be nice, though? Just a thought. Cooking is not theology there are no strict rules.)

I guess honey mustard flavouring is OK.

Hot recipe tip: Re-gift it to someone who likes arugula and dark chocolate with chilli.

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.

"Dear Food Thoughtz:" Urgent Query

Dear Food Thoughtz,

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

Obviously we have a dilemma: should we eat this? 

Sincerely, 

Bewildered in the backyard

Dear BiB,

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

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

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

Falafel

Confession: I've never been exactly sure what a falafel is.  At first I thought it referred to a bunch of stuff in a pita. Then I found out that it actually refers to brown chickpea balls that are sometimes served in a pita. And then I learned that falafel can actually refer to the pita as well as long as the brown chickpea balls are one of the leading ingredients in the pita. And finally I just googled "falafel" and now I'm pretty sure they're actually cartoon bull testicles. I think they first appeared in a Picasso painting but now for the life of me I can't find that painting.

This definitely is not the painting I had in mind. I was thinking of one that
was sort of a rusty-brown colour... The more I try to remember what painting
it was, the more I begin to suspect it might actually just be that
painting of Simba that Rafiki does in the Lion King.

But all of this is beside the pint point because whatever a falafel may be, what I know for certain is that I don't want to eat it. Even outside of the pita and on their own these things just do not appeal to me at all (although admittedly a pita packed with shredded lettuce and an unidentified white sauce is far less appealing to me than the plain falafel itself). It seems like they would be really dry and crumbly and would fall apart in your mouth. Without ever having eaten a falafel, I'm certain that is what would happen--which is weird, because "crumbling apart" isn't really a quality anyone ever looks for in a food and nor is it a quality one might associate with testicles (at least not healthy ones). It seems bizarre, then, that the (imagined -- can someone please confirm whether or not falafels are actually crumbly?) crumbliness is a foremost quality of this food. Maybe it is the pita, full of sauce and vegetables, that is supposed to counterbalance this flaw, but if the only way to make a bad food better is by making it worse, there's a problem. The dryness also makes me suspect that falafel might taste like how B multi-vitamins smell, which is something like being trapped in a small space with a bunch of mostly dried-out manure. I hate those vitamins. Of course I'm also afraid that if I bit into one of those testicle-esque falafels in might explode with semen (perhaps that mystery white sauce in the pita is not such a mystery after all).

All this being said, if you do like falafel that is great news for you because they are readily available and often dirt cheap. Just be warned that the reason they're so cheap is because they're made of dried manure packed into cakes using semen, all with the ultimate purpose of resembling bull testicles.

Harvested from the genitals of a bull

Is the trendy, affordable, and enigmatic falafel.

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.

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.

Poutine

The Quebec election is over. The Liberals have a majority and Pauline Marois is out. Perhaps now is the time for Quebec to repeal its repressive language laws so that “poutine” will be listed on the menu in both its French and its English name, “gross-sloppy-mess.” Just kidding. I don’t actually really have much of an issue with Quebec’s language laws—except when they insist that the menu listing for “pasta” in an Italian restaurant be changed to “pâtes,” which is unnecessary and tedious.

The term “two solitudes” has often been invoked to describe the troubled relationship between Canada and Quebec, and although in this sense it has been used descriptively, I also yearn for the day when it will be prescriptive and poutine will be served as two (three) solitudes: fries on one plate, a little dish of gravy on the side, and if you’re particularly depraved, a small heap of cheese curds on a separate plate. As it stands, poutine is disgusting and sloppy combination of all three ingredients that has more in common with the lump of rotting and mouldy hair that I pull out of my drain every month or so than it does with food. That said, poutine is actually my favourite national (I mean “Quebec nation”) dish—I just happen to enjoy mine plain, with the gravy and cheese curds on the side (read: in the garbage).
I'm not even sure what part of the poutine disgusts me the most: the gravy or the cheese curds. On one hand, I think it would be easier for me to eat fries just topped with cheese curds than it would be to eat fries covered in gravy. But there's something about those cheese curds--and I'm not sure if it's because they're called "curds"--that makes me wince. I guess they're find if you get the good ones that melt on top, but I feel like too many of them would just sit like firm, gelatinous lump. They look like the teeth of teratomas or something. 

I might think that poutine is disgusting, but I disparage it with the utmost respect for Quebec's rich culture.

It shouldn't be a surprise that I won't eat poutine,

And my reasons for which should by now be routine:

It's sloppy and gross and a waste of good fries

And I can't stand the sogginess all of that gravy implies.

But yet--in between my gags and my heaves--

I will still find the voice to beg: "Quebec, please don't leave!"