Those Slurping Sounds!

OK!

I have been getting an inordinate amount of harassing emails and comments about not eating vegetables. So here is a meal that includes some veggies…



… and yes peppers, while botanically a fruit, count as vegetables. I don’t care if they were stuffed with cheese and stored in oil, they still count! There was also some sun dried tomatoes (botanically a fruit as well) and pickled okra in there for good measure.

OK? I sure hope you’re happy now! And really let’s break it down. If you are what you eat, then a cow is grass. My eating a cow is the same as me eating the grass. The cow serves the function of concentrating the goodness of the grass. Pigs, if left to their own devices, will feed on vegetables and nuts. Animals are basically vegetable delivery systems.


1. You are what you eat.

2. I eat vegetarians.

3. Therefore, I am a vegetarian.

Q.E.D.

Now for the interesting items: we have a nicely cured ham (sliced as thinly as I could manage), some very good tangy fermented Italian salami, and some blutwurst from the metzgerei down the street. There is also some fresh cheese with herbs, some bread, and a good, but somewhat pedestrian, Oettinger Dunkel Hefeweizen.

Sunday I cooked some red beans and rice. I usually use smoked ham hocks in this recipe, but the commissary was all out. At least I’d like to think they ran out, and that it was not the other unbelievable choice (that they never had them). I will find out sometime in the future. I did find some frozen unsmoked and uncooked hocks, but they were from much higher up the leg than I wanted. Instead I settled on the frozen split pigs feet. These were not quite what I had hoped for either as most of the toes were cut off. All except for that one little piggy who went to market…



You can see the little toe on the one at the very top and the one in the middle on the right. I also threw in some of the rind off of the ham I bought the other day. Surprisingly the feet don’t really have much worth eating on them, so after simmering in the water awhile, I removed and discarded them. I usually pick the meat off of the hocks at this point, but this seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. So I double down on the sausage. One pound Kielbasa on pound plain smoked sausage to try and get some smoke flavor into this mess.

It actually turned out to be satisfactory. The rice was not very good though. I had bought this brown basmati rice, which takes a hell of a lot more water to cook than regular basmati. And even then it still is kind of grainy. It’s OK, just not what I was after in this meal.



But I ate it anyway (and will for lunch all this week). This time with a fine hoppy Jever Pilsner, from northern Germany.

I really don't have any choice but to eat it. I don’t have a dog to feed it to here, and I probably put too much Tabasco in it anyway. You know, nothing’s worse than waking up in the middle of the night to the slurping sounds of a dog trying to cool off his anus.