his page is all about weird food. Stuff that you can't believe people eat, humorously bad things missed by quality control, amusing contaminations, and more.  Someone finds a thumb in their can of emergency Vienna Sausages? You'll probably see news about it here.

Read on, if you dare. Newer additions are added on top of the page.

April 20, 2003

As an added thingie, here's a joke that Malaya sent me some weeks ago, and that I spent the last hour looking everywhere for.  Yeah, it's gross, at least to non-Filipinos.  Like me.

If you are wondering, yeah "balut" is what it's called, and it's a partially developed duck embryo.  It's not actually served inside of a chocolate egg, which is why this image is a joke from some SA.com feature or other.  I couldn't find it on their website to link directly to it.

The balut is basically hard-boiled, and you throw away the bits of egg white that are left, and just eat the poached embryo.  I don't know what sort of sauces or seasonings are used, or if it's own boiled blood and the basting of amniotic fluid is sufficient for flavor.

Malaya tells me they are a bit crunchy, about the consistency of chicken gristle, and you eat every last bit.  Feet, beak, everything.

And yes, I really am planning on kissing the mouth that has consumed this sort of thing. Thanks for asking.

She said they'd had balut on Fear Factor at some point, and many Filipinos were up in arms since the host of the show was going on about what "savages" the contestants were for gobbling it down.  Some couldn't manage it, too disgusted by the sight.

I suppose I could eat it to save my life, but I'm rather sickened by the concept, I must admit.  Just goes to show you how upbringing and culture is so important in determining what you find tasty and acceptable to eat.  White bread American kids often won't even eat vegetables or bread crusts, and a lot of adults aren't much better. Yet if you grow up in some other culture and eat insects or dog meat or snails or duck embryos or drink blood or fermented milk drinks, it's all normal and even a delicacy. Funny how much sway the mind has over the stomach, in terms of what we find disgusting or delicious.

Hardly anything is inherently good or bad; it's just how you learn to think about it and what you learn to appreciate the taste of.

April 19, 2003

Honey bear!  Everyone is familiar with those cute little plastic honey bears that contain... honey.  Squeeze bottle things, bear-shaped.  Looks a lot like this, though mine actually has a sort of nozzle on top, like a dunce cap.

Mine is nearly empty, though I couldn't really say why, since I never use honey in anything, other than very occasionally if I make a quick and calorie-intensive PB, banana, and Honey topless sammich.  It's an old bear.  A Papa Bear!

Anyway, the half an inch of remaining honey hardens into a crystalline solid, and becomes impossible to extract.  However there is an easy way to get it out; heat it.  Nuke the ursine squeeze bottle for about 15 seconds and it heats up enough to become liquidy.  It's not properly viscous, being a bit too runny, but you can wait and let it cool down some, or just drizzle it out all runny and sloppy, while saying, "What the hell."  You can probably guess my technique.

The dangerous part is that the honey becomes super-heated very quickly, and when I say "nuke it for about 15 seconds" I mean it.  Twenty tops.  You go 30 seconds the honey will melt the bottle, possibly pouring out into your microwave.  This is sort of hard to clean up, if you're wondering.

So just a bit ago I was eating the last slab of cornbread, and decided I'd do a bit of honey on them.  Other slabs had been eaten plain, or with some raspberry preserves, and one had just plain canola spread on it.  But I wanted honey on the last one.  And I put in the honey bear, and was busying myself pouring a drink and washing out the baking pan, and guess who forgot to stop the honey bear BBQ before the 30 sec timer went off?

Not me!

I stopped it with about 6 seconds left, after hearing a small explosion from inside the microwave. *cough*  But hey, it was before the 30 seconds!

The bear had developed a volcano-like orifice, just a tiny pin prick sized hole, through which about half the remaining honey had been ejaculated rather forcefully, spraying across the rotating plastic plate in the microwave, and all over the side wall.  I removed Papa Bear and laid him on the counter on his back, with the rupture pointing upwards, and quickly wiped off the side of the microwave before the sticky sweet splooge had a chance to cool down and harden.  While washing off the plate, I looked at the bear, and had to giggle.  The rupture was exactly in front, and about a centimeter up from the base.  Exactly where Papa Bear's baby-bear maker would be, if he enjoyed the benefits of anatomically-accurate modeling.

The funnier part was that the rupture proved self-sealing.  The plastic that melted resealed itself as it cooled, thus depriving me of the dubious joy of sucking Papa Bear's sticky goodness out that way. 

It was probably for the best, since I have a full honey bear container in the pantry, and I think it's a Mama Bear.  And you know how angry mama bears get when they see someone coming between them and their Little Bear.

March 9, 2003

Who says the Internet doesn't cover important news stories?

(CNN) -- It's believed to be the largest Chee-to in the world. The cheesy glob of fried cornmeal that Navy Petty Officer Mike Evans found last week in a bag of the snacks is about the size of a small lemon and weighs in at about half an ounce.

Somehow it was found in Hawaii and ended up as a gift to a hick town in Iowa, where they intend to display it on a shrine, like some sort of artificially-colored offering to the Dark Gods of the Corn.

Radio stations from around the country interviewed Evans, a Gulf War veteran stationed in Pearl Harbor who patiently explained that he bought the bag of Chee-tos for his 3-year-old son. Giant Chee-to T-shirts and Chee-to puppet auctions sprung up online. And pranksters bid up the Chee-to into the millions of dollars -- so much that eBay cancelled the sale and a frustrated Evans donated the Chee-to to a good cause: a sleepy farming community in Iowa.

"I was absolutely astounded that something like a Chee-to could become a pop icon," said Evans. "It's international. I've even seen it online on a Russian site."

Give the amount of free publicity the crap-tastic snacks have received as a result of this lapse in quality control, I think we can expect people to start finding Honey Nut Cheerios the size of truck tires.

Ironically enough, I wrote the above Saturday morning.  Saturday night I bought a DiGornio's mushroom, spinach, and garlic pizza (to which I customarily add black olives, sliced pepper, purple onion, more mushroom, and a bunch more garlic) and upon opening it, saw this mega-mushroom.  Upon closer inspection it was less than attractive. It's like a huge mushroom snowball, like about 3 pizzas worth of chopped mushroom all compacted into a bolus of unappetizing proportions.  The outside of it was all smooth and molded, like mushroom paste.  I removed it from the pizza, which required some prying since it was stuck all the way down to the crust, and came off with frozen sauce and cheese that I had to chisel off.

Foolishly disregarding the ebay potential of my find, I left it on a saucer to thaw while I cooked and ate the rest of the pizza (well, ate half of it, I'm not that big of a pig). An hour later it was goo, swimming in a tepid puddle of brown ooze.  It really was just a bunch of mushroom paste, with some bigger chunks in the middle.  Below you can see the mega-shroom in its natural habitat, dominating the pizza like the fattest steer in the barnyard. Since my initial fear upon opening the box was that I had a garlic, mushroom, spinach and mouse pizza, the end result, though ugly, was a relief.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.