Don’t forget that the Fabulous Taco Quiz is rounding down to its last few days. You need to put your entry in NOW! And trust me, you’ve got a good chance of winning a fabulous prize.
Now onto more immediate concerns: food.
If I were a twelve-year old, and they gave me the task of designing the perfect cookie, I would create these Confetti Bambolin.
A chocolate sugar cookie topped with a dollop of marshmallow and crusted with colored sprinkles.
I’ve meant to stop by Lammes candies for a while. It seems improbable that there could be a chocolate factory in Austin that I haven’t investigated, but such is the case. At their outlet store I found a Texas Chocolate bar and several Texas chocolate coins.
You can tell it’s a Texas coin because there’s an armadillo stamped on it.
Stopping by Phoenicia, the Mediterranean grocery store, got me some flatbread, some laban (a type of yogurt), and a meat product called mortadella.
This mortadella was of the sort of highly-processed meat that resembles extruded protein gel more than animal muscle. If you look carefully at the "meat" you can actually see a circular pattern of bubbles formed by the meat extrusion.
But I don’t want you to think this is a low-class meat product. It is very fancy, as you can tell by the label.
When my food-frakking deputy Julia doesn’t have a craving for chicken, she has a craving for Vietnamese food. So we made a trip to Tam Deli. For an appetizer we had a crepe stuffed with bean sprouts and pork. We weren’t sure what the lettuce leaves were for, but we wrapped it around pieces of crepe before dipping the whole wad in the bowls of fish sauce.
I also ordered a rice noodle dish. The slippery white mess stuck to the chopsticks.
During a visit to La Canaria I bought tostadas topped with carne guisada. Tostadas are somewhat like nachos, but there’s only a single huge chip.
Here’s a birthday present that I ate recently, lumpfish caviar. I savored each and every delicately aborted fishbaby.
I spilled some lumpfish eggs on the table, and when I tried to pick up the tiny balls with my short and stubby fingers, they popped like miniature ketchup packets, spraying a single black drop of fish-egg goop.
Here’s another kind of fish balls.
I dropped these in with my ramen. They tasted rubbery and smooth, retaining the roughly hexagonal shape they developed when frozen.
To celebrate reading Man Eating Bugs cover to cover, I took the risk that my shrimp allergy crossed over to insects and ate several pre-packaged crickets.
Ostensibly they were chile and lime flavored, but in reality they tasted like dry oat hulls. But luckily there was no vomiting!
Pennywort tea was also in my recent birthday package.
It tasted much like it looks: as if someone put a fistful of lawn clippings in a blender and added some sugar. Therefore I concluded that it was very healthy.
The aloe vera drink is also probably healthy, but it tasted much better, not at all like aloe vera salve.
It’s from that particular class of Asian canned drink that has weird textures. You can see the chewy bits floating in it.
I can’t believe we don’t have more chewy soft drinks in this country.
