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Tag: heart

It’s Official: Offal’s Not So Awful After All

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in food. No Comments on It’s Official: Offal’s Not So Awful After All

I’ve been thinking about all the kinds of foods I’ve eaten in the last couple of culinarily adventurous years, and am somedeal proud of the assortment of variety meats I’ve been lucky and brave enough to try. Below is a list of the types of offal I’ve eaten, organized by animal, followed below by my humble appraisal of each:

pig: belly,cheeks
chicken: liver, gizzard, heart, feet
turkey: gizzard, heart
cow: liver, brain, thymus, stomach, kidney, tongue
monkey: syke!

Gizzards is the bomb-diggy. Look at me askance all youse want, but I love rubbery meat! The more it’s made of muscle, the more I’ll like it, almost guaranteed. Gizzards are tricky thanks to the good bit of gristle you have to work your teeth around, but the dark sinewy hard-packed muscle is simply super-duper.

Hearts are rubbery too, with the added bonus of allowing one to consume and assume the courage of the animal it came from (seeing as how I most often eat chicken hearts this may explain my cold feet and weak knees).

Tripe the jury’s still out. I’ve had it twice, the first time, in Rome, it was delish, the second time, in Madrid, it tasted like cow poo. Maybe it was another type (there are three, each from a different of the cow’s four stomachs). Maybe the Spanish don’t flush it as well? I dunno. Texturally however tripe is another rubbery to the point of almost crunchy meat, which I liked.

Brain was a little too squishy with assorted bits, like rancid custard. Not my kinda texture at all.  Plus I really had to deliberately not think about what what I was eating had been thinking about before it became my meal, lest I get it into my head that I was eating it’s thoughts. Calf brain, my stomach, my brain: a most unholy communion.

Thymus (sweetbread) had a little better texture, kinda flaky almost like fish, but the taste was not at all worth the bother. I’ve had tastier meat in a slim jim.

Liver: the godawfullest type of food put on this planet to date. No, thank you mom, I don’t care how rich in iron it is I still don’t want to eat that cow’s toxin-catcher.

Kidney came in a pie. I couldn’t tell you what it was like or how it tasted. Either I don’t remember or it was unnoticable enough not to lodge in my memory in the first place.

Feet: probably more dependent on the preparation than anything else (like wings I reckon) but ultimately not worth it to get the tiny little bit of tasty between all those knuckles. 1.3 billion people may disagree with me on that one.

Tongue: I like it! Another pretty rubbery meat. And good on a samich.

Cheeks: Indistinguishable (to me) from any pother pulled pork-ish preparation. Tasty enough, but I could have just had the PP sandwich and not known the difference. I’d like to try it prepared in other ways.

There is plenty of offal I have not (yet) tried: fries (I can tell you I’m in no hurry to scratch that one off my list), lips, snout, tail, chitterlings, cockscombs, spleen, udder, cheeks, blood (unless blood sausage counts), and for better or for worse, penis, uterus, scrotum, etc. Name yer part, you can find a dish of it.

Then there’s your various offal concoctions, such as liverwurst (yum!) and scrapple, souse, chitterlings, and many others.

I’m all for waste parts æsthetically. It’s an essential component of my intractable hedonism, and so by principle if something tastes good that’s all I need, even/especially if it violates some primal taboo like don’t eat thoughts. But a little variety in your meat is anti-waste too — it uses up the whole animal not just the muscle — and therefore would please my parents, republicans, and other conservative types. What other cuisine, I ask you, strikes such an impressive balance between moral decline and the kind of restraint that keeps civilizations strong?

Self-Soothing

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in navel gazing, not worth publishing, oh life. No Comments on Self-Soothing

In Sam Sheridan’s A Fighter’s Heart he talks about dogs that will fight for forty-five minutes without letting up versus the dogs that quit earlier.  He quotes a trainer: “All this care, you must love the animal, and if the animal loves you back, you will get a dog that fights past forty-five minutes, an animal with gameness. If there is love, the dog will fight to the death…without it, the dog will not show heart.”

A dog whose trainer beats it to make it mean will rage and tear but run out of steam early. It’s the loved (love here not taking an easy definition) dog, the dog that not only trains with but connects to its trainer, the dog with heart, that will die before it quits.

In eighth grade, we had to wrestle in gym class.  I wrestled Mike Haft, the bully. He was big and solid and he got me on my back and I let him take me without a fight. I’ve relived that moment differently in my mind at least a thousand times. I didn’t prove myself then and I’ve proven myself many times since but still that moment haunts me.

My friend has a two year old, and she and her husband are slowly going mad trying to get him to sleep through the night. They’ve tried letting him cry it out, and they’ve tried letting him sleep in the bed with them.  They’ve tried detachment and they’ve tried attachment, and are confounded by the hard fact that no matter how many childrearing philosophies there are out there telling you the right way to raise your kid, each is his own special little (hard) case. Some will be easy and some will be hard.  Some will sleep and some will slowly drive you insane.

Fourteen years ago I was a hardcore attachment parent.  I knew (knew!) that if I gave my baby everything she wanted she would not know need, and would know the world was a good safe place, and would be contented.  But my cute little Hobbesian bundle of complicatedness flew in the face of everything I thought I knew.  I gave her all I could and she only wanted more. Now, at fourteen, she wants me to tell her how to make jell-o.  Where’s the ice? she asks.

I don’t know how to self-soothe and so am consequently constantly flirting with compulsion (long ago cigarettes, now alcohol, now sex) — never quite permitting it to do harm but never quite able to get enough either.

It occurred to me last night, restless and agitated next to sleeping Courtney, unable to deep-breathe myself down into unconsciousness, thinking only of the one thing that would soothe me but unwilling to wake her (even if I had…), that I have heard of few if any successful rescue stories. You can love it and you can give it some peace, but can you ever get its tail out from between its legs? I am trying to learn that in our cores we are all good, and satisfied, and safe, but I see so much hurt and hardness and danger. If I were more religious it might feel easier to have this sin washed out of me suddenly in a moment but I just keep getting hung up on how many thousands of neural paths have to be rerouted. Old dogs, new tricks… Or, once a cur always a cur, isn’t that how it goes?