Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Horrendous Foods
I have discovered the book, "Wild Fermentation" by Sandor Katz and, as he says, I've been infected by fermentation fervor. I've started a batch of Gundru, Nepalese bitter greens pickles and I'm onto the second stage of distillation of my first ever batch of wine. The wine is dandelion. I recommend making your own hooch (HAH! Hooch jokes. always funny) but I do not recommend making it from dandelions.
A gallon doesn't sound like a lot of flowers, does it? It is. It is an even more mind-boggling amount when you take into account that dandelions are small and fluffy. You're going to remove the green parts, which are the bulk of the flower because they make the wine bitter. So you spend two days harvesting the stupid things and a week cutting the green parts from them. At this point you discover that you've only got half the amount you need. You're pissed and bored and your fingernails are all stained green and when you went to the wine supply store they told you that the flowers don't add flavor, just color so "Fuck it, cut 'em up" and you just dump that shit in there anyway.
*hyperventilates for a moment*
Anyway. So I've somehow gotten really into cooking and slow food. Seriously. I cook my own beans from dry beans (24 hours), I bake my own bread (3 hours) and now I'm making my own pickles (a week) and wine (3 months). Somehow this started a discussion w/ my friend Graeme about food and weird shit that people eat. These are the top five-ish disgusting foods that I can recall from my life of outgoing eating.
Gravlax - Let's pack a fish in moss and bury it underground for a year! I bet that'll be tasty....hm, or it'll just taste like moss. Until I had gravlax I'd never eaten anything that tasted like mold, smoke and dark green.
Lutefisk - "We have lots of fish. Let's soak it in lye until it turns to jelly and then wash the lye out with another caustic chemical and eat it!" Though the idea of eating fish jelly is appealing you can only have 3 mouthfuls of it before you are struck with violent and long-lasting runs. Ppl who routinely eat lutefisk think this is charming and hilarious. Diarrhea is never charming and rarely hilarious. I use lye often. Know what for? Making soap. I don't want to eat that either.
Who thinks, "Hey, when we touch this stuff to our skin it bubbles and gives horrible burns and hurts like getting anal raped. Let's make food with it!"
Haggis - Well, I've never had it, but I'm vaguely to really grossed out by most sausage (yes, even American favorite, hot dogs), so this doesn't sound tasty and it smells really bad. Incidentally Durian smells really bad but tastes like custard, so maybe Haggis isn't too bad.
Natto - Do NOT google pictures of this unless you're not planning on eating any time soon. It's the worst of the soybean ferments. I don't know how it went so horribly wrong. The other soybean ferments are great. I love soy milk, shoyu, tamari, tofu and tempeh. Natto is one of the fewer-than 5 things I've ever eaten in my life that I had to immediately spit out for fear that I might vomit if I swallowed it. Still I retched for the next few minutes. If someone with a yeast infection pissed on a shoe and made that into cheese from the athlete's foot in the shoe, that's what Natto tastes like. Plus it's gooey-slimy.
Kim-Chee - It's cabbage, which I don't like, added to Daikon, which I also don't like. Then you're going to add spices and put it in a jar and stick it in the sun until it gets moldy and tastes like hell? No. That's cool. Everyone I know likes Kim-Chee so every once in a while I try it again and I still hate it. It still tastes like vegetables that I don't like allowed to rot and then made spicy.
Just about anything made in Malaysia, but especially fermented fish head soup, bulls dick soup and fish sauce. They're REALLY big on fermenting or rotting shit in Malaysia. It's understandable b/c they're a large population that until very recently had relatively abundant food resources but no access to refrigeration and a humid climate (so unsuitable for preserving food by drying). That it's understandable doesn't make it any tastier.
When I was a kid we had a Malaysian missionary stay with us. He was SO happy to be making some kind of delicacy they have there. It had like, eggs and fish and onions or something. It was in a big earthenware crock that was in the carport and he was going to open it up for the first time in front of mom when it was done. She made me come with her. It smelled so bad that I threw up on my shoes. That was the ONE time I didn't have to eat the crap he made. He was embarrassed, Mom was mortified and I couldn't look the guy in the eye for weeks. Thinking about it almost 20 years later still turns my stomach. It was like...bodies and onions and...I don't know, the same spicy smell Kimchee has. God it was awful.
A gallon doesn't sound like a lot of flowers, does it? It is. It is an even more mind-boggling amount when you take into account that dandelions are small and fluffy. You're going to remove the green parts, which are the bulk of the flower because they make the wine bitter. So you spend two days harvesting the stupid things and a week cutting the green parts from them. At this point you discover that you've only got half the amount you need. You're pissed and bored and your fingernails are all stained green and when you went to the wine supply store they told you that the flowers don't add flavor, just color so "Fuck it, cut 'em up" and you just dump that shit in there anyway.
*hyperventilates for a moment*
Anyway. So I've somehow gotten really into cooking and slow food. Seriously. I cook my own beans from dry beans (24 hours), I bake my own bread (3 hours) and now I'm making my own pickles (a week) and wine (3 months). Somehow this started a discussion w/ my friend Graeme about food and weird shit that people eat. These are the top five-ish disgusting foods that I can recall from my life of outgoing eating.
Gravlax - Let's pack a fish in moss and bury it underground for a year! I bet that'll be tasty....hm, or it'll just taste like moss. Until I had gravlax I'd never eaten anything that tasted like mold, smoke and dark green.
Lutefisk - "We have lots of fish. Let's soak it in lye until it turns to jelly and then wash the lye out with another caustic chemical and eat it!" Though the idea of eating fish jelly is appealing you can only have 3 mouthfuls of it before you are struck with violent and long-lasting runs. Ppl who routinely eat lutefisk think this is charming and hilarious. Diarrhea is never charming and rarely hilarious. I use lye often. Know what for? Making soap. I don't want to eat that either.
Who thinks, "Hey, when we touch this stuff to our skin it bubbles and gives horrible burns and hurts like getting anal raped. Let's make food with it!"
Haggis - Well, I've never had it, but I'm vaguely to really grossed out by most sausage (yes, even American favorite, hot dogs), so this doesn't sound tasty and it smells really bad. Incidentally Durian smells really bad but tastes like custard, so maybe Haggis isn't too bad.
Natto - Do NOT google pictures of this unless you're not planning on eating any time soon. It's the worst of the soybean ferments. I don't know how it went so horribly wrong. The other soybean ferments are great. I love soy milk, shoyu, tamari, tofu and tempeh. Natto is one of the fewer-than 5 things I've ever eaten in my life that I had to immediately spit out for fear that I might vomit if I swallowed it. Still I retched for the next few minutes. If someone with a yeast infection pissed on a shoe and made that into cheese from the athlete's foot in the shoe, that's what Natto tastes like. Plus it's gooey-slimy.
Kim-Chee - It's cabbage, which I don't like, added to Daikon, which I also don't like. Then you're going to add spices and put it in a jar and stick it in the sun until it gets moldy and tastes like hell? No. That's cool. Everyone I know likes Kim-Chee so every once in a while I try it again and I still hate it. It still tastes like vegetables that I don't like allowed to rot and then made spicy.
Just about anything made in Malaysia, but especially fermented fish head soup, bulls dick soup and fish sauce. They're REALLY big on fermenting or rotting shit in Malaysia. It's understandable b/c they're a large population that until very recently had relatively abundant food resources but no access to refrigeration and a humid climate (so unsuitable for preserving food by drying). That it's understandable doesn't make it any tastier.
When I was a kid we had a Malaysian missionary stay with us. He was SO happy to be making some kind of delicacy they have there. It had like, eggs and fish and onions or something. It was in a big earthenware crock that was in the carport and he was going to open it up for the first time in front of mom when it was done. She made me come with her. It smelled so bad that I threw up on my shoes. That was the ONE time I didn't have to eat the crap he made. He was embarrassed, Mom was mortified and I couldn't look the guy in the eye for weeks. Thinking about it almost 20 years later still turns my stomach. It was like...bodies and onions and...I don't know, the same spicy smell Kimchee has. God it was awful.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
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