Food is just freaking me out lately

So last week I ate durian and chicken feet. Dare food.

I thought once I’d left behind my years of volunteering and the like, I’d be able to stop eating dare food. Clearly that wasn’t the case, as I’ve still been ‘tempted’ with half-formed duck embryos, fruit that smells like vomit and tastes like death, and roasted bugs. Even though these things turn my stomach, I’ve still never really thought of myself as a non-adventurous eater.

I’ve eaten horse penis for chrissakes. Horse PENIS. That should get me out of the consumption of most dare food. It certainly tends to win the dare food contests that people get into around these parts. Oh, what’s the strangest thing you’ve eaten?

A worm? yawn.

Goat’s eyes? borrrrring.

Natto? wake me up when you finish your fascinating story about fermented soybeans.

Horse sashimi? Please, I raise you

HORSE PENIS!

What’s up? Got nothin’?

I THOUGHT SO!

Anyway, even after eating horse penis (what the hell kind of people are going to find my blog NOW? There are some random searches that find their way to this site…), the cosmic energy of the universe still won’t let up on the dare food. So I’m in gag reflex training for balut. I know it is coming. Just gotta prepare.

However, I don’t think I’m doing a good job of preparing, frankly. Because I realized today that even with the horse penis on my resume, there are still relatively tame things that trip me up. Things that pretty much everyone who grew up where I did should be able to eat without qualms.

My housekeeper was all psyched earlier this week about making seafood curry. She makes amazing seafood dishes. I’ve had them at my friend’s house. So she went by the wet market early today to pick up the freshest seafood possible to make the seafood curry. All day at work through a very poor lunch at a meeting, pizza party to celebrate promotions, everything, I kept dreaming of the seafood curry. Mmmm, shrimp and fish and crab in a curry. What could be better?

Except.

I get home, change, and run to the kitchen to survey the delicious dinner. Lifting the top off the pot I spy

shells.

The only little animals that had been removed from their shells were the shrimp.

Mussels? Still in the shell. Also, incredibly ugly and bizarre meat bits make up the mussel. I peeked in the shells and thought, I have absolutely no idea what to do with that. There was this pink wavier thing with a dark beard or some ungodly bit on it and it was stuck to the shell and trying to remove it you could see the tissues stretch and then relax back to shape, stretch then relax back. I was unsuccessful in all attempts to remove the mussel from the shell as the stretching and relaxing just…got to me.

Crabs? Still in the shell. I have never had to crack crabshells before. The crabmeat has always been neatly removed and waiting for me, often in a quesadilla. They are some ugly fuckers aren’t they? Look remarkably like insects. Big crappin’ insects. The crabs were cut in half straight down the middle of the back. So eventually I was able to tease out some bits from the center, but I had no idea how to get the majority of meat. I’m pretty sure that you’re supposed to get more than a forkful of crabmeat from a crab. There were the legs, but do you eat what is in the legs? How do you get to it? I seemed to recall having seen crab cracker thingamabobs somewhere before and figured that there must be something in there you could eat, but after I twisted the crab leg a few times and then became kind of fascinated with how easily the joints moved, then realized I was playing with the carcass of a crab that had been happily skittering and clicking its way across the ocean floor before being scooped up to eventually land on my plate, I put myself off crabs in about five minutes.

There was something else confusing in the pot as well that I can’t remember now. And there was squid, which doesn’t have a shell, but is back to freaking me out after the successful consumption of squid cooked in its own ink last week. Just the sections and the way the legs still kind of wave around in the curry liquid reminded me of the movie Aliens and then I thought, if I eat this will it eventually burst through a hole in my belly with a baby?

The cat was whining up a storm so I took some bits and put them in his bowl. Then after I was done playing with the crab leg/crab half I put that in his bowl as well. I scooped up a fair amount of the broth and then all the shrimps I could find in the bowl and ate that with some pita bread. It was quite tasty.

Then I called my downstairs neighbor and asked if she and her husband wanted the rest. She asked if I wanted to eat with them but I said I was full. I couldn’t very well admit that I actually had no idea how you were supposed to eat the majority of the animals in the pot, and that I had thought about it to the point where I was no longer able to eat the little animals in the pot.

Her husband came up for the soup and was quite excited by all the mussels and crabs in there.

Good luck.

Tags: balut, chicken feet, dare food, durian, horse penis