Things that are pissing you off- Food & Drink Edition - Page 170

A maggot in my sesame seeds from Whole Foods. WTF?

Was it an organic maggot?

Chopped three garlic cloves and now mg fingers reek of garlic. Yummy but distracting now I'm chillin in bed

Just rub your fingers against a chunk of stainless steel and the smell will go away

so, is that what you kids are calling it these days?

. One of my roommates used my cast iron pan and washed it with soap. Most of the seasoning I developed over the past two years is gone.

The fact that Smirnoff is now making fake-ass flavored vodkas like whipped creme. Give me strength.

I like eating Chinese food, but get tired of all the ethical condundrums involved in their food. It's like they are trying really hard to piss people off. My local 'good' Chinese restaurant has a course menu of shark's fin and sea turtle for the month. Just give me some chicken or beef, let's skip the endangered species. I don't have the perverted need to kill everything on earth just to have killed it.

^ Is it true that many of these dishes were originally considered special-occasion dishes?

 

It sometimes seems to me that democratic notions have reduced decadence to gluttony. Damn, I sound like LK.

 

~ H
 

I've talked about this before as relates how when immigrants from countries with high food pressures move to the US (or Canada, the UK, etc.) the first thing they do is get chubby as they can suddenly afford special occasion food almost daily.

Yeah, things like shark's fin are special occasion foods/celebratory foods, but menu fixtures as well. In Japan, they're everywhere (I think rehydrated from dry), but the largest fresh (best) shark's fins are in Hong Kong from what I've seen. A good bowl of shark's fin soup in Hong Kong is like 10x the price of a cheap meal for a few people.
Still, and Japan is included in this - they gotta slow their roll on this stuff, the shark's fins, the turtles, the whales and dolphins, the bluefin tunas. Shark's fin is probably the worst though, because of the way they harvest them, and the fact that it literally tastes like nothing. I am convinced that a very compellingly suitable substitute could be developed using collagen harvested from pig trotters, and no one has ever really tried.

Dude, just make this part of your business plan. Faux shark's fin pho.

I never got the hype behind shark fin soup either beyond using it as a status symbol. As impolyt said, it's almost completely tasteless.

it's a gelatinous texture. like swallow's nests.

Thought the avocados I'd bought a few days were ripening nicely and cut them open to make some guacamole. Turns out they weren't ripening--they were rotting.