A Small Rant About Things That Piss Me Off

Monday, January 28, 2008

In the restaurant and catering industries it's normal to call whatever meat they plan to be using in a dish the "protein." ...the hell? It's chicken. Beef. Fish. Bison. Gator. What I hit on the I-5. Whatever. Protein just sounds so unappetizing and scientific. It sounds like a biology lesson. I understand the purpose of saying, "This dish needs a protein." But if you know it needs beef, just say beef. Really now.

The phrase "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." When you're in a good mood, fine. But when you are in life and buried in god damn lemons, I say do as Bill Watterson once suggested in Calvin & Hobbes: chuck 'em back at life and add a few of your own. When I am pissy, don't say this little lemony catchphrase too me. Otherwise, I will juice a lemon in your eye. I will laugh. I will feel better. Because let's all admit something to ourselves; nothing helps a bad mood more than passing it on.

People who won't try new food. If you have tried it, and know you don't like it, then fine. If you think you don't like it based on how it looks then get out of my kitchen. I'll allow certain things, I won't try tripe for example. Anything that needs to be boiled for like, 5 hours, just to make it edible was never meant to be eaten. However, if you won't try a blood orange because of it's name, or kale because you "don't like greens" then I strike you with a spatula.

Women who have bouffants. No! No! *smack on the nose with a newspaper*
(Same goes to men who are trying to bring back the watch fob.)

Freaky foodie people who are hyper-anti-whatever. And YES, I see the irony in this post. I mean, I love to eat fresh, local, and organic, but dammit sometimes I want to eat Captain Crunch until I vomit or eat greasy french fries from the drive-thru. And you know what? I like it. There is nothing wrong with wanting incredibly over-processed food with enough grease and salt to kill a racehorse if it's only once in a blue moon.

So stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

P.S. By the by, school started again today which means a small slow down in posting. Nothing drastic, but I may lull an extra day or two at times before putting up something new.

13 comments:

  1. Amen.

    (I like to eat Velveeta sometimes. And I put mayo on my steamed cauliflour. Gasp).

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  2. Feels good to get things off your chest in a public forum sometimes. Amen.

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  3. Another issue along the protein vs meat is a strange thing I've experienced in a couple of restaurants recently..."and for your starch???" Unless they're doing laundry, I think I'd prefer to leave that term out.

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  4. How freeing it is to let go of food snobbery from time to time. Sometimes my inner child NEEDS a can of Chef B-A-D ravioli liberally sprinkled with cheese from the green can. Or a big, buttery mound of instant mashed potatoes!

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  5. "Sometimes I want to eat Captian Crunch until I vomit"


    That would be a great blog name.

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  6. I loved this post and agree with you completely. People who refuse to try new foods always annoy me. If you ahven't tried it - how do you know?? Plus, I once read that you have to try a new food up to 11 times before you start to like it, so even if you tried it ages ago and didn't like it, there no harm in trying again!!

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  7. Your threats don't frighten me, 'cause for the record, I like to be hit with spatulas.

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  8. My favorite dessert of all time is a fancy creme brulee, but I live to eat the cheap grated parmesan cheese in a can. Long live cheap, bad for you crappy food.

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  9. Hahaha. I'm also a locavore when I have the choice, and regularly astonish friends by having captain crunch peanut butter crunch for an afternoon snack. Yeah, I have foodie tendencies, but I like a much wider range of food than that moniker would allow.
    ;p

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  10. No tripe for me either, but some days a Cap'n Crunch orgy is just what the doctor ordered!

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  11. I think this rant would have been more powerful if you'd left out your own personal bigotry about tripe, based on logic that's actually more faulty than rejecting food based on how it looks. Human beings have evolved to have respond to unappealing-looking food for reasons of self-preservation, whereas the length of cooking time of a particular ingredient is really kind of irrelevant to anything, no? Would you reject a cheese because it had to sit in a vat for a year to become itself? For the record, tripe is yummy. Each of the cow's stomachs yields a different texture of tripe, with different names, and honeycomb tripe, for example, cooks in an hour and a half. Boo! Just try it. If you still hate it, more power to you.

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  12. Michele - You have a point. If I get a chance to try it (for free, will not pay) I will try it.

    However, bigotry against tripe? I wholly disagree with your choice of diction here. It offends me as an English major. Not that it is wrong, but I mean look at the context of this post. The point of a rant is for me to be totally bitchy for my own purposes. I have eaten BBQ'ed scorpion, rock fish, and fresh cow blood. Stomach lining just sounds gross to me, and I am sure there is a food or two out there if you were presented with would not have at all.

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  13. M&M's, Oreo Cookies(with palm oil not soy- taste icky), Godiva cheesecake, my daughters cakes and macaroons.

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