We had ravioli for dinner tonight. It was tasty. But Willow, who raises hell whenever she's served anything that isn't in nugget-form, insisted that it was the "grossest thing ever."

That's right, a child who turns her nose up at ravioli. Couldn't you just box her ears?

Instead of doing that, we got on the subject of some of the foods that are far nastier than ravioli. As usual, the internet proved a valuable resource. Here are some of the culinary nightmare's we've just read about:

• Black Pudding is also known as Blood Pudding. It's a sausage that's made by cooking pig or cow blood until it congeals and then ... doing something else, but I keep turning away from the screen as soon as I've read that first step.



• Scrapple is simple to make. Take pig liver, heart, head, and basically any pig parts you might have around, and boil the hell out of them. Boil them with the bones attached. Then take the goop and mix in cornmeal and allow it to gel. Then begin the costly, prolonged therapy sessions that you're going to need in order to get over having made scrapple.



• Livermush is considered by many to be a mild and preferable alternative to scrapple. Personally, I consider hari kari to be a mild and preferable alternative to scrapple, but that's just me. Anyway, the primary difference between livermush and scrapple is that livermush, in order to be official livermush, must be made of at least 30% hog liver. The secondary difference is that "Livermush" would actually be a far crueler and more memorable grade school nickname than "Scrapple."



• Mountain Oysters is a dish that's also known as Rocky Mountain Oysters and Prairie Oysters and Tendergroin and Bull Balls. Bull balls is the most accurate name.



• Souse is also known as Headcheese and is a sort of lunch meat loaf that's made of scraps of meat from the head, heart and feet of a pig and is sometimes pickled in vinegar. Why pickle it in vinegar? Why the hell not? Pickle it in kerosene for all I care. I ain't eatin' it.



• Balut, which is a delicacy in Vietnam and Cambodia, is the kind of thing that one should only eat in public, on stage, as a form of angry performance art. Balut is a fertilized duck or chicken egg that has been allowed to develop until the chick inside is almost ready to hatch ... and then boiled and eaten in the shell. It's considered to be an aphrodisiac and is sold by street vendors in the areas where it is available. The drug "ecstasy" is also considered to be an aphrodisiac and is also sold on the streets ... and I bet it's far tastier.



• Chitterlings is pronounced "CHIT-luns." But since chitterlings are the boiled, stewed and/or fried intestines of a pig, it is pronounced around here as infrequently as possible.



• Haggis is the Scottish queen mother of repugnant foods. If you don't know, haggis is made by taking the heart, liver and lungs of a sheep, mixing them with suet, onions and oatmeal, and boiling them for hours in the sheep's stomach. The recipe was conceived of by a Scotsman who, having killed a sheep, felt that he needed to somehow further degrade the animal. Haggis is traditionally served with potatoes, turnips and unconcealed spite. If you're tempted to try it for some reason, the Food Network's Alton Brown has posted his favorite recipe for haggis. Clearly, Alton Brown has joined the terrorists.

So, see? Ravioli really isn't all that bad. Hell, spoiled ravioli sounds pretty good right now.

Labels: Personal, Recipes, Trivial Matters

I'm ready to kill our basset hound, and I might try to do so if it hadn't been made clear to me over the past eighteen months that it's impossible to actually harm a basset hound. They're impervious to pain, they have no concept of "no," and based on some of the situations I've seen Chester get himself into over the last year and a half, they seem to be indestructible.

Here's what happened.

Wendy and I watched an old John Wayne movie last night after the kids got to bed, and decided afterward that it was too warm and gorgeous a night to let pass by without sitting on the porch and sipping a beer. While we were enjoying our beer, Chester was in an absolute frenzy for some reason. He was running around the house, running back to us, barking his head off and trying desperately to tell us something.

I'd have investigated, but some of the terribly urgent situations that Chester has tried to alert me to in the past have included the following:

• "The neighbors are getting laundry out of their car!"


• "There's a cat just outside the fence!"


• "There's a rock just outside the fence!"


• There's air just outside the fence!"

So I ignored him.

But when we came in and decided to get ready for bed, Chester was still absolutely all to hell.


A little background on the two dogs might be relevant. Tilda, our brittany, is going on five years old. Tilda is a registered purebred Brittany and she's a bit ostentatious. She's been fixed and she's generally disinterested in most things that happen outside the fence. Tilda sleeps beside our bed and, if she had her way, that's what she'd do most of the time. Chester, our basset hound, is almost two years old and has not been fixed. We tell ourselves that maybe we'll breed him someday. He is the most stubborn dog I've ever seen. He refuses to sleep anywhere other than one of two places: My recliner or his crate. Since he's been known to leave "surprises" in the living room if he's trusted to spend time there by himself, we have him sleep in his crate at night.

But Chester refused to sleep in his crate last night. Wendy put him in his crate and he sat and barked and barked and barked. After a short while we decided that he probably had to go to the bathroom again, so Wendy let him back outside. Once out there, he sat at the back fence and barked and barked and barked and barked.

I decided to get the flash light and go see what was going on. Heck, maybe this time something serious was in the works. Maybe something was really wrong. Once I got outside, I figured out what was up pretty quickly. See, on the other side of my back yard there's a vacant lot with a creek that cuts through it. Beyond that is my neighbor's house, and my neighbor keeps hounds. Coonhounds. He hunts with them and he breeds them and, I'm pretty sure, one of his females has gone into heat.

At least, that's what I was picking up on from Chester. Now, as you can tell from the picture to the right, Chester doesn't seem to be a full-blooded basset hound. (I think his breeder was less than scrupulous.) Chester looks like he has some black-and-tan in him, and I can't help but believe that he was able somehow to pick up on love in the air, coming from the female hounds across the creek.

Chester was running along the back fence, looking toward the neighbors dogs and howling his head off. There's a Hardees about a quarter mile from here in the small town 'round the bend and I'd bet you anything that people in the parking lot could have heard him. I became convinced at that point that there had to be a female hound in heat across the creek and Chester was in the throes of passion, howling the hound equivalent of "How YOU doin'? You live around here? That collar is YOU, baby. How's about I come over to your place?"

We brought him inside and waited for him to calm down, hoping that he'd maybe fall asleep beside Tilda in our bedroom. Nothin' doin'. Wendy and I laid in bed trying desperately to fall asleep while Chester sat beside the bed barking his fool head off: "You can't keep us apart! You can't stop our love! This thing is bigger than all of us!"

Finally, we stuck his butt back in the crate where he howled for another half an hour and finally dozed off. As I write these words he's asleep about four feet from me. He seems to feel dejected. Crestfallen. Defeated. Alone.

It's amazing, really, that we had the energy this morning to get up and try a breakfast recipe that's been going around the blogosphere for a while. We got it from B13, circa Jamie Dawn (who posted it in his comments section), And Jamie Dawn got it from Alison. If you look at Jamie Dawn's picture and B13's picture, it's obvious that Wendy and I did something wrong. I'll tell you what we did wrong: For one thing, we were unpleasantly surprised to get up this morning and realize that we were out of all purpose flour. I only had bread flour and tried to make the recipe with that. It obviously makes a difference. For another thing, both B13 and Jamie Dawn doubled the cooked apples in the recipe, and we didn't have enough apples to do that. So our version of the Oven Apple Bake doesn't look quite as tasty as Jamie's and B13's … but, trust me, it was lip smackin' good.

Between Wendy and Liam and me, we almost finished it off. There is, however, a nice, big section left. I don't know who's gonna get it … but I know one hound dog who I ain't sharin' NOTHIN' with.

Labels: Humor, Personal, Recipes