WTF MONDAY - Guest Comestible from the U S of A

The Interweb can be a scary place, filled with horrifying images, deliberately harmful content and comedy cat videos.

This disturbing image had me cowering behind the sofa, whimpering with terror at the realisation that the oddball inhabitants of our Lost Colonies have weaponised that most sacred of foods and marketed it as a "GREAT GIFT IDEA!"

I looked this stuff up … it's bacon grease, scraped from the bottom of the pan. Yup, bacon grease. Their website makes no bones about it: "Real Bacon Grease, Ready To Use", "Authentic Bacon Grease", with recipes and testimonials. Nine-pound tubs of it! Nine POUNDS of bacon grease! Like they say, a "GREAT GIFT IDEA!" And a free spoon in the tub!

They also have a "What Shouldn't I Do With BaconUp?" page, including the perhaps wise advice not to add it to coffee. "DO NOT Overheat, DO NOT Leave Unattended, DO NOT add back into the container, NEVER pour in trash, NEVER pour down drain, NEVER add water."

This stuff is a WMD!

So why, Why WHY do I want to crack open a tub and spoon it down my gullet, making gronf, gronf, gronf noises?

Be Afraid …

They said it couldn't be done …

or more truthfully, it shouldn't be done.

At last, someone has weaponised chocolate.

We've had bacon chocolate on here before, and wasabi chocolate, but this knocks 'em into a cocked hat.

It's gorgeous! Just don't let me breathe near you.

And no, you can't have any; I've eaten it and now I want more!

More Intelligent Design …

Holy crap. I have got to get myself one of these.
And PLEASE check out the Mister Tea link at the bottom. I want one of those, too!

If You're Gonna Take a Selfie, Why Stop at Your Face?

Hokay, so as selfies go this one is pretty extreme but it's the only photograph taken of me this year so I'm thinking of using it as my Fæcebook profile shot (or maybe not). It was taken by a teeny tiny Raquel Welch in a miniaturised submarine (for anyone who can remember the sixties).

Anyhoo … other than some minor medical faff and blather and some icky nasties that the surgeon put right with rubber bands, superglue and bulldog clips it appears that I am all mended and can get back to whatever passes for normality around here.

This, by the way, is a portrait, taken yestereve of my prominent Brunner's glands - something I was not aware of having until last night. As it's a whole lot prettier than my face I may well use it on dating sites.

One thing I learned about gastroscopies: when the surgeon pumps your tum full of air so he can see what's he's doing, you can't help but do the most AWESOME monster belches! Hell, if I could belch like that when I was ten years old I'd have been king of the school.

I also learned that it's possible to giggle with a camera tube jammed down your throat and to make a nurse crack up.

So … Let's see some of your own extreme selfies.

There Is A God

Bacon Macarons!

"SQUEEEEEE …"

Hello. My Name Is Dive And I'm A Pastaholic.

Fuck, I'm fat!

Hokay, time for an intervention. Time for all of my more reasonably proportioned body parts to gather round and gawp in disgusted awe at my utter rotundity.

Holy shit … I wouldn't look out of place in a Mid-West strip mall, shopping for cheese in a spray can. Not being one for mirrors and only having a top view of the corpulent crisis going on in my midriff I had been only vaguely aware of the effects of rampant inflation … until this weekend.

Last Sunday, given the choice between Easter church service and traditional family roast dinner, I sensibly opted for neither and instead moseyed on down to the studio to make an unholy racket with my disreputable friends (or at least one disreputable friend and my equally disreputable little brother).

Phil has gone all gadget-happy and spent his groats on one of those new fangled moving picture screens (an Apple eye patch I think he called it). Anyhoo, he propped the thing up on an amp while we spent a pleasantly unproductive afternoon busking old songs that none of us could really remember and songs that none of us actually knew … pretty much par for the course.

It would appear that the piratical eye patch captured some of the shambolic mess on video. The upshot of which is that I caught sight of myself standing sideways on to the camera and screamed like a girl.

Fuck, I'm FAT!

As a friend has since put it: “Most people would simply opt for conventional gender reassignment, but you? You have to be different. I mean the man-boobs were bad enough, but how the hell did you manage to get yourself pregnant?”

I took a screen grab of my planet-shaped pregnancy and stuck it on the fridge door with a big red sign that simply states “DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE!” I have another sign on the kitchen door which reads “Don’t even think about it. Turn around one-eighty and get your fat, ugly arse into the gym, lardboy!”

On an unrelated note, Nokia recently took over the company I used to use to post all my music on my blog and - to improve their service - are pulling the plug on the whole thing. So if anyone clicks on my old music tracks all they'll get is a bunch of Swedish incompetence and no noise whatsoever.

Whilst the more culturally advanced among you might consider that an improvement, I'm a sadistic bastard, so here's some of last Sunday's cacophonous crap to annoy the hell out of you and to remind me to lock myself out of the kitchen.
Knowing myself pretty well, however, I predict that dieting will be a non-starter and will be replaced by the simple expedient of never again standing sideways on to a camera.

Toodle pip.

WTF Mmmmmonday

As I am suffering Katie withdrawal symptoms at the moment (she's on vacation, chilling by a pool in Chaing Mai in preparation for invading Laos), here is a WTF Monday gift she gave me.

Yes, you read that right; it's BACON chocolate!

And I must confess it was totally delicious.
Yes, it was chocolate, but yes it DEFINITELY tasted of bacon.

It was GOOOOOOOOOOD!
More, more, more! PLEASE!

Go HERE to buy some.
Thay make an awesome chili chocolate, too.
Proof that the US of A has finally discovered that food does not have to0 be made entirely from crap*. Woohoo!

* About fucking time!

Not 500 Words

If anyone's over here looking for a 500 Words assignment for next week I'm afraid my mind is still recovering from my vacation and is a total blank where writing is concerned.
I'll restart the 500 Words thing next Friday, but in the meantime …

I've been seriously neglecting my series on eating the weirdest, ickiest and most dangerous things I can find and now, thanks to Katie smuggling the things into the country I have the opportunity of ingesting probably the most disgusting and soul-destroying alleged foodstuff the planet has ever known.

This is not an experiment I feel safe conducting on my own so I've invited Phil over to join me.

Laydees and gentlemen, I give you - all the way from the USA …
That most awesomely destructive Weapon of Mass Obesity:
The Hostess Twinkie!

Ewwwwww!

If anyone feels like making one at home, here are the ingredients:
ENRICHED BLEACHED WHEAT FLOUR [ FLOUR, REDUCED IRON (what the fuck is "reduced iron"? Rust?), 'B' VITAMINS (NIACIN, THIAMINE MONONITRATE (B1), RIBOFLAVIN (B2), FOLIC ACID], SUGAR, WATER, CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE AND/OR ANIMAL SHORTENING (Animal Shortening? Is that when they cut the legs off?) (SOYBEAN, COTTONSEED AND/OR CANOLA OIL, BEEF FAT … Mmmmmmm … Beef Fat! Just what you're looking for in a dessert; slap it over your lemon sorbet. Yum), WHOLE EGGS, DEXTROSE, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: MODIFIED CORN STARCH, GLUCOSE, LEAVENINGS (SODIUM ACID PYROPHOSPHATE (isn't that an explosive?), BAKING SODA, MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE), SWEET DAIRY WHEY, SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, CALCIUM AND SODIUM CASEINATE, SOY FLOUR, SALT, MONO AND DIGLYCERIDES, POLYSORBATE 60, SOY LECITHIN, CORNSTARCH, CELLULOSE GUM, SODIUM STEAROYL LACTYLATE, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOURS, SORBIC ACID (TO RETAIN FRESHNESS), YELLOW 5, RED 40.

Holy fucking crap! That's wholly fucking crap!

Combine all that stuff together in a big factory and you get these: sticky little sausagey cylinders of corn syrup and chemicals.

Well … Here goes nothing!

Katie well and truly threw down the gauntlet earlier this summer by eating a (brace yourselves) deep-fried Twinkie on a stick (GACK), so, as we big brave boys cannot let the girls have all the glory, open wide and let's eat Twinkie!

Gimme an "I"
Gimme a "C"
Gimme a "K"
Gimme a "Y"

Phil's actual verdict was "Ooh! They're quite nice!"

Sheesh! The sugar rush is going to kill me!

Gah! And pthah!

The awful, sickly-sweet taste of factory syrup and nasty chemicals. These things are truly gross!

They're kinda like chewing the foam rubber padding out of a cheap sofa that's been marinaded in corn syrup for a few years and then left to rot in a chemical dump.
Plus there's enough preservatives in there to ensure my corpse won't rot for decades after I'm dead. Though it may spontaneously combust from all the chemicals.

I'm writing this an hour or so after eating my Twinkie, having since flushed my tastebuds clean with green tea and then had a vigorous minty tooth-brushing session, but STILL all I can taste is sticky sickly sweetness.
EUGH!
Plus I now have a kind of chemical burn at the back of my throat.
ACK!

So far in this series we've eaten such things as whalemeat, wasabi chocolate, soy sauce flavoured Kit-Kat and tamarind poo, but Twinkies are easily the worst culinary experience I've endured to date.

Of course if anyone knows anything grosser I can put in my mouth, please send along a sample.

It's Brown; It's Sticky: It's Poo-Shaped. Let's Eat It!

It seems weird working from home on a Monday but the car's in for a service so here I am.
As I'm too busy to write anything that requires conscious thought and I am also quite peckish I think it's time to re-visit an occasional series we've not seen for a while: "Dive's Extreme Eating."

This series has seen me putting odd things into my mouth and chomping down on them both for my own curiosity and your prurient entertainment.
We've explored the stinky and sticky world of natto, eaten whalemeat, taken part in the infamous wasabi chocolate experiment and I have related the tuna cat food / dead spider / meths / cheese and pickle cautionary tale.

Today I'm breaking with tradition and actually eating something yummy.
Today I shall be launching my tastebuds at a box of sweet tamarind.

Now some of you (especially Joy, who introduced me to this gloriously addictive stuff) may already know how delicious this is, but I'd not tried it until earlier this year and now I am a registered addict.

So … Here we have a box with Sweet Tamarind written on it. If you check your local Asian store you may well come across something similar.
Step one is to buy it.

Step two is to remove some of the strange, poo-shaped and poo-coloured pods from the box and look at them a little nervously.
Some of you may remember how soaking and squeezing tamarind paste is as near to poo-massage as you are ever likely to want to get and may well be backing away from your monitor right now.
Worry not! For yummyness awaits within.

Tentatively break open a pod and take a peek inside.

Oooooh!
Looky! A little poo, all tied up with string.

If ever any of you have nightmares about triffids or Invasion of the Body-Snatchers this might freak you a little.
I dare say not many of you would think - upon first encountering one of these - "Hey! That looks like something I want to put in my mouth."

But persevere! Remove the strings and chow down on that sticky, brown mess.
Holy Moly!
It is utterly delicious!
If there are any Brits out there who remember Rowntree's Fruit Pastilles, these are just like a less sugary and far more delicious version of those.

Once the sweet-sour tang has hit home and your tastebuds are enjoying multiple orgasms in your mouth you'll discover that there are hard little seeds inside the gooey deliciousness.

Simply put these to one side and carry on avidly devouring every last drop of that sticky pulp.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm …

Once you have a decent pile of seeds (which won't be long as the taste of the pulp is so fantastic), get yourself a frying pan and gently dry fry the seed cases for around five minutes, shaking them occasionally.

Let them cool for a bit, then crack open the shell casing with your teeth (or a hammer if you've got crap teeth) to reveal what looks (and tastes) like a hard version of a toasted peanut.
These are considerably less delicious than the yummy pulp but still worth trying, if only as a test of your dentist's handiwork.

As a special treat on today's "Dive's Extreme Eating" post we'll be devouring some of the goodies Mayuko brought back from Tokyo.

Pocky fans will be drooling at liquorice and crunchy nut Pocky and lovers of weird, squidgy, milk-flavoured rubber sweets will enjoy the little white packets with the cow on the front.

These read:
ミルクソフトキャンデー
… which is pronounced "mirukusofutokandee", which - as any fule kno - is milk soft candy.

But it is the limited edition KitKat that is the scariest thing here.
The Japanese really love their limited edition weird-flavoured sweets and this one is no exception:

Hands up who can read this:
しょうゆ

Yup. It's "Shouyu" … er … soy sauce flavoured KitKat.

Which … much to my disappointment, actually tasted delicious. A little like Caramac, if anyone remembers those.

Anyhoo. That's it for this episode of Dive's Extreme Eating. Not very extreme this time I grant you, but perhaps it will encourage you to put weird things in your mouth and see what they taste like.

A Cautionary Tale

Robyn's mouth-watering, chocolate-covered post reminds me of a cocoa-related cautionary tale of my own:

Where I used to work we had a guy who would cruise around peoples' desks and help himself to any chocolates that happened to be laying there. As you can probably understand, this kinda rankled after a while.

So anyway, Elaine had a chocolate making kit (one of those crappy mould things she got for Christmas) with which we spent an entertainingly disgusting evening creating a small batch of rather exclusive chocolates with … er … "exotic" fillings.
And drinking a lot.

The first one we made was a cube of cheese with a tiny pickle on top, lovingly encased in chocolate. It looked so damned good sitting there I almost ate it myself.
The next was a wad of cotton wool soaked in meths; again a rather enticing prospect when coated in the yummy brown stuff.
Another was a dead spider (quite a meaty one) enhanced with a dollop of tomato ketchup and gloopily enveloped in a dark chocolate shell (yum).
The fourth was tuna cat food.

We arranged our creations artfully in an old chocolate box and left them on the end of Elaine's desk the following morning, every one of us surreptitiously keeping a sly eye on events.
Sure enough, within minutes, Frank (hi, Frank) zoomed in and snaffled a couple, cramming them into his mouth with unconcealed glee.

Oh, joy unbounded!
He got the dead spider in ketchup and the cheese and pickle. And it took several seconds of self-satisfied grinning and chomping before his expression changed to one that is best imagined rather than described.

Ah, schadenfreude … Pointing and laughing is always such fun.
Unfortunately it didn't stop Frank's predatory ways but he was somewhat more circumspect as a consequence, only snaffling unopened chocolate bars.
We did offer him the meths and cat food chocs but he nobly declined.

Let that be a lesson to you.

P.S. Happy birthday, little brother!

Don't Try This At Home

My marvellous "very personal secretary", Ms. Gaijin Girl has suggested I start a regular post called "Dive's Extreme Eating" after last night's shennanigans with a bar of chocolate and a tube of wasabi paste (hey, you do what you want with your "very personal secretary" and I'll do what I want with mine) …

As I have previously posted on other inadvisable things I have put in my mouth (check out the link to "Eating Endangered Species" posts at the bottom of my sidebar … Not you, Kate!) … I felt I would share this one with you, too.

Last night, I simply smeared wasabi paste on some chocolate and stuck it in my mouth. The wasabi hit first, which was nice, but then the chocolate started to melt and …
Well … Let's just say that was something I vowed never to repeat …

Until this lunchtime, that is …
I decided to vary the experiment. Follow this recipe if you are clinically insane:


These are the basic ingredients:
1 bar of Green and Black's Organic Dark Chocolate.
1 tube of wasabi paste.

To avoid the kind of time-lapse taste explosions of last night I decided to let a piece of the chocolate dissolve on my tongue first, and only then follow it with a further - and larger - piece, liberally dosed with wasabi paste.

Take it from one who knows …
This is something only an imbecile would try once.
Only my love for my fellow bloggers and the interests of culinary science induced me to repeat the excercise.

What I WILL say is this:
The aftertaste is fucking AMAZING!
The taste itself is, however, decidedly not.
Suffice to say, wasabi paste on dark chocolate is probably the most unpleasant thing I have ever had in my mouth (and believe me; a whole lot of strange things have passed that way).

So this is the first in what will be an occasional series of Dive's Extreme Eating. Starring Dive and his lovely assistant, GG.
Coming soon to a cable channel near you.

Lunch With Knudsen

The old bugger just made me hungry with his mouthwatering post about giant squid.
And as there's no sushi bar in my stupid village, all I've got is this tin of くじら　(that's kujira for those of you too cheap to get a decent computer that shows kana) that Jun brought back from Tokyo.
Vegetarians and panty-waists start screaming now. Sorry, but it's delicious … Mmmm …

So, here's to lunch with Knudsen.
Sing along now: Whalemeat again, don't know where, don't know when, but I … etc.

Egrets

The measure of a person can be judged by what they do.
Surgeons, astronauts, lifeboatmen, care nurses, single mothers … All heroic; all up there on the very top rank of peopledom.
You may be a volunter nurse, working with Medeçin Sans Frontiers;
You may be a freedom fighter;
You may sail single-handed around the world;
You may like to climb mountains (hi, Rog);
You may be a great writer (hi, Frances);
You may like to … whatever; you get the gist …
Me? I like to sit alone in the dark in my studio, clicking on the random "next blog" switch ...

Which is where I discovered Fluff (thanks, Sassy).
You can reach Sassy's blog by clicking on the "Intelligent America" link in the sidebar. There you will see a splendid series of photos of a biggish jar with the word "Fluff" on the front, on tour in Europe and America.
Fluff has even been photographed on Liar's Lawn, just round the corner from my office (that patch of grass outside the Houses of Parliament where the politicians get interviewed on TV).
Fluff intrigues me; I'm that kind of guy. I have to know more, and Sassy obliges with the revelation that "Fluff is a thick marshmallow sauce, sticky (unbelievably so … getting it off one's face is almost impossible) in consistency, and sweeter than anything on this Earth."
Now I was raised in England, not long after the end of rationing. I'm used to eating wet, overcooked cabbage, thin slices of grey gristly stuff, watery gravy, twigs and berries … Now I discover there is a substance like a black hole made entirely of sugar. And I can put it in my mouth! WOW! According to legend, it's only available in New England, not Old … Bugger!
I sense the atavistic urge for a quest …

We must have a specialist deli somewhere in London. We have shops where you can buy Japanese food, Portuguese food, Polish food, chips with gravy in a tray (corner of Strutton Ground Market in Westminster, if you're feeling peckish); why not an American deli? A magical kingdom where the staff are actually nice to you. And deep in the mysterious recesses, shelves bursting with exotic delights: alfalfa and sassafras; intoxicating cajun spices; pork bellies; hominy grits and Bazooka Joe (what the hell is a hominy grit?); and there at last, glowing with golden light: the holy grail: Fluff!

I've put some odd stuff in my mouth over the years, yet the box marked "Fluff" remains frustratingly unticked. When I get hold of some, it's gonna be Operation Dessert Storm! Let's dissolve some teeth.
I once spent fifteen years as a veggie, but wound up one day in a sushi bar where it all ended in tears. I've eaten things with any amount of legs/fins/tentacles/protuberances, though I try to steer clear of endangered species (except くじら; sorry guys, but I love it).
Egrets: I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention (sorry, Frank).
But なっと (natto) still defeats me. …
Natto: what the fuck is that all about? You get some soya beans, let them go really manky, then pour a load of two-pack epoxy glue over 'em. Stickier than a whole mountain of sticks, with an aroma like a tramp has wanked into a bag of dry roast peanuts. Life's too short to put that in your mouth.

Your homework this weekend:

I'm fed up with the telephone game. Play it amongst yourselves if you want, but it'll only appear here again when I can think of a really good one. In fact, the whole homework thing may come and go, depending on my mood. Anyway:

Today's track to track down: Hallelujah by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra. Weird Norwegian girl takes old Leonard Cohen song and holy fuck! This is GOOD!

Today's fact: Beetroot juice can be used to remove minor stains from upholstery and soft furnishings.