Chuck Junk Food–Another Goldurn “Themed Post”

The following was intended to be a two or three sentence introduction to some food I like to eat and cook–good, simple fare–but it was late at night, some of my faculties had already submitted to that dark goblin, sleep, and I found this in the morning (most of which I don’t remember writing at all)….

Enuff wit the themes n’at fer cry’n aht lahd.  If you understood what I just said you “might have that Picksburgheese,” and if so, please let me apologize now: we won’t be making pierogi, which leads to an interesting sidenote: my browser’s dictionary component is completely baffled by my insertion of polish dumplings into my blog. What the hell do those tech geeks eat at Christmas?  Turkey?  Aw, jeeze…..

Turkey is for Thanksgiving.  Christmas is for ham.  To quote a great, albeit fictional man, “this isn’t Viet Nam, Smokey. There are rules!”

But I digress. (As you know I do–you even knew I was going to say that, didn’t you? Don’t worry, though–it’s part of my idiom.)

So, um. Food. I like to eat, and what’s strange is that I like to cook even a little more than I like to eat.  I don’t go in for exotica–I’m not a foodie–a person who is to food what pervert is to sex (and I’m a Democrat, so you know how weird things need to get before I start throwing around the word “pervert.”  Think: things they do to each other in Finland at the height of winter, when the sun never rises.) I have a friend who is like that with beets. She eats the shit out of beets in ways you don’t even want to imagine–I’m ribbing her.  She’s actually an incredible cook.

I don’t cook Beets.  I ate Caviar once and that qualifies me lifetime refusal to eat anything I find objectionable, for any reason, ever. Like foie gras, for example–or liver of any kind. Ever wonder why pretentious people who would not under any circumstance share a toothbrush with a blood relative could enthusiastically gulp down the organ responsible for filtering out all the horrific toxins accumulated in the blood of migratory waterfowl?  Or deer, for chrissakes–have you ever seen how many ticks are stuck to a deer at any one time, every one of them happily exchanging fluids.

A truth about foie gras–more people despise it because its considered to be cruel than do because it’s definitely gross. Being practically amoral, I come down on the “gross” side–but I was disappointed when I realized that it was just method of fattening the duck that is objectionable.  When I was young, I thought that the fattened liver was stuffed back into the throat of the cooked bird, after which it’s throat was consumed, like gory flesh and muscle cannoli.