Tastes Like Chicken

My son brought home a doggy-box containing Veal Parmigiana the other day.  I don’t eat veal because of how they raise the calves and then slaughter them while still young – it’s just a thing I’ve got.

I asked my son if he was going to finish the veal; he said no.  So now I had this dilemma:  Do I eat it for dinner or do I let it go to waste?  Go to waste, or eat it?

I ate it.  Tastes like chicken.

First time I’ve knowingly had veal in 30 years.  I’ll probably not eat it again for 30 years.

Old-Fashioned Flavor

I just had a Stewart’s Birch Beer. Boy does it suck taste bland.

I realize that artificial flavoring and corn syrup sweeteners save soft drink manufacturers money, but can’t they come up with better flavoring? Or at least more of it per unit volume? This stuff tastes like acid rain; in fact, the #1 ingredient is carbonic acid. Flavoring is fourth on the ingredients list.

Instead of quenching my thirst with a tasty beverage, I burned my throat trying to drink it.

I think it’s time to make my own.

The Policeman in the Donut Shop

On Tuesday I stopped in to my favorite donut shop for a late afternoon cup of (mostly decaf) coffee. I’m there so often they just start pouring my usual when I walk in the door. There was a cop who walked in, gun holstered, flak jacket on, carrying a radio and some other equipment. Without saying a word the girl behind the counter made him a box of donuts and poured an entire pot of coffee into a “Box o’ Joe” container and handed it to the guy. He paid her, thanked her and left.

Turns out that Tuesday night is drug raid night; he and a few of his colleagues go out on all-nighters waiting for various drug deals to go down throughout the city and suburbs. They patiently drink coffee and eat donuts, and wait for the right time to move in.

Tuesday night is drug raid night? I wonder if the drug dealers have figured this out yet…

It’s a Little Like Meth…

I had 8 cups of coffee the other day and they did not make me climb the walls.

I don’t quite understand the effects of caffeine.  I mean, I do understand them from a biochemical standpoint, but I don’t follow why all that coffee didn’t set my heart a-fluttering.  On other days a single cup will wind me up.  Maybe it had something to do with recent sleep deprivation canceling out the effects of caffeine stimulation.  Maybe some of the cups were mostly decaf (they were).  I certainly had to pee a lot.

For several years now I’ve been pretty good about reducing my caffeine uptake by mixing decaf with regular coffee.  Mostly I drink coffee that’s only about 1/3 decaf.  My morning driving mug is about 20 ounces, so that’s less than a single cup of hi-test joe.  About 3 weekdays I end up having a second round of java at lunchtime; and on weekends I usually imbibe twice a day.  Since I cut back on the caffeine the withdrawal headaches have gone away, and I sometimes (rarely) go a day without any coffee.

I really don’t like the taste of coffee.  The smell is great, but after drinking it I have to brush my teeth or swish some Listerine to kill the bad taste in my mouth.  But it’s lo-cal so it beats chugging a Coke on a regular basis.

Yet:  Coffee is a big part of my life.  Business deals  – especially over lunch – are consummated with coffee.  Morning staff meetings aren’t comprehended unless I’m sipping on a warm mug of that brown stuff.  Dinners at a fancy restaurant with my wife, Sunday mornings reading the newspaper, 3 PM business interviews, winter days, summer days – they all stop and wait for me to have a sip before flowing through and past my life.

Coffee is in my veins.

Hold the MSG

I would liked to have met General Tso. He seemed to like a breaded, fried-in-oil spicy chicken dish that every Chinese takeout place is required to have on their menu. And was broccoli native to China in General Tso’s time, or was that added to Americanize the dish? The very famous General Tso died in 1885 after wielding his sword in battle for many years. He is best known for crushing the Taiping Rebellion during the Qing Dynasty. There’s a big article in Wikipedia if you really want to know more about the General. He probably fried several of his enemies in oil and said to his cook “Hey! Make me a dish like this.”

My wife is a really good cook. No, a great cook who takes pride in creating authentic meals. She measures her cookbooks by the yard. It should not be a surprise, then, how generally disappointed I am in most restaurant food, as her preparations are at least as good – often better – and at much lower cost. I can’t think of all the weird foods that we’ve eaten, but there are many. Rattlesnake, alligator (tastes like chicken!), frog, bear and elk come to mind, as do “witches tongue” and baby octopus (types of sushi) and fried earthworms (a salad garnish). We will pretty much try anything at least once, but not monkey brains.

I do not understand why I remain so thin.