Category — gross stuff

Joe and I moved in September to a new apartment in North Vancouver – it’s a HUGE improvement on the old place. Some of its best features are:

• No more demon-spawn upstairs.
• A partial view of downtown.
• Proximity to things like groceries and sushi.
• A gas stove and fireplace.

I do miss having access to a compost bin though – we throw away a lot more garbage than I’d like now. Our disappointment at being without a composter is somewhat mollified by the presence of the garburator; we can dispose of our lettuce bits and soggy Cheerios that way.

I admit it, I have a childish sense of glee when stuffing old lettuce bits, leafy end first, down the garburator and then hitting the button and watching the lettuce spin as it get chewed up and disappears. I’m sure I had the same sort of fascination with the toilet as a child when flushing marbles and keys down it – garburators are just a more grown-up form of the same fun.

So, this past weekend I toddled off on Sunday to go to East is East with a friend. We ate amazing food and chatted and, though I was completely stuffed from lunch, I ordered their vegan chocolate pudding to take home and enjoy later. It looked so amazing – dark chocolate with fresh coconut sprinkled on top – what could be bad about that?

Later that evening, I decided to try the pudding. The chocolate was good and dark with a hint of some sort of spice in it, and it had some chunks in it reminiscent of grapes. I hadn’t been expecting bits in it and swallowed one of them whole. That was it for me. In my limited and dull world, pudding does not have chunks. So I told Joe to try it (this is the fun of being married – you get to share all your chunky pudding experiences with someone!). Joe did not like the pudding;  not even the chocolate part, which I did like.

The chunks were disposed of down the garburator and neither of us thought anything more about it.

Fast-forward to about 20 minutes ago. I am cleaning up from lunch and I see that there are lettuce bits to be disposed of. I stuff them down the garburator in the usual manner and hit the switch. The lettuce spins, but the garburator is making a horrible grinding sound. I stop it spinning, run some hot water down it and his the switch again. More grinding – and somehow it’s louder.

Now, I know you’re not supposed to stick your hand beyond the rubber sheet thingy, but how else can you figure out what’s wrong with a garburator? So I soldier on, reasonably sure there are no poltergeists waiting to hit the switch and amputate my hand when I’m not looking, when my fingers hit something slimy. It has a hard centre and then a thick, almost fibrous, coating of slime on it. I pull gently at the tail end of the slime and everything comes up.

This is shameful, but I squealed with alarm and jumped back from the counter, for in the tiny sink, by the opening of the garburator, lay this:

I feel certain that this used to be one of the grapey-bits from the pudding.

On Sunday, it was a pudding covered globe of something edible; now, it is a white and grey trail of slime. I didn’t think anything decayed that quickly outside of horror films and time-lapse photography. I crept back to the sink and peeked in. The slime hadn’t moved and it looked relatively harmless, so I scooped it up on a spoon and dumped it in a discarded Shredded Wheat packet.

I ran the garburator again. It was still making a terrible racket.

I grabbed a small flashlight and a sturdy wooden spoon and lifted the rubber sheet. There were two more, much larger, pools of slime.

My skin crawled with revulsion, but I got them out using the wooden spoon to haul it up the side of the garburator and another spoon to keep it from slipping back into the drain. These slime pools joined the first in the Shredded Wheat packet. I washed my hands – twice! – and then rinsed the garburator with scalding hot water and pressed the button. No more grinding noise; the garburator was free of decayed grapey-things.

I sat down at my desk, prepared to resume writing and ignore the paranoid part of my mind that was telling me that not only are the slime pools sentient, but that they are also angry and hungry for human flesh – when it hit me. I could share this horror with the world. I could post this online and make sure that everyone who comes here can see the grossness that is decayed, possibly sentient, grapey-things!

And, feeling much better about things, I did just that.

Hosting a dinner for a couple of friends isn’t terribly hard, but it does require some preparation.

For instance, this Saturday I decided to test out a recipe that I wanted to make for two friends coming over this coming Friday. We have an awesome night of board games, dinner and hanging out planned.

The recipe is called Sirloin Roast Wrapped in Bacon. How can you go wrong with such a recipe? Roast beef? Good. Bacon? Awesome.

So, Joe and I went out and I bought all the ingredients we needed and I have to admit, as I was preparing the roast – slathering on the Dijon mustard, carefully wrapping the roast with bacon (the kind with 25% less salt too – I am considerate of my guest’s arteries) – I felt a surge of as yet unearned pride. There I was, making a meal that would say: “I am an adult. I can host a successful dinner. I am awesome.” A montage played through my head: my guest’s eyes rolling up in their heads in ecstasy as they took the first bite. A ringing of wine glasses as they toasted my prowess in the kitchen. Admiring and envious looks.

Yes, I do have quite the imagination.

I slid the roast into the oven, marveling at my own handiwork and within 30 minutes, I could smell bacon and a hint of the Dijon mustard in the air. I congratulated myself; if the smell was anything to go by, this was going to be great.

Fast-forward to nearly 2 hours later.

The timer on the oven has buzzed; I open the oven door and when the fog clears from my glasses – there she is: the bacon wrapped roast. I break off a tiny piece of crisp bacon. It is perfect.

With great care, I remove the roast from the pan. I take out most of the toothpicks I used to hold some of the bacon and cut in with my sharpest knife and try a little of my masterpiece: it is not good.

The marbled fat that I somehow missed seeing when I purchased the meat is rubbery and disgusting. The Dijon mustard has added a sludgy texture that is reminiscent of flavourless mud. The bacon seems bland and a little soggy. The meat itself is dull – I might as well offer my guests waterlogged wood chips covered in filth and fat.

I have failed.

In fact, dinner was so bad that we ate almost nothing of it (while attempting to watch the movie Trick ‘r’ Treat which was nearly as bad as our dinner) and we tossed most of it straight into the garbage; it was that unsalvageable.

As I was washing the dishes, I saw the whole thing in a new and rather dismal light. I don’t even like Dijon mustard – it doesn’t belong on any food ever. I knew this and still used 1/3 of a jar on the roast. That bacon has 25% less salt – to hell with healthy arteries, everyone knows salt adds flavour! The toothpicks made the roast resemble Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies and it tasted gross!

My confidence in my cooking skills took a dive. My faith in the god-like abilities of bacon to make everything awesome wavered. I felt something like despair. I should have known that a recipe that came with the roasting rack might suck. I mean, it was a $14.00 rack for god’s sake. I doubt Gordon Ramsey would have clipped the it from the package and stuck it in his recipe box like I did.  I should also have known that buying a roast at your local Save On Foods might not be as good as say a butcher’s cut of roast. I might have been able to get the part of the cow that wasn’t riddled with fat if I’d gone to a butcher.

And then I remembered I had beer in the fridge.

So I had one, and I thought some more about my failed adventures in roast beef. Perhaps I wasn’t a failure after all.

I did learn the value of a good cut of meat and I did save my guests from having to eat a disgusting dinner (plus forcing them to choke it down politely because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings) – I hadn’t failed at all.

I just wasted some money and time and made my husband eat a crappy dinner…for the second night in a row…

And then I remembered I had beer in the fridge…

I am participating in CurlyWurlyGurly’s theme posting challenge for June: The WORST candy in the history of mankind has to be Hershey’s Eat-More bar.

The Eat-More bar is supposedly a “chewy dark toffee, peanut and chocolate” bar. But what you never hear about is how these bars are made – well, I am spilling my guts to the world now. No more secrets! This is how Eat-More is manufactured:

1. Go to work at candy bar factory.
2. Pick up random bits of toffee, peanuts and chocolate on the bottom of your boots.
3. Scrape boots off into the Eat-More bucket at the end of your shift.
4. Grave-yard shift workers press it into bars and sell it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an economical and environmentally friendly method for making candy, but even if their boots are clean; do you really want to eat candy that was on the floor? This defies the five second rule and is, quite frankly, unhygienic.

I did try to get a picture of it, but it sensed my great dislike for it and would not allow me to take its photo. All the photos were blurred and in one, I’m fairly certain I saw a cluster of peanut bits shaped like Satan. But, I am not one to disappoint my readers and I discovered the Candy Blog has a very nice and in-focus photo of it.

Besides which, the candy looks rather like a shiny turd with peanut bits embedded in it and this is a G rated blog. Someone has to think of the children.

My father would tell me I am a cretin for not loving these bars. He claims they are tasty, they keep the mail moving (though how that much sugar translates into fibre I will never know) and the number one reason to love Eat-More bars (according to dear old Dad) is folding the wrapper like so:

I tried eating a little piece of the bar – after all I have broadened my horizons somewhat since I was 7 years old – but, my refined adult palate wholeheartedly rejected the candy and went running straight into the arms of a 3 Musketeers bar.

Dad, if you’re reading this, I’m sure it’s Mum’s faulty genes that dictate my hatred for this candy. I still like beer if that helps.