Anyone for Eyeballs?

It’s not as blatant as it used to be on TV cookery programmes, but its appearance on Masterchef the other day reminded me that eating bone marrow is still very much an in sort of fad.

It always seems to be presented as a sort of deep fried mini scotch egg, a little round parcel of offal, to be sold for 16 quid as a starter by Michelin starred “Brit-Chefs” on the ghastly gastro pub circuit. The sort of people for whom The Obese Goose or whatever it is called, is just not experimental enough.

I’m all for utilising the whole of an animal. Farming for meat is expensive, barely-to-un-sustainable and thus using the whole of the beast for food is ethically the right thing to do. But please, let me eat it as reconstituted cheap ham, or ground up eye-and-ballburgers.

I am not a Buffy monster, or a space creature with unusual tastes in organs. Ergo, the idea of scoffing into tripe, or kidney (piss making) or liver (shit making) or any intestinal or ocular apparatus is vile. But no, the new Brit-Chef scoops out parts that should never ever see the surface of the plate, and foists them upon a gullible public.

“Oh dahhling…that warm calf’s throat salad with an experience of lung was just deeeee-viiiiine. And cheap for twice the price at 18.99”.

If I was a glooping, slurping creature with the wrong number of arms and legs, or none at all, I might be interested in eating such hip concoctions. But I’m not. Give me burgers, or cheap ham, or turkey twizzlers.

Just don’t give me eyes.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 19/11/2013

Foraging for the Gods

I can’t tolerate recreational drug use. Not out of any great moral outrage, but rather because my Tourette’s and generally overstimulated frontal lobes make narcotics inadvisable to dabble with.

I hear from friends that magic mushroom season, Psilocybe Semilanceanta, is upon us, and that foraging parties will soon be underway in various secret woodland glades around about my home town. I always remember the classic album “Boss Drum” by The Shamen, featured Learian psychedelic enthusiast Terrence Mckenna on one track, where he said things like “If the truth could be told in a form that could be understood, then it will be believed” in a funny nasal voice.

He went on to say, on top of bleepy house burblings, that psychedelic plants were the key to opening up the mind of humanity to enable it to progress. I was the perhaps jealous outsider looking in on all this, as although I was the right age, the reliance of drug use for the rave experience – whether acid or ecstasy – I found very excluding.

I lost several friends because they were into drug culture back in 1989, and I wasn’t. Nowadays I feel that I’ve been lucky to be blessed with a powerful imagination, and that drug dabbling would have enhanced nothing. So this afternoon, instead of looking for psychedelic mushrooms, I will be looking for blackberries and perhaps elderberries, hopefully to put a few in a sandwich container to gift to my presents.

And who knows, perhaps blackberries are the true food of the gods, and that this “reality” I see before me, is a fruit enhanced view of the world, and actually I live in some sort of endless concentration camp, smothered in mud and excrement and raddled with typhus, and that a precious dose of smuggled blackberries has led me to hallucinate I’m typing in a library.

You never can tell.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14/09/13