There are things I won't eat.
Okra is top of the list.
Closely followed by kapenta. Kapenta smells like very dead fish and tastes worse. And let's not go into what it looks like. There taste/the smell or the appearance I could handle separately. Just not all together.
Then there were the 9" long caterpillars. Which were fluorescent green - for a very good reason. If one of those bit you, you were about to need a blood transfusion. Assuming you lived long enough,
And used cat litter tested better. Don't ask. Really don't ask. Let it remain at the whisky was talking.
And yes, I puked. Speaking as someone who once ate ten cans of Winalot. With a lot of chill sauce. And won enough money by doing so to feed me for three months.
And yes, I have eaten snake - and would prefer not to have to do so again.
Haggis is wonderful stuff. I fed it to the 67% of my D.Min class who came from the US. They turned a bit green when they discovered that the stuff isn't allowed in the US as the FDA won't let people eat lungs.
"My own haggis experience - In search of the pinnacle in culinary stupidity, a friend and I decided that for Burns Night a couple of years ago we required a haggis. In Afghanistan you can barely look around but that your eyes are offended by some rancid looking sheep. We thought that bringing one in would be like bringing coals to Newcastle. So we decided to make one, I confess motivated more by the notion of getting a good story and jock-like machismo than anything else.
The day before I had spoken to my language teacher and obtained translations for the vital ingredients of a haggis, the sheep’s ‘pluck’ comprising the liver, heart and lungs. As we walked I muttered under my breath the Dari words, practicing different cadences: diljiggarShUsh, dilJIGGarshush etc. Our day, as with all interesting days, started before dawn. It was a cool minus 10; a typical brisk Kabul winter’s morning.
We got up early because we had been earnestly assured by the self-same teacher, in convincing tones, that: “sheep’s pluck go like lightining. They slaughter at six sharp, and then all the people in Kabul flock there, queueing round the block, cramming into the shop, just so they can get hands on a sheep’s pluck. Lucky if you can get one at all.” We duly turned up on butcher’s street at 6 am, fresh as rabbits, where we were greeted by a notable lack of people and a marked absence of open butchers’ shops. We left, drank some nuclear coffee (procured from the local shop, believe it or not) to fortify us, then sallied forth an hour and a half later.
One butcher was kind of opening, and seemed slightly surprised at the custom so early in the morning. I walked in, mentally girding my loins. While I knew this was going to be the vilest thing I had ever done, nothing had prepared me from the pile of stomachs lying discarded on the black and filthy floor in that butcher’s shop. Nothing. They were truly horrible. After that, the diljiggarshush was positively inoffensive: we found one hanging by it’s windpipe from a hook was a piece-a-cake, no bothers at all. Liver: why not?I walked out of that shop a lot whiter that I was when I walked in, but with the goods in hand. The worst was yet to come.
Getting back to our house with the ingredients tied up in bags and held as far from our person as humanly possible, we put them in a bucket outside in the snow a safe distance from the house. Then we made ourselves, at seven thirty in the morning, a stiff whisky and turned our attention to the construction of the vessel for cooking the haggis – the stomach. We returned outside, to find a cat delicately picking at the intestines.
We all know that a haggis is made from a sheep’s stomach. “Just take the sheep’s stomach", the recipes said. But soft: hands up anyone who knows which stomach a haggis should be made in? A sheep, being a ruminant, has four of them. Now that - that was an interesting google search. There we were with a vile, stinking … thing in a red bucket, smelling gag-inducingly, stomach-churningly awful, one of us leaving periodically to keep the cats away and trying to swallow the bile rising whenever we looked in the stomach’s direction, while the other tried to work out from veterinary websites which stomach we were to use. In the end, we took a guess.
Choosing a nadir to the process is a challenge, but for me it came at the point that we had to cut up and scrape the inside of that stomach. The smell: I can’t really describe the smell. It was like a farmyard, sure, but that underestimates by a power of sheep the stench that emitted from that bucket. Plunging my hands in, picking up the flaccid tissue, in places bulging into great swollen balls of puslike phlegm, then cutting off the flapping corpse-like sack wasn’t pleasant. But then came the scraping. A sheep’s stomach is coated in bile-like grey-green adhesive slime. It adheres to fur-like protuberances that for four hours fought us tooth and nail. It was this that forced me to take my first shot of whisky. At eight o’clock in the morning. Four hours later, the kitchen covered in rank grey gunk, our faces and clothes stinking and filthy, we had cleaned most of the inside of the paunch. Out, out damn spot. I simply couldn’t remove the smell from my fingers. We left that stomach in salted water, our spirits crushed.
Then came cleaning the heart and lungs and liver: vileness, it turns out, is relative. I quite cheerfully got stuck into cleaning and salting the vital organs of the poor animal. Still, who would have thought that a sheep’s heart would have so much blood in it? When a sheep’s been dead a while, the blood coalesces into a deep purple gell, which you sort of have to pull out, rather like pulling worms out of the ground. That wasn’t very pleasant either. We can sweep over the cleaning of the lungs and liver as being child’s play, because then came the boiling-to-remove-impurities. Let me tell you, when they talk about removing impurities, they aren’t kidding. You’re supposed to boil the sheep’s pluck - hanging the trachea over the lip of the bowl to allow for escape of said impurities - and so we did. We boiled that R^%^ until it bled tears. Oh, how we boiled it. We boiled it, and boiled it, and boiled it. We watched it as it boiled. And where did the impurities go? Not out of the @^%$ trachea, I can tell you. No, they came from everywhere, right into the water where our pluck was boiling. As nadirs go, it was marginally less vile than scraping out the stomach, but it wasn’t pleasant.
Then came the coup de grace. Have you ever spent an evening sewing a sheep’s stomach together with the string from Lipton tea bags? This is a rhetorical question because unless you are myself or my mate of course you %$^&^%$£ haven’t. Nobody has. It’s an offal idea. For a start, the string on lipton tea bags are simply too short. We tied them together, then finally threaded a needle (after some ridiculous convolutions), and spent the best part of three hours sewing flaps of still faintly-unpleasant-smelling sheep’s stomach together into the single worst-tailored haggis ever born into this world. It’s grotesque. It’s bizarre. It looks like nothing else I’ve ever seen. But by God, did we finish that haggis."
I like pickled herring.
Eels! I've thrown up better.
) so they're getting a couple pounds a week.
