I don’t know about you guys, but I am sooooo fully of turkey and stuffing and mashed taters and pecan pie right now. And it was so good.
Here’s hoping your Thanksgiving was as full of good food and memories as ours was.
I understand the appeal of pet ownership and I also understand that the more exotic a pet the more it can cost to acquire. Snakes aren’t my thing, but some folks like keeping them and some of them can cost a pretty penny. So it’s not entirely surprising to me that some folks would engage in silly competitions for the chance to win an expensive snake. What I can’t understand is why anyone would consider snakes, or any other expensive pet, worth eating cockroaches over.
But apparently I’m in the minority in that opinion as a contest held at Ben Siegel Reptiles in West Palm Beach required contestants to do just that and several people signed up to participate.
Alas, for contestant Edward Archbold it would be the last meal he’d ever consume:
Edward Archbold, 32, collapsed after winning the repulsive contest at Ben Siegel Reptile Store. Archbold, who was competing for a free python, was stricken outside the Deerfield Beach business, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office.
Investigators reported that Archbold “wasn’t feeling well and began to regurgitate” shortly after the contest’s conclusion. “He had consumed dozens of roaches and worms,” a sheriff’s spokesman noted.
Archbold was pronounced dead after being transported to an area hospital. An autopsy was conducted, and the Broward County medical examiner is awaiting test results to determined Archbold’s cause of death.
On the positive side, he won the contest.
If I had to guess I suspect he may have had an allergic reaction. Eating bugs isn’t particularly dangerous in itself if they’re cleaned and cooked, but live insects can carry a number of potentially problematic diseases (read: e. coli and salmonella, among others) not to mention possibly pesticides.
Knowing all of that, I still wouldn’t eat cockroaches — live or otherwise — unless I was starving and had nothing else at hand. Certainly not for an expensive pet. Very few bugs, uh, bug me, but roaches are at the top of that short list. I couldn’t tell you why. I’ve never had to live in a roach infested home and my encounters with them over the years have been few and very far between, but they give me the heebie jeebies.
Yeah, it kind of feels like that.
The impetus for this question came to me while brushing my teeth this morning and being reminded that I had burned the roof of my mouth on the left side the night before by digging into my wife’s homemade chicken noodle soup before giving it time to cool. I do this every damned time she makes CNS because it’s just so damned tasty that I can’t wait to start in on it.
I always think to myself: Remember, you burned your mouth last time so give it time to cool. And inevitably I still start too soon and end up with a singed gum line someplace in my mouth. What the hell is wrong with me that I can’t give it a good five or ten minutes to let thermodynamics do its thing and make it safe to eat? It’s not like it’s going to jump off the table and run away or that I have any pressing engagements to worry about.
So I’m curious: Do you guys have any foods that you find so delicious that you end up burning your mouth trying to eat them too soon or am I the only dumbass who does this sort of thing?
Anyone who has spent any amount of time barely making ends meet, like me and my wife currently are, knows that sometimes when shopping for food you have no choice but to go with the cheap stuff. Which is how I came to be eating a can of Southgate Beef Stew this evening. That’s a brand I hadn’t even heard of previously and I’m not even sure where we got it from. I normally would be reluctant to even try it, but when you end up with weeks like this one where the bank account is literally at $0 available until Friday you start looking at the stuff that’s been in the cupboard for awhile.
So I grabbed the can opener and dumped the contents into a bowl and slapped it into the microwave which is right about the time I took a close look at the label on the can. This is what I saw:
Just like what Grandma used to heat up!
Yeah, that just rolls right off the tongue suggesting a savoriness of a unique and special kind. I always get a little nervous when something on the label sounds as generic as possible or includes the word PRODUCT in it. Just what the fuck is TEXTURED VEGETABLE PROTEIN PRODUCT anyway?
Turns out it’s pretend meat:
TVP is made from a mixture of proteins extracted primarily from soybeans, but also cotton seeds, wheat and oats. It is extruded into various shapes (chunks, flakes, nuggets, grains, and strips) and sizes, exiting the nozzle while still hot and expanding as it does so. The defatted thermoplastic proteins are heated to 150-200°C, which denatures them into a fibrous, insoluble, porous network that can soak up as much as three times its weight in liquids. As the pressurized molten protein mixture exits the extruder, the sudden drop in pressure causes rapid expansion into a puffy solid that is then dried. As much as 50% protein when dry, TVP can be rehydrated at a 2:1 ratio, which drops the percentage of protein to an approximation of ground meat at 16%. High quality TVP can be mixed with ground meat to a ratio of up to 1:3 (rehydrated TVP to meat) without reducing the quality of the final product, sometimes improving it if the meat used is poor. TVP is primarily used as a meat substitute due to its very low cost at less than a third the price of ground beef, and when cooked together will help retain more weight from the meat by absorbing juices normally lost.
It’s commonly used in “Vegan” versions of foods normally made with ground beef. Or, as in this case, in cheap foods to lower the cost. The clinical nature of its name makes it sound somewhat suspect, but it’s actually used in a lot of stuff. You can buy it in bulk and there are lots of sites on the web with recipes for it. All things considered it’s probably the last thing in that stew I should’ve been concerned about.
As for the stew itself, well, it tasted like cheap stew. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything that I’d develop cravings for either. It did the job of Food-as-Fuel that I needed it to do this evening ensuring that I’ll survive long enough to see better days with more flavorful foods.
Ah the stupid things young people will do on a dare. Down in Sydney, Australia a young man is fighting for his life after eating a slug infected with rat lungworm:
The 21-year-old contracted rat lungworm disease – a rare form of meningitis – after the stunt.
Rat lungworm disease is caused by Angiostrongylus cantonensis, a parasitic worm that is carried in the pulmonary arteries of rats. Larvae are excreted in the rat’s droppings, which are often eaten by slugs and snails.
The disease can cause fatal swelling of the brain and spinal cord.
I’m sure everyone is very impressed at the size of your balls for nearly killing yourself over a stupid dare. Next up perhaps you’ll attempt to choke to death swallowing a live gold fish?
Remember kids, if you’re going to eat slugs be sure to cook them properly first.
I went upstairs to find something for lunch and I settled on a Marie Callender’s Creamy Parmesan Chicken Pot Pie we had in the feezer. While I was reading the instructions on the packaging for how to microwave it I noticed the following final step:
If that’s still too hard to read what it says is that I should use a food thermometer to check and make sure that the inside of the pot pie has reached 165 degrees.
Now I know we’ve had a lot of problems with the safety of our food supply over the last year or two. And I’m aware that food producers are always going to cover their asses anytime they feel it’s necessary. But does anyone actually ever do this?
I know i don’t. I don’t think I even own a food thermometer and even if I did I wouldn’t bother using it to check the temperature of my pot pies. It just seems… silly. A blatant CYA move by the pot pie folks. Doubt it would stop them from being sued if one of their pies ended up killing someone. Still I suppose they have to try.
The folks over at the Consumerists have an entry about how dangerous Denny’s food is:
Denny’s entrees are loaded with dangerous amounts of salt, according to a class action suit filed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The CDC recommends consuming no more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium each day, but some Denny’s entrees contain a whopping 5,500 milligrams.
No Denny’s dish contain less than 500 milligrams of sodium, and 75% of them contain more than the maximum recommended allowance
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever eaten at a Denny’s. I love the taste of salt as so I tend to find Denny’s food to be better tasting than it probably really is, but I make point not to eat there too often because it is so salty. It’d probably be best not to ever eat there, but occasionally you find yourself awake at 2AM and hungry and it’s one of the few places still open. It’s a guilty pleasure which will probably lead to my death someday, but that damned sampler is just so tasty!
Anne and I work on different shifts—I’m mornings and she’s afternoons—and have different days off so there’s only three days out of the week that we see each other in a conscious state (read: when one or the other isn’t asleep in bed already). This means that I have to fend for myself for dinner on the four nights that she’s working and while I’m quite capable of cooking I am a bit out of practice. Anne has tried to make it easy on me by buying TV dinners that can be tossed into the microwave. It was while preparing one the other night that it struck me what a great example of Fantasy versus Reality these are. The meal in question wasn’t a particularly amazing one to begin with, a frozen Banquet brand Chicken Fingers meal, but the picture on the box made it look pretty good:
Not too shabby. Sure the chicken fingers look like cardboard, but the mac and cheese looks fairly appetizing and that brownie is damn near perfect. Still, I’m an intelligent guy. It’s clear someone went through a lot of trouble to arrange that food in such a way as to make it look as appealing as possible. I’m not so credulous to expect that the reality will be close to what’s being depicted on that box.
That said I still wasn’t prepared to face the reality of the actual product after being through my microwave. Here’s what I sat down to eat:
Holy crap on a cracker! What the fuck is that shit? OK, the chicken fingers are at least recognizable. Somehow they manage to look even more unappetizing than they do on the box, but at least I can tell what they are. The mac and cheese looks like some sort of industrial byproduct that might come to life and claw its way out of the little plastic serving tray, but it too is recognizable. That brownie, though.
My first thought was: Who the hell shit in my Banquet Chicken Fingers dinner when I wasn’t looking? I mean WTF? It was almost enough to make me not eat it, but as it turns out that fucking disgusting brownie was arguably the best tasting thing on that little tray. The chicken fingers themselves tasted like soggy cardboard with a ton too much of salt on them, and that comes from someone who loves his salt. The mac and cheese tasted like vaguely indeterminate “cheeze” flavored rubber. The brownie tasted like a brownie, albeit one made with cement, but a brownie just the same.
Even for someone who’s smart enough to realize the box is an impossible vision dreamed up by an over-paid marketing department that could never be matched in reality, facing that reality was more than a little disappointing. You’d like to believe that the box art is at least a fair approximation of the final product, but it’s almost always far from it. It just amazed me how far from it it really is.
Just sayin’ is all.
In all fairness I also must say that Jell-o brand sugar free gelatin tastes pretty good. So one out of two isn’t too shabby. Avoid the sugar free pudding and scarf down the sugar free gelatin.
One of the perks of working for my current employer is that they allow us to partake of a large selection of free drinks and snacks on our breaks and over lunch. In addition to the usual assortment of various bags of chips and random candy bars there’s a few healthy (or more healthy at least) alternatives to choose from. Amongst the pre-packaged single-serving bowls of cereal, for example, are some Kellogg’s Special K and something called GOLEAN Crunch! from Kashi foods. Being that I often have a bowl of cereal when I get here in the morning I’ve been trying to avoid the temptation of the Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops (a long time favorite of mine) in favor of the GOLEAN Crunch. Here’s the ad copy from their website:
Kashi GOLEAN Crunch! cereal will satisfy your sweet cravings in a low fat, healthy way. With 9 grams of protein and 8 grams of fiber, GOLEAN Crunch! has more than twice the protein and fiber of the average cereal, so you stay full until your next meal!
Whether you’re enjoying a bowl of GOLEAN Crunch! for breakfast, using it as a topping for yogurt, or snacking right out of the box, you’ll love these crunchy clusters made from Kashi Seven Whole Grains & Sesame™. They’re naturally sweetened with a touch of honey and cinnamon, then toasted to perfection for a hearty crunch.
It certainly sounds healthy enough so I gave it a try and found it to be quite tasty for a (supposedly) healthy food. There’s just one problem with it: It turns me into a walking and talking natural gas reserve. And when I say that it gives me gas I don’t mean that it causes me to fart once or twice later in the day. No, I’m talking in a all the national gas companies are in a bidding war over rights to my ass way. As in I’m beginning to get worried I’m going to float away way. As in you don’t dare bend over lest you let rip with the flatulence heard ‘round the world way. In case you’re too obtuse to catch my drift, I’m talking some serious gas production.
This would be bad enough at home, but it’s even worse when you’re at work at a job that requires a fair amount of stretching, bending, and reaching – all of which put you at risk of squeaking at a decibel level impossible to conceal – in a room with some 100+ other people. The one upside is that there are so many fans in operation along with the AC that any potentially offensive smells are quickly dispersed. Not that these emissions are particularly odorous (surprisingly they aren’t), but that doesn’t help you much when 30 people suddenly look to see who started up the chainsaw in their midst only to realize that it wasn’t a chainsaw.
And the gas just kind of sneaks up on you too. You’re fine one minute and then the next you feel like your intestines are about to explode out of your abdomen. So you try to hurry to the closest bathroom so you can at least fart in an environment that most people will grudgingly accept as appropriate, but you can’t hurry too quickly because if you move too fast you start sounding like you’re on a mini-bike as you putt-putt-putt along your merry way. Trying to hold the gas in for any amount of time is just stupidly dangerous and only makes the inevitable expulsion that much worse. Though if you’ve ever wondered what Mount St. Helens felt like before it blew its top then it’s one way to find out.
The thing I don’t understand is that when you compare the amount of food in that single serving bowl (roughly 2.6 oz or 73 grams) the amount of gas produced seems exponentially higher. I know it’s not possible, but at times I swear my digestive system is violating the first law of thermodynamics. I’m probably contributing way more than my share of greenhouse gases by trying to eat a healthy breakfast and I’m beginning to think I’m going to have to offset my carbon ass-print by switching back to Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops. I’m not doing it for me, but for the sake of humanity. Or at least my fellow coworkers.