Sheep’s Eyes and OctoPodia?!?

Exotic foods are a veritable minefield, I’ve learned the hard way. First, the definition of the word “exotic” is often misleading. For some reason, people tend to immediately connect it with the Orient, or tropical islands, or the Third World, and not necessarily in that order.

It never strikes them that us “designated exotic” types might find them equally so. For example, I’m from India and I live in Indonesia. This, I have found, makes me double-whammy-exotic to, for instance, a Scandinavian. To me, swallowing live eels is exotic. (I know they do that someplace, don’t they?!) And I don’t mean in a fun, haha kind of way either. Something live, slithering down your oesophagus?!? ackkkk! ( See what I mean?)

“Exotic” simply means “from another land; not native to the place where found”. It comes from the Greek “exo”, meaning “there”. And “there” as we all know, is definitely not “here”.

"There" is foreign, alien and unfamiliar and sometimes downright scary. Also intriguingly different, possibly mysterious and often exciting. And yes, “strange” and “odd” often have walk-on parts somewhere in the overall picture.

I’d like to believe I’m adventurous enough to try (nearly!) anything once…as long as it doesn’t move, look me in the eye or talk back to me. But the persona that believes this, generally manages to go missing when, say, a plate of sheep’s eyes is plunked on the table. Or a baby octopus with all its little suckers on display, attached to all 8 podia, attached to the head.

I have a whole bunch of "exotic" bad food stories, but there are still a lot of countries on my “tovisitsometimesoon” list so naturally, I would not like to go into too much detail here. Who knows who I might offend, and I certainly don't want to be denied a visa. So those stories will just have to wait until I’ve beenthere, donethat!

chokesputtergasp!!!

Oh dear. Now, this is NOT a personal, caffeine-powered assault on my Fellow BloGGee, though it might come out sounding that way in bits. Fact is, one of the several million words BANISHED from my lexicon practically since the day I learnt to speak, is Decaf. Banished for the next 10 millenia at LEAST.

I am passionate about many things, some of them entirely incomprehensible even to me. Snails, for example. Coffee. My collection of trolls. Coffee. My chin hairs. Coffee. (...shhhh...I'm trying to be subtle here and just slip the coffee in subliminally so nobody notices.)

Any form of Java abuse (and you must know Decaf is the most heinous of the lot), raises my hackles and causes me to take refuge in Righteous Indignation.

Of course, everyone has a right to choose Decaf over Java. But conceptually, I don't get it. I mean, coffee is about caffeine. Take the caffeine away, and what are you left with? You get my drift, right? It's like taking the cocoa out of chocolate. The fat out of butter. The fibre out of bran. The chicken out of the soup. The brain out of a head. I mean, I could go on.

I've heard stories from World War II (no, I was NOT around then) about ersatz milk, made from flour and leftover bits of shoelace. Ersatz eggs, made from extruded corn and earthworms. Ersatz chocolate, made from old brown shoes. And yes, ersatz coffee, made from roasted almond shells.

Okay so I might have got some of the ingredients mixed up, but the important thing is that all this stuff was trying to be other stuff, which it just intrinsically wasn't. I suppose you could call it impostering.

Those days, during the war years, they had good reason to make stuff that looked like stuff that it really wasn't because nobody could get hold of the real thing but everybody lusted after it anyway. Those were times of serious deprivation, pretty much the way life continues to be for millions in the "Third World" (which, coincidentally, I originate from) ...

So anyway, back then, they were probably getting rather tired of extruded corn and such, and one fine day decided to call the whole goopy mess "scrambled eggs." Similarly, somebody must have looked at a pile of almond shells after the almonds had been roasted, and thought "aha, extension-of-use chocolate substitute possibility!"

Now, when you raise gustatory expectations to such elevated levels, the mind will get fooled into believing anything. Call it auto-suggestion, mass hypnosis, whatever. Evidently, it worked.

In fact, it worked so well that even the kids and the soldiers at the front were fooled. And we know how discriminating that lot can be. But, "by golly! they even TASTE kindoflikeeggs/chocolate/whatever it's masquerading as!!!" was the standard refrain. They actually ATE the stuff, instead of pretending they had a stomach-ache and needed to go to the loo.

To get back to my original point, which I seem to have briefly lost along the way: Decaf is NOT coffee. It is un-coffee, piggybacking on the whole coffee-as-legend appeal of "the real thing". So trying to retain even a nebulous connection by tracing back lineage to the noble coffee bean is just a low-down trick. Everybody realizes this. As a result, people have finally stopped ordering Decaf Coffee. Today, they just say, "Make mine Decaf." I guess it's a "More-Aligned-to-the-Truth" kind of thang.

So now you see my point?? It seems the Decaf is finally out of the coffee and will go down in history as just another aspiring wannabe. In some countries, they SHOOT aspiring wannabees.

Be right back, I need my gun.

Cross Dresser?!?

Okay, we’re talking clothes. I guess I must be a cross dresser. I have my reasons, foremost of which is I wake up like a bear with a sore head, usually around midday. I am lethal till the caffeine kicks in and the nicotine pumps up the cardio, which could take from an hour to a couple of years on a bad day.

As you can imagine, this is never a good time for decisions. Unfortunately, I have a meeting in a couple of hours, and I still need to print out the presentation I stayed up all night doing. So deciding what I want to wear is just about the last thing I am thinking about.

I need to insta-grow 3 heads, 10 arms and six pairs of feet trying to multi-task: coffee, cig, underwear, printer’s out of paper, WHAT is this error message, can’t find printer??? It’s right HERE! See? Damn, the cat pulled the wires loose. Uh oh, phone ringing. Client says can we prepone the meeting? Clothes. Shower. Whattowearwhattowear? Pull out the entire closet. Then spot the same thing I wore for the last meeting. For about 8 or 10 last meetings. Damn. Nothing to wear. Catttttt! GET out of my coffeeeeeeee! Never mind, just wear it one more time. Ok, let’s go. GOGOGO!

Ok, so mornings are bad. I already told you that. I just get progressively more grumpy. So yes, I’m a cross dresser. Now if all this happened backwards, and we had to dress at the END of the day instead of the beginning, I can bet I wouldn’t be half as cross. No, really!

Chocoholics Unanimous

I sat here this morning, reading this utterly foodcentric, chocolate-infested bloGG and suddenly suffered a massive insulin surge, which sent me into InstantChocolateOverdrive. I made a dash for the fridge, which took me all of 3 secs., my best personal time ever. The fridge yielded one of those monstrous half-kilo slabs of some new Swiss uber-milk chocolate layered with cream and biscuit (I know, it sounds ultrayuck&bleaagh, but believe me...it is to DIEIEIE for), which I had actually kept safe (from myself) for friends' kids who sometimes come to visit.

Considering I am usually rather fastidious in my choco-consumption habits… Lindt Extra-dark Ultra-thins get top billing...this milk-choco phenomenon is a radical departure from the norm. I contemplate the packaging at length. Since I’m working on my will power, I resist the temptation to rip the choco-wrapper open immediately. 10 seconds later, I give up the unequal fight and enter into the sacred ritual of ripping open the box-pack. Then I attempt to sensibly tear open the foil pack, so I can fold the foil neatly over the remainder of the slab before putting it away. Instead, the struggle is so intense, I end up with a mangled mass of melted chocolate (body heat from hot, grasping hands will do that), with bits of foil embedded in it.

They make high-tech packaging these days: tamper-proof, nuke-proof and insect-proof, which of course also happens to make it human-proof. (At this point, I bodily attack and consume a quarter-slab of aforementioned hapless chocolate. Just like that. Gone!)

If you persist in ripping ANY kind of modern-day food packs open with bare hands, as I usually do, for no reason other than rooting around for a switchblade or a heavy duty meat cleaver (I don't do scissors) would simply deflect me from my immediate purpose... well then you know exactly how this little saga plays out. (By now of course, I have devoured half of the half-kilo slab of choc in question. But shhhh...)

First, you need to rip open the external packaging, generally a box or carton of some sort. And no, it’s not that simple. Any and all food/drink/snacks these days come either tetra-packed, or vacuum-sealed, or hermetically deranged, and all of them wear chastity belts. Some stuff comes boxed in cartons that are reinforced with plastic fused onto them or into them. Plastic, as you know, is indestructible and resistant to barehanded tearing. (I know ALL about this; I’ve dismembered about 98,753 varieties of packaging to research this piece. All in the last one week. Burp.) I think this is the packaging industry's subtle way of keeping us away from junk food. Either that, or they're in cahoots with the household cleaning-liquid manufacturers.(Ahh, only two squares left, not much point saving them for later...)

While all this fancy-schmancy packaging material might keep things hygenic, fresh and safe to consume, it just makes it pretty damn impossible to rip packs open without spraying/spilling/slopping approximately 3/4ths of the contents into your lap/onto the rug/all over the bed. (Messy, messy. Now GO clean that up!) Ahh, but we consumers are wise to this little trick by now, which is why we buy 6 bags of crisps and 10 bags of cornflakes and etc. etc. a week. So no matter how much of it lands on the floor, there's always another bag to to rip open. (You know why more cornflakes get deposited on the floor than any other food group? People are still SLEEPY when they do breakfast!) ZzZzZzZz...

And, hey!!! Who finished my chocolate??!

Sorry about the roses, would chrysanthemums do?

.

© Priya Tuli

Pass the whine please, somebody?

Wine. Whine. What a difference an ‘h’ makes. Though it could be a natural progression. If you’d indulged in too much of the first, say, you could end up armpit-deep in the second. No? Hmmm…

Well anyway, as the saying goes, there is wine and there is wine. And while I probably couldn’t tell my Chablis from my Chardonnay, Oi knows wot Oi loiks and it woiks fer moi! For instance, did you know that Cyprus produces a great white (no, not shark, doofus, WINE!) called KEO Hock, which is wonderful chilled, on a hot summer afternoon as you pick at a big platter of nifty nibbles, whiling away the time when you should actually be Doing Something Productive? Or that Yugoslav reds are a darn sight more finessed than your average, over-rated French table wine, 'apellation controllee' be hanged, and a whole lot cheaper, too? Or that South Africa produces some kick-ass wines, and I didn’t even know you could grow grapes there?

Apart from the whole Romance of Wine thing, though, which is big business I might inform you, there’s all that other kerfuffle to deal with. The cobweb-festooned cellars with bottles dating back to the Neolithic Age, and the whole fuss and foobabble about uncorking it and letting it breathe (what??? all this pollution will RUIN the bouquet!) and then ceremoniously pouring 3 drops into an enormous glass and sniffing at it (atchoooo!) for ten minutes, making polite little society noises all the while...well hell, I’d just as easily just drink it straight off the bottle, and often do. Which is probably why my last 3 applications for French citizenship have been consecutively turned down. Hic.

Now, I was thinking, if I could somehow convince the Italians that having me on board might boost the anti-French-wine lobby, and considering I haven’t said a nasty WORD yet about Chianti, they would probably reward me in the customarily generous Mediterranean way. I could then buy an island in Greece, nothing too opulent, mind you, just a villa or two with the Elgin Marbles strategically placed amidst the topiary, and a sweeping expanse or two of private beach, a schooner with a gorgeous captain and a Learjet with a hunky pilot standing by, for quick weekend visits to nearby islands or even the Hebrides, if the mood should suddenly take me...hic...ahh yes...

But no, to get back to reality, what I do find more than a little upsetting is my latest discovery. I was absolutely aghast to find that some pretty damned GOOD bottled wines now come with a PLASTIC cork. Here, let me say that again. PLASTIC CORK. It doesn't even make sense. A cork is a cork, right? Wrong, it isn't, not any more! Soon they'll be selling wine in plastic jerrycans, and let me tell you, that will pretty much be the end of THAT.

And then you have Aussie wine, which comes in bladders made of aluminium foil with a plastic tap attached! Well of COURSE you don't get to see the bladder because it's disguised...cleverly encased in a fancy cardboard 'cask', butbutbut foil?!? Doesn't that change the specific gravity of stuff and mess with the molecular composition and cause horrid green warts in places I dare not even mention?!? No? Well, it SHOULD!!!

SO as I was saying, about the wine. Hic. And did you know that in Greece, it’s called krassi: kokkino (red) and aspro (white) and isn’t that a SILLY name for a headache pill?!? Hic. ANd in a Greek taverna, you don't order wine by the jug or carafe, they'd think you were daft. You order it by the KILO. How macho is that?!? Or if you're a lily-livered coward, by the half-kilo, or even the glass. Be warned, however, that if your metric system is congenitally defective like mine is, it could cause you the beejeezus of a hangover next day.

So anyway, no matter what they say about wine being good for you/not good for you/good for you/not good for you, the sad fact of the matter is that it actually gives a lot of people severe heartburn... myself included. This is a documented scientific fact, by the way. Hic. Apparently, it rips into your stomach, causing it to unreasonably squirt hydrochloric acid at every shadow that passes by your window. It does all sorts of damage to your GI (as in Gastro-Intestinal) tract, including murdering the villi (go on, look it up in the dictionary you lazy sod) and insulting the transverse colon. It also causes you to giggle hysterically once you've crossed the one-kilo mark, but who's counting. Hic. And does any of this stop us from imbibing it? No way, Jose! Which is probably why whine is spelled the way it is. Hic.
Oh ughh...pleeeease pass the Alka Seltzer?

"W-all dente"...

One last WallStory, and I'm done. Or rather, the spaghetti is. You know, of course, how to check if your spaghetti is done 'al dente'...toss some at the nearest wall. If it sticks, it's perfect; if it slithers down like an eel on steroids, it needs more doing; if it wraps itself tightly around your neck, you need an exorcist and don't forget to hang some garlic out by the front door to confuse the vampires.

So way back when I was in my extended PleasePassTheParmigianoWithEverything phase, it was pasta whenever I had friends over to dinner. For three good reasons: 1. Everybody loves pasta; 2. It's the easiest thing to do; and 3. If you organize it right, you also get wall-art for free.

The last point evolved slowly, from a stray al-dente test that went public one evening, to a full-fledged tradition that typically consumed a whole pot of this-is-for-the-wall pasta at least once a month.

It all began one Friday evening after work, when some friends stopped by for a drink, and stayed on for dinner. I was checking to see if the pasta was done, when one of them walked into the kitchen and loudly asked why I was flinging the dinner at the wall. And if I was doing it, he wanted to do it too. Suddenly, everybody is in the kitchen, the noise has woken the neighbour's dogs who are barking their heads off, and steaming hot spaghetti is flailing through the air leaving contrails, slapping into faces and splatting onto everything in sight.

Dinner, of course, was by then incidental. But we had established a pasta-flinging tradition which continued for several years, albeit with a minor adjustment.

Since the kitchen was miniscule, the wall behind the dining table became the designated 'W-all dente'. As time went by, I learnt that hunger puts an edge on the appetite AND the wall art. Since dinner was rarely served before midnight, several guests would have customarily dozed off, standing straight up. The rest, having imbibed enough 85 proof alcohol to render their pasta-throwing techniques wildly inspirational, would set upon the hapless mass of steaming spaghetti and toss it at said wall with gay abandon and greater gusto.

Tossing styles varied, with everyone intent on perfecting their personal flick-of-the-wrist technique. This made for intricate slither-trails, with overdone strands melded to the wall at the point of contact, ends curling in disdain as they dried. Regular dinnertime returnees would closely inspect the wall to see if their last pasta throw was still up, with their signatures, or had been replaced by newer, more artistic tosses...with other signatures.

While it's all jolly good fun while it's actually happening, I must say here that pasta art is at its best when it's fresh. It is not the sort of thing you want to wake up to on a Saturday morning and contemplate for any length of time. Besides which, dried-on-the-wall pasta is difficult to remove, and sometimes annexes bits of plaster and wall when you try and rip it off.

By now, the 'W-all Dente' was looking positively leprous, despite all my attempts at patching it up with putty and giving it a lick of fresh paint once every few months.

And then, the disaster of the dried-on spaghetti neapolitan. This was never the plan, mind you, but pasta artists six sails to the wind do not take kindly to "NO sauce!" rules. One night, an entire plateful of pasta- sauce, fork and all- found itself hurled at the Wall. I assure you, right then it was a whole lot funnier than it sounds. Abject apologies from the inebriated pasta-thrower in question, coupled with his inept attempts at a clean-up, provoked me into throwing several pods of garlic at him in quick succession.

By next morning, I began to see that the Universe was trying to tell me something. I was fresh out of 'al dente' wallspace. The lease was up in 2 weeks and the landlord, an ogre, wanted a rent increase I couldn't afford. Last night's spaghetti was still leering at me off the Wall, with bits of tomato adhering to it, looking like I don't even want to SAY what...and the neighbours had deposited a pile of dog poo at my gate. Maybe it was time to move house?