Patrick Is Happy He Didn't Eat This

Impaled Wildlife For Sale!

You're probably sick of pictures of take out containers at this point, aren't you? OK, maybe you aren't because no one really comes to this blog expecting to see anything but take-out containers and empty plates. Which is probably why the readership is so low.

Anyways, as a special treat, here is a picture of some actual real food. (Would scorpions-on-a-stick be considered food, or impaled wild life?)

The picture is courtesy of Patrick, a friend of mine from my university days who's currently traveling the world on sabbatical.

He recently came back from Beijing where he took pictures of the local street food. He ate some of it, but took a pass on other, more "interesting" things, like the scorpions-on-a-stick and the sea-horses-on-a-stick.

One of his students tried the scorpions and said they tasted "salty". My guess is that it was incredibly awkward to eat, somewhat revolting to think about, and the student wanted to get out of eating the rest as gracefully as possible. "These are delicious, really, but I find them a bit salty for my taste. Would you like the rest?"

I mean granted, yes, we will all need to learn to eat scorpions and crickets and cockroaches once the End Times come and there isn't anything else left to eat.  But until then, I'll stick to not eating scorpions-on-a-stick, and so will Patrick.

You have to admit that display looks really pretty, though.  It looks even more impressive when you see it move!

I'll Wait For My Quinoa To Be Fully Grown Next Time

The vegetarian kick continues.

Spousal Unit decided to be creative and buy kaniwa -- which is marketed as "baby quinoa" -- instead of the regular quinoa. According to The Internets, kaniwa is The Next Great Thing in ancient grain superfoods. Because we need more superfoods to combat the supervillains that are overrunning Gotham City.

I like regular quinoa. It's a bitch to clean and cook, but it makes for a nice summer salad. Kaniwa, on the other hand, is just kinda revolting. It's tiny, mealy and bleuch.

Mush

This kaniwa salad was made with chick peas, which is everyone's favourite legume to shove into a quinoa salad. In case you aren't savvy to the whole vegetarian thing, you need to find your protein somewhere, and quinoa and chick peas are "excellent sources" of protein. Plus the softness and mellowness of the chickpeas is a nice contrast to the nuttiness, and slight crunchiness, of the quinoa.

Adding chick peas to kaniwa, however? Ugh. Because kaniwa is so small and mealy, the whole dish becomes a grainy, mushy mess. Plus kaniwa doesn't taste of anything. So eating this salad was like eating tasteless, sandy mush.

I'm lobbying to have the remaining package of kaniwa thrown away. Or, alternately, I can send it to you so you can try it out for yourself. If you exist.

Eggs: In Greasiness and In Health

My new trainer -- the 24yo ultra-buff rugby player -- practically begged me to switch from fried eggs to soft-boiled eggs for breakfast. I told him I'd try it. And I did.

It tasted less like cardboard than I expected.

It wasn't as awful as I thought it would be, but contrary to what he claimed, I still needed to sprinkle a generous amount of salt all over the eggs to make them tasty.

I had them atop honey whole wheat bread to make the breakfast super-duper ultra healthy. And that whole wheat bread? It wasn't the supermarket variety with glucose-fructose -- it was the all-natural variety from the hippy bakery. It was somewhat cardboardish, but not as much as I expected.

If you fry whole wheat bread in olive oil, it's totally healthy.

But then I slipped back into my old ways. I really wanted a tasty breakfast, so I decided to make myself Italian Hash the Way My Mom Made It. I made it with the whole wheat bread, though, so it was somewhat healthy. And the oil was olive oil, so it was heart-healthy, too! It's the, um, Mediterranean Diet.

Grocery Store Calzone

It's been a while, hasn't it?  I blame the stupid Whatever S.  It's been synching stupid lately.  Like it unpublished the Pork Dumpling post for reasons unbeknownst to me, but beknownst to it.

Anyways.  Here we are, ages later.  I've been on a vegetarian kick ever since I had that burger.   Something inside me snapped and I was like, "Fuck, I've been eating a lot of grease and animal fat of late.  This can't be healthy."

I also started training with a new trainer.   He's a 24yo ultra-buff rugby player who "indulges" by having a soft-boiled egg in the morning, yolk and all.   At the end of each training session, he asks me how my diet has been. When I said, "I had a burger for lunch yesterday" he was all, "That's OK once in a while.  As long as you don't make a habit of it."  

So I had to atone.  I mean he didn't say, "Atone for your sins, you revolting slug!" but he might as well have.  I mean, the guy's all muscle and no fat.

I am so much more than the sum of my parts

This, here, was a vegetarian calzone. I contend that it was healthy, but my dining companion said that it wasn't. She said that while each component of the calzone was, on its own, healthy, the whole was not. Feta cheese? Healthy. Tomato sauce? Healthy.  Red bell peppers? Healthy. Whole wheat crust? Healthy. Vegetarian feta cheese calzone in a whole wheat crust? Not so healthy.  Especially when washed down with a lemonade. Though, in my defense, I only drank a few sips of the lemonade.

The Burger Siren Song

I was going to get a low-fat meal of grilled chicken and vegetables.  I really, really was.

I pulled up to the place, got out and was going to go in and get that bland grilled chicken with a side of grilled vegetables (Mediterranean Style!), but then I smelled the burger place next door.

That smell!  It called to me!  It said "Snad...Snad...you want a burger!  It's tasty!  It's hot!  It comes with a side of fries!  It will taste so much better than grilled chicken and vegetables!  You know you want it!"

That siren song!  How could I resist!  I walked, trance-like, to the burger place.   It was run by three old guys.  I ordered a cheeseburger.  They had the toppings laid out, like the Harvey's of old.  It was glorious.

Beauty

I brought it to work, sat down in the lunch room, unwrapped it and watched all the men stare at it and salivate.  "Where did you get that burger?" they asked.  "Down the street," I said.  "Near the Healthy Choice place."

And I ate the whole burger.

It was glorious.

No one needed to get snooty. Snooty? Snotty! Snotty?

It was our wedding anniversary.  Spousal Unit decided that we needed to go somewhere "special" instead of the place we always go to, which has super long line-ups and doesn't take reservations because it is Trendy and so you should feel honoured that they make room for you.

Instead we went somewhere fancy.  It was a place downtown that boasts healthy, locally-sourced, blahblahblah, yaddayaddayadda food.  You know the type.

The thing about this place, though, was that we needed to dress up to go there.  Now you've never met us.   You don't even exist, so how could you have met us?  But if you did exist and if you had ever met us, you'd know that Spousal Unit and I don't really get gussied up.  We don't clean up well.

But we had to.  Because we had reservations and a sitter and whatnot.

So we put on our best outfits and showed up at the restaurant and felt like Ferris Bueller, Cameron and Sloan at Chez Quis. I kept calling Spousal Unit "Abe" and we made pancreas jokes. Of course, we didn't eat pancreas, but Spousal Unit did eat diseased duck liver (foie gras). I had the 5 course vegetarian tasting menu and Spousal Unit had the 5 course meatatarian tasting menu. This place was so good, it made tofu palatable.

It came out to a little over $200 with tax and tip, but we still were greeted with trash when we walked out.

Awwww....How nice!

Industrial Park Indian Buffet

My second visit to the Indian buffet in the industrial park south of the business park was with people who don't care if I start taking pictures of yucky plates. 

Dahl is awesome.

A friend of mine said that the place was still too new to have started sucking, so we figured we'd go there as often as possible til it started sucking.

The place is pretty damned good.  I mean, it's not the best Indian food ever, but it's pretty good for an industrial park buffet.  And it has bottomless baskets of naan!  Bottomless. Baskets. Of.  Naan.

Gulab jamun (jamon?), aka "warm sweet balls".

The naan was good.  The fish was weird.  The desserts were awesome.  And we all sat around enraptured with the Bollywood movie playing on the TVs in the restaurant.