ysabetwordsmith (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ysabetwordsmith) wrote2018-02-11 04:07 pm
ysabetwordsmith) wrote2018-02-11 04:07 pm
Entry tags:
Edible Animals
My inner teenage boy was deeply amused by this billboard showing a spectrum of pets to food animals.
Me, I'm a pragmatist. Anything I can get into my mouth and digest safely is potential food. In practice, I strongly prefer not to eat other sapient beings unless I am starving to death, so things like cetacean, elephant, and primate are off my list of edibles outside of that context. There are a few things I choose not to eat because I disapprove of their production methods; farmed veal exceeds my personal tolerance for animal abuse. However, historic veal is in the same class as buckling for me -- used to be, all the milk animals would drop about 50% male offspring that you didn't need, so you dressed them out right then and had the tenderest meat ever. That I would gleefully eat if I had the chance. There are plenty of things I'd like to try, haven't encountered yet, and probably wouldn't want to eat routinely; dog and horse are both in that category. So are insects, a key indicator that I am not culturally an American despite living here. My everyday category is wider too: rabbit, goat, and lamb are all things I actively look for and order when I find them. I also enjoy some animal parts that most Americans do not, including tongue, brains, heart, gizzard, and testicles. I loved haggis the one time I got it. However, I have tried kidney and wasn't fond of it; I really dislike liver and would have to be ravenous to eat it willingly.
These are all things that vary widely by culture and time period. What are some of your settings?
Me, I'm a pragmatist. Anything I can get into my mouth and digest safely is potential food. In practice, I strongly prefer not to eat other sapient beings unless I am starving to death, so things like cetacean, elephant, and primate are off my list of edibles outside of that context. There are a few things I choose not to eat because I disapprove of their production methods; farmed veal exceeds my personal tolerance for animal abuse. However, historic veal is in the same class as buckling for me -- used to be, all the milk animals would drop about 50% male offspring that you didn't need, so you dressed them out right then and had the tenderest meat ever. That I would gleefully eat if I had the chance. There are plenty of things I'd like to try, haven't encountered yet, and probably wouldn't want to eat routinely; dog and horse are both in that category. So are insects, a key indicator that I am not culturally an American despite living here. My everyday category is wider too: rabbit, goat, and lamb are all things I actively look for and order when I find them. I also enjoy some animal parts that most Americans do not, including tongue, brains, heart, gizzard, and testicles. I loved haggis the one time I got it. However, I have tried kidney and wasn't fond of it; I really dislike liver and would have to be ravenous to eat it willingly.
These are all things that vary widely by culture and time period. What are some of your settings?
Foods and preferences
When I was a kid, my mother was on a veal kick as a diet measure, but I won't touch the animals now because of the way they are raised.
Finding /real mutton/, not LAMB, would make my decade!
I've eaten roasted grubs, roasted scorpion (bland as paper, in both cases), cabesa (cow brains), but stopped that during the last mad cow disease scare. Chicken livers were a staple menu item when I was a kid, and I occasionally indulge in them deep fried, but usually in Cajun style dirty rice. I've had rabbit twice, but can't find a reliable source for it.
One of the dishes that youngest enjoys is steak and kidney pie, which appears on the menu here every few months.
Goat is delicious, and there was a local halal food truck that served it on weekends here. My kids don't balk at things like head cheese or braunschweiger. Yet, there's a delightful vegetarian/vegan restaurant that I am DETERMINED to taste through the entire menu available to me sans allergens.
Oddly, the issue of horse meat illustrates my biggest problem with the food chain in America today: I have involuntarily eaten it because certain fast food chains were proven to have meat which contained horse. Frankly, I may or may not be willing to try it voluntarily, since I do love buffalo, but I resent to the ends of the Earth the fact that I wasn't given a choice in the matter.
I haven't made any decisions about the relative intelligence of horses, but I'm pretty okay with pigs as food animals... even as I find the idea of eating whale or dolphin as upsetting as human cannibalism.
So, yeah, there's bias in there, all tangled up with observed versus unexplored assumptions. I love conversations that make me THINK about those assumptions.
Re: Foods and preferences
I have on occasion, but not often.
Similarly, what is sold as goat is more often chevre (kid meat) and the two are not identical. Recipes designed for mature goat or mutton will overwhelm kid or lamb.
>>cabesa (cow brains), but stopped that during the last mad cow disease scare. <<
Sadly, I came to the same conclusion.
>>My kids don't balk at things like head cheese or braunschweiger. <<
<3 head cheese.
>>Frankly, I may or may not be willing to try it voluntarily, since I do love buffalo, but I resent to the ends of the Earth the fact that I wasn't given a choice in the matter. <<
That's an example of how America's food system is not based on safety or consent, but on money and power. >_<
>>So, yeah, there's bias in there, all tangled up with observed versus unexplored assumptions. I love conversations that make me THINK about those assumptions. <<
Yeah, and that's exactly why I need like-minded friends. Most people find my favorite conversations boring, scary, or offensive. I feel the same about theirs, especially when they won't shut up about the sex lives of people neither of us even know.
Re: Foods and preferences
Re: Foods and preferences
I mean, look at some of the stuff I've turned up. Everyone else found worlds full of superpowers and all they wrote was crime drama. For decades. I'm like, don't you want any of the other genres? Because hey, if you're not gonna eat that...
Re: Foods and preferences
Seconded on goat, NOM! And pig meat.
I couldn't find kidney, so I figured out how to cheat: Use chicken livers instead of kidney. Makes a damn fine pie. First time I made a GF crust, too - dead simple, rice flour and shortening, I don't remember the proportions but it turned out just fine.
Oh. Best vegetarian restaurant in Seattle? Kosher Chinese place called Bamboo Garden. Kashrut certificates visible from outside the door. Neither meat nor milk enter the building; it's all veggie, and they can do things with tofu and mushrooms like you would not believe. This certified carnivore took home leftovers... and ate them happily!
Re: Foods and preferences
My dirty rice recipe isn't really a RECIPE as a starting point, but here goes:
Dirty rice
1 lb sausage (note, I use ground chicken and spice it myself- start with ½ Tbsp sage and ¼ tsp red pepper flakes, and an equal amount of nutmeg, plus a pinch of WHITE pepper. Fully cook a marble-sized sample and taste, adjusting spices)
1 lb chicken livers
A few tablespoons of oil IF using homemade, lower-fat sausage.
1 medium green bell pepper, diced
2 red or orange peppers, diced
1 large onion, diced fine
3 stalks celery, chopped fine
2 cups long grain rice (Frankly, I've used lots of different types. Don't use black rice or sushi rice, but other than that, use what's to hand and tastes good to you.)
2Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
a full bunch of green onions, chopped fine
3 cloves of garlic (I usually use two per pound as a rule of thumb)
a bunch of parsley, of your preferred type, chopped very fine. I also use curled parsley and cilantro half-and-half for this
salt, white and cayenne pepper
½ tsp sage (if you use ready-made sausage)
2 or 3 bay leaves
hefty pinch of gumbo file (NOTE-IF you like it, you probably LOVE it, and if you don't you can leave it out. For those who don't know what it is, "gumbo file" or "file powder" is ground sassafras leaves.)
A quart of flavorful liquid –stock, potato broth, garlic broth, whatever's easy. For those who buy it, two cans of prepped commercial broth is another option.)
1/2c to 1c of extra water if needed.
Start by chopping, dicing, and mincing the vegetable ingredients and keep them in separate piles for the moment.
Roughly mince the garlic, then put the salt on the cutting board and use the flat of the knife to make the garlic into a nearly perfect paste. It takes only a couple of seconds, and is a tremendous help to the flavor. For those who need to use less garlic, this will maximize the flavor of even a single clove.
Use a heavy skillet (my cast iron is perfect for this), brown the sausage and livers together, mashing the livers into smaller bits while stirring, until there is NO PINK left. None. It's not worth rushing this step, even if you KNOW you're going to keep it on the heat for twenty more minutes.
Drain off all but roughly 3Tbsp of oil-- when using homemade sausage you will NEED to add liquid oil or lard for it. Conversely, keep draining the commercial sausage as you work, or you'll practically be deep-frying the meat!
Add the diced (bulb) onions, the peppers, and celery, and stir attentively until the onion pieces begin to turn translucent.
Add the garlic paste, the cayenne, white pepper, and bay leaves along with the rice and green onions, and keep stirring for just a minute or two, until the rice just starts to become translucent. This step will allow your rice to remain separate rather than sticky, and actually cuts about ten minutes off the overall cooking time. Once you master this technique, Rice-A-Roni becomes “Box-o-Ripoff.”
Add a quart of flavorful liquid and the Worcestershire sauce, stir to coat everything, then turn the heat to low. Simmer, COVERED for twenty minutes.
Pick out those pesky bay leaves before they break into little shards of viciousness!
Cook until the liquid is mostly absorbed. Taste and correct seasoning with a pinch of black pepper, a bit more cayenne, or an equally tiny pinch of smoked paprika, depending upon your preferred flavor profiles. Add the parsley (or parsley and cilantro), and stir attentively to cook through for another minute or two and incorporate the last of the liquid.
I seldom have leftovers for this dish, no matter HOW big the batch is-- but expect this to serve eight as a generous main dish. (When feeding teenagers, this was called “a snack.”)
Re: Foods and preferences
Re: Foods and preferences
Re: Foods and preferences
Chicken hearts are definitely NOM!
Re: Foods and preferences
Another of the odd things I've tried is duck's blood soup, a Polish recipe. Too sour for me to eat much of, but very interesting to try.
Re: Foods and preferences
Re: Foods and preferences
But some places we go are awesome. At Yanni's he was talking to the Greek-American family next to us, and we just sort of got rolled into the conversation.
Re: Foods and preferences
We get that a lot, too. One way we've found that seems to reduce the issue (fortunately, fairly easy to do around here) is to filter by how many of the patrons look like the place the cuisine is from: if you're a round-eye, and walk into a place like that, there seems to be a general presumption that you know what you're doing once you can convince them you haven't wandered into the place by mistake. Which we usually confirm by getting at least one instance of Stuff White Folks Don't Eat.
Speaking of culinary racism, spouse got a stiff dose of that once at a supposedly renowned dim sum restaurant in Hong Kong, where they got shunted off into a side room and served mostly mundane stuff. Having seen more interesting stuff in the main room, they went back, the staff attempted to put them back in the side room again, and they got across that they wanted to be in the main room -- where the dishes were much more varied and quite enjoyable.
More locally, they were taking a break to have lunch with a colleague, and went to a halal Chinese place we frequent once. One of the lunch specials was tripe, which the colleague loves and ordered. The server asked whether colleague knew what they were ordering, got "yes, bring it", and filled the order. When the order came out, a number of the wait staff and a few folks from the kitchen positioned themselves discreetly to check out what the round-eye was going to do with the order. According to spouse, there was visible relaxation once the colleague's enjoyment of the dish was observed.
Re: Foods and preferences
And just about every time I'm in a crowded ethnic Chinese restaurant, the staff will do a double-take, because I'm ambidextrous enough to use chopsticks with both hands. That means I can switch to whichever side isn't bumping into someone else at the moment. Apparently almost nobody can do that, so it attracts attention. But after that, they take me quite seriously.