the food rant thread

[ian]

I think the honorable Clare has it. All promise and no delivery.

[Tigerrr]

Aubergines are indeed beautiful. When our daughter was 3 she fell in love with an aubergine, and it went everywhere with her, displacing all but the ragged bunny in her affections. But she was fickle and when the aubergine lost his good looks she abandoned him and selected another from the green grocers shelf. This went on for several months.

[ian]

Pumpkins. Hmm. I've never been a big fan of squashes once you pass the courgette barrier (I love courgettes, though not in the sex way, which given their shape I feel I should emphasise). Pumpkins only taste good in pumpkin pie with plenty of ice cream, in savoury recipes I find them pointlessly bland (see also the butternut squash). Shooting them is probably a good idea.

[Efrogwr]

Aubergines are hideous? Excuse me?



Mmm... yum.

I didn't say they look hideous, I said they are hideous. That is one of the problems I have with aubergines, they are incredibly beautiful to look at, they promise so much, I expect waves of supreme taste and texture under that glossy purple coat but they deliver no taste except the grease they are cooked in and have all the texture of a freshly laid cow pat.

I nearly bought some of the purple and cream ones to paint…

I'm better now. I stick to trees and rocks.

[rower40]

I discovered this at a very young age but with marmalade-making being seasonal there were insufficient supplies to last the entire year chiz.

Seville Oranges for Marmalade-molishing can be frozen without detriment to the resulting preserve.  This factoid was discovered by my Mum many years ago after bemoaning the short duration of the above fruit's availability on Cambridge market stalls, and on noting how much space her freezer really had.

(Apologies for the delay in replying, and if this has already been commented on.)

[Mr Larrington]

Initial freezer ownership at Fort Larrington roughly coincided with the Summer of Punk, first marmalade manufacture with the DETH of Buddy Holly.

[hellymedic]

Buddy Holly or Elvis Presley?

[contango]

I think the honorable Clare has it. All promise and no delivery.

I wonder how they managed to stay out of politics.

[contango]

Pumpkins. Hmm. I've never been a big fan of squashes once you pass the courgette barrier (I love courgettes, though not in the sex way, which given their shape I feel I should emphasise). Pumpkins only taste good in pumpkin pie with plenty of ice cream, in savoury recipes I find them pointlessly bland (see also the butternut squash). Shooting them is probably a good idea.

I will agree that pumpkin pie is good. It's remarkable how many things have a pumpkin variety this time of year - we get pumpkin bagels (surprisingly good), pumpkin donuts (usually pretty good), pumpkin chocolate bars (ranging from passable to grim), pumpkin muffins (good), pumpkin coffee creamer (truly awful) and so on. Just when you think it can't get in any more things it does. I recently enjoyed salted pumpkin caramels and they were remarkable good. And at $10 for a 12oz box of them they needed to be, but they were good enough that I took a box home.

Firing large pumpkins from trebuchets looks like remarkable fun, although I wouldn't want to be the guy in the boat who landed the job of scooping the pieces out of the lake. Shooting them could be interesting. A friend of mine has access to a large patch of land, and an AR-15. This could be fun.

[ian]

I have some pumpkin beer, it's the sort of thing that tastes ok for one bottle but you'd turn down the second. They are messy when shot. I used to live in Virginia. They love shooting vegetables south of the Mason Dixon especially if they're the sort of vegetable you can draw a face on. It's true though, Halloween in the US is a just a mass excuse to get rid of all the pumpkins.

I also have some pumpkin gnocchi which isn't so bad served up with sage butter.

[Jurek]

Pumpkins.
Useful for little, other than
Pumpkins.JPG by jurekb, on Flickr][/url]

[Tigerrr]

Don't American snipers and spree killers practice on pumpkins? They do in the movies anyway. Or watermelons. I guess the exploding pulp is satisfyingly brain like.

[Mr Larrington]

Edward Fox used a watermelon in "The Day Of The Jackal".

[ian]

One of my formative American experiences of guns involved pumpkins, assorted other unfortunate squash, crayfish, and the backwoods of West Virginia. For some reason I got myself invited to a crawfish boil. I'm not sure why as I like crustaceans about as much as they like me. But hey, there was the promise of beer and when in Virginia with a girl called Mary Lou and she's y'all-ing for the Dixie olympics, you go with the flow because you know where you'd like it to go. Plus she promised to show me where the Waltons lived, which turned out not to be a euphemism.

Anyway, we crossed the state line. Maps were consulted. Further and further we went, trees edging closer to the road. Daylight got more squeezed. It turned out that none of us actually knew the hosts, they were friends of someone's brother's cousin (never to try to unpick these family relationships would be my advice) who had mentioned en passant that the event was happening. So, we were basically gatecrashing a redneck party.

Now you know it's a party when you get to the end of the driveway, or rather rutted track, and there's some balloons or a banner, maybe a sign saying 'crawfish boil this way.' Not in WV, there's a big fella leaning on a pump action. Y'all here for the 'fish? I'm not arguing. Why yes, good sir we are. You ain't from round here? Sarcasm, go stand on the corner and shut the fuck up, the man has a gun.

So, anyway, another ten miles of track lands us on Planet Pick-Up truck. You know how it is when you arrive at a party underdressed. I felt undergunned. A small army would have felt undergunned. Mary Lou? Paul? Not one of us had thought to bring a weapon. These people made it look like the crawfish might be fomenting armed rebellion. They weren't going to go quietly into that oil drum of boiling cajun-spiced water.

So, in short order, beer was consumed. Two hundred and fifty pounds of crawfish met an unseemly demise, of which I ate about one. As my brain started to go sudsy rockabout, the shooting starts. Now all good Americans want to see English people shoot guns. Trust me, like the accent, it holds an ineffable attraction. So I find myself holding a small cannon in one hand and a beer in the other. Mary Lou appears with a borrowed assault rifle, looks my limply clutched handgun up and down, and shakes her head before putting a 7.62 mm round through a pumpkin far enough away to be in the next county. Suddenly, about 200 pair of eyes fall on me. Shoot the pumpkin, English. I don't think this shit ever happened on the Waltons. I don't think Mary Lou is going to offer any favours to a boy who won't kill a pumpkin so I down the beer, slug some bourbon and take aim and – every varmint in the state duck – start massacring trees. Then everyone is shooting. It's like a small war. Someone zooms by me on a quad bike with a machine gun in one hand, splattering veg left right and centre. It's like an organic veg version of Mad Max.

I've no idea how many people died that night. My ears rang for about four days. Mary Lou never looked at me quite the same. I think you shot a squirrel, she said. Collateral damage.

[Jurek]

^
Class.

[Legs]

Without meaning to toady, I sincerely believe that ian might be the funniest man on the Internet.  Keep keeping me smiling! 

[ian]

I should point out that Mary Lou was a vegetarian so very concerned about the squirrels and other woodland varmints as she thinned out the ranks of arrayed vegetables, tin cans, and scrap machinery with the kind of glee only an American clutching a semi-automatic assault rifle can exhibit.

I also had my first lesson in gun safety that day, as one of my new gun-toting buddies points the nasty end of a large shotgun at me and says 'son, never ever do this' and then jabs it at me to make the point. 'Might. Go. Off.' 'You gotta treat a gun right.' This was the same chap who was using the gun as an armrest earlier.

No one tried to shoot a crawfish to my knowledge, though they did shoot the barrel they were cooked in, a traditional sacrifice to the gods of gunpowder and freshwater crustaceans.

[Cudzoziemiec]

They have vegetarians in West Virginia? 

[fuzzy]

I got absolutely relaxed as a newt on crawfish and beer^* one evening in Baton Rouge. The Police and Fire Department made me do it. Honest Guv.

It was the close of cycle patrol convention festivities hosted by BRFD and as one of the international guests, getting really relaxed was a given, whether I wanted to or not.

I think the evening might have finished with one of the FD dudes removing the couple of yards of duct tape that had been wound round my chest earlier in the day due to rib breakage. It took some hair and skin with it.

*I think it was more the gallons of beer that did it than the pound or so of crawfish.

[Feanor]

BAck in the '80s, driving along I-10 between Houston and Nawlins, the radio stations were of only 2 kinds:

- God Squad: "Send yer cash to the Jimmy Swaggart church of Prostitutes" etc;

- Highly compressed Stadium Rock, with a promise never to play anything you've not heard a million times before, punctuated with ads for every Cajun Food Joint for miles around.   Best crawdads in town! they proclaimed.  They all seemed to prominently feature the phrase "Suck them heads!"

[ian]

Yep, suck them heads. It's a thing. Everyone slurping out those crispy little craniums like short-changed zombies.

Really, I'm not hot on the entire crustacean thing. I can manage prawns though I would rather not. I remember once in Boston trying to ignore my girlfriend dismembering a lobster when splat, guts down my front. She looks at me and says 'was that me?' Like lobster guts just rain from the sky. Not even in Maine, honey.

Oh, and Baltimore crabs. You have to, they insist. These people are monsters, after about five minutes there's bits of crab everywhere, legs, claws, bits of shell. It's like someone has dropped a daisy cutter on a beach. Carnage. I don't need to see that and I definitely don't want to eat it.

[billplumtree]

They have vegetarians in West Virginia? 

I was a bit surprised at that an'all.  Until

Yep, suck them heads. It's a thing. Everyone slurping out those crispy little craniums like short-changed zombies ... dismembering a lobster when splat, guts down my front ... bits of crab everywhere, legs, claws, bits of shell

[Cudzoziemiec]

I used to have a cow-orker from West Virginia. She was called Virginia. Really. From what she used to say, the most popular vegetable in WV must be crystal meth.

[Ruthie]

I've just been out to a leaving 'do' at a restaurant in Darlo.

It was bloody disgusting.  The service was non-existent - I'm still waiting for more parmesan on my pasta, and for my coffee, and I've been home twenty minutes.  And the seat I had was directly under a freezing cold draught which stank of fag smoke and toilets, in a kind of nasty cycle of stench.  There was a cobweb a foot long directly over my head as well.

The best thing you could say about my food was that it was edible.  It's left a kind of aftertaste, in a bad way.

The girl who'd organised it would have been mortified if I'd said anything, so I didn't, but really.  Yuck.

[David Martin]

They have vegetarians in West Virginia? 

They are the ones who have a salad with the steak..