Detestable Delectables

There are things out in the world that no one in their right mind would eat, like rail road spikes, live power lines, or my grandmother's terrible, terrible cooking. Then there are foods out there in the world  that are generally accepted as fantastic.

But then there are the foods out there that straddle the line. These foods might look absolutely god awful, like something crawled on your plate and died a slow agonizing death from eating something as equally ugly as it, but these foods can still be tasterific. And today's post ladies and gents is dedicated to two of my favourite foods (of many) which aptly fit the category of what I like to call Detestable Delectables. 

1. The Dim Sum Treat

BOCK!?

For those of you not in the know Dim Sum is essentially Chinese brunch, but instead of eating eggs Benedict and washing it down with a nice mimosa, we eat different kinds of proteins stuffed into dumplings and wash it down with cheap Chinese green tea. Which I'm pretty sure means that it has been cut with something toxic that will either render me blind or dead. 

Anyway, we don't just eat dumplings though, we also eat sticky rice, which is various proteins shoved into steamed rice, black bean steamed short ribs, and one of my favorite all time items, chicken feet.

So here is the skinny on these skinny little treats.

Pros:

- Fried or steamed, sometimes both, then simmered in black bean sauce. Pure awesome.

- They are all flavour, as you'll mainly just be eating chicken skin, and everyone knows that the skin is the best part.

- If you are full and you have two left you can always dance them across the table, or if you only have one you can always use it to traumatize a small child. Both of these things I have done, and they are fun, fun, fun!

Cons:

- It's kind of morbid eating something that is clearly and easily identified as having come from a chicken. 

- It's a guilt trip thinking that you are eating the feet of a now amputee chicken, less so when you realize that the rest of him probably went the same way, or more so I suppose. Crap now I feel like a jerk.

- Try not to think about where those feet may have been when they were still attached to the chicken... You thought about it didn't you?

- It's feet for fucks sake, who the hell would choose to eat feet? Besides me?

2. No it's Not.

Another one of my favourites from my childhood is a dish that is very close to my heart and the hearts of literally billions of people around the world, congee.

Hmmm that looks... Wait what the hell is that?

Now congee, which is actually known by many names in many languages, is at its most basic level nothing more than a small amount of rice that has had the ever living shit cooked out of it. If you ever over cooked rice you know that it tends to get a little mushy, and if you took that mushy rice and cooked it further then you eventually would get congee. Now either during or after the cooking you would add all sorts of lovely and not so lovely ingredients to the mix. Ingredients like salted fish, green onion, mushrooms, chicken, and just about anything else that you might have in the kitchen. Which makes sense because congee was eaten largely in the past as a famine dish because China doesn't have a real stellar history of taking great care of its people, shocking to say the least. 

So here is the low down on the this lowly dish.

Pros:

- It's tasty.

Cons:

- In some of the languages that have a name for congee, that name translates out to "rice gruel". There is a reason for this, it looks like gruel. It is seriously one of the most ugliest things you will ever eat, or won't eat given my enthusiastic endorsement of the dish.

- It has the consistency of warm, chunky snot. If that isn't appetizing I don't know what is.

- They will charge you five dollars for a bowl of the stuff, and it really only takes about fifteen dollars to make a huge pot of it yourself. It's easy to make too, a lobotomized monkey with one arm and severe radiation poisoning could prepare it. Not hard.

- People, if I was not raised eating the stuff, I would sure as hell not willing eat it today.

That concludes our little culinary adventure for today, I hope you enjoyed it and managed to keep your appetite. Stay tuned for the next installment of Detestable Delectables which is my "things that should never have been dunked in a deep fryer" segment. Until later.