This Big City Boy Won't Eat Country Foods.
Posted: Friday, July 17, 2009
by Mike Fak
http://mikefak.com
I love live radio. It is one of those things that can be a bunch of fun especially if you don't have an iota of regimen about what you are planning to talk about.
My partner Jim and I we're talking about the Iowa State Fair officials being in a quandary over whether or not to make a Michael Jackson statue out of butter.
My dyslexia kicked in and I said they we're debating making a butter statue out of Michael Jackson. After Jim stopped laughing of course that got us off on a tangent.
The conversation then progressed into the difference between big city and small town rural with the conversation being raised about how different some of the foods are from Chicago compared to central Illinois.
One is the culture shock of Rocky Mountain Oysters being considered a delicacy around here. For you big city dwellers, they are pig testicals and for the life of me I don't know why anyone would eat something like that. I remember having to go to an oyster fry once and I kept taking those nasty things on my plate and flinging them at the appreciative dogs when no one was looking. I then went around going yum, yum but that just made someone throw some more on my plate. Finally when I could see the dogs we're stuffed, I quietly left the shindig saying I had to get home for an appendectomy I had been putting off until after I could eat a pound of pig's gonads.
I have a simple motto in life: it is, "I will not eat your gonads, please don't eat mine."
Another thing down here that I can't make a lick of culinary sense about is chicken livers and gizzards. Those disgusting things are available at almost every restaurant or convenience store and they even put signs out bragging when they have a sale on a plate of those things. The thought of eating anything or anyone's liver is repulsive. The concept of eating a chicken's gizzard is enough to make me puke right up through my own gizzard.
From time to time a farmer will talk about frying up a bunch of turkey fries. For the ill-informed those are the pointers that turkeys have right next to their own oysters and the thought of eating one of those is about as tasteful to my palate as going in the backyard and slurping down a slug or two off the cabbage leaves.
Another zany food around here is fried pumpkin blossoms. Now a pumpkin blossom is so frail and thin you can't really taste them. That means all you are eating is a pile of coating fried up in hot grease. Why not just go get a can of shortening at the store and eat it with a spoon and save all that wasted time breading and frying a piece of nothing.
Maybe the strangest food around here is Rhubarb pie. Rhubarb tastes absolutely horrible raw so people take a pile of it and then add five pounds of sugar and then brag about how great their rhubarb pie tastes. I have on occasion said a regular cow pie that had a bag of sugar added to it also would taste good but I don't go cow pie picking when I want baked goods. That always gets me in trouble with these country folks but when it comes to eating these weird things I'll stick with my steaks and bacon and chicken wings thank you
This Article has been viewed 1,945 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (7 total)Hi Mike.I guess that if you are a subsistence farmer and exist only on what you can grow or raise, you might not want to waste any part of it, but you'll never find me eating any of that either!Thanks for the look, I think, at country dining.DianneThanks Dianne. I'm sure you are right about the culture that uses everything, but I would starve first than eat some things.Mike
Well, I was agreeing with you right up until you mentioned Rhubarb Pie. I love Rhubarb pie, even better when you mix Rhubarb and Strawberries.Thanks David. But if it tastes horrible raw then I put it in my things not to eat category.Mike
Weird Al Yankovic - Eat It(to the music of Michael Jackson's Beat It)How come you're always such a fussy young man?Don't want no Captain Crunch, don't want no Raisin BranWell, don't you know that other kids are starving in JapanSo eat it, just eat it (prrr)Don't wanna argue, I don't wanna debateDon't want to hear about what kind of food you hate oohYou won't get no dessert 'till you clean off your plateSo eat it, Just eat it,Go ahead and eat it Jim. I will visit you at the hospital later.A big Michael Jackson fan I see.Mike
I couldn't agree with you more, Mike. There are some things that the Good Lord did not want us to eat, in my opinion.One such thing, along with your list, is what I call squid. My wife calls it menudo!Thnaks Ken. My friends call it Calamari and the thought makes me want to become a vegetarian.Mike
Mike,You have been converted and do not even know it! The chicken wing was once a southern last bit of the chicken with very little meat or economic value. The cheapest and last eaten piece of the chicken. We even enjoyed liver and gizzards before the chicken wing. It now is a delicacy with the right sauce. As for eating the genitalia of a variety of species, I will also leave that to those that to those that look at the animal and say "I wonder what that tastes like?" Take care.Thanks Jon. In Chicago the wings go first. Must have been some southeners who came up and showed us the wing wasn't scrap but the best part of a chicken.Mike
There you go, putting down our fine southern cuisine, Mike! I have you know, chicken wings would be a country food so the big city boy is moving up! Pokin' fun at ya, Mike. I ate some of this stuff as a kid (livers and gizzards) but came to my senses as I got older. If I ever eat gonads just know I'm a gonna!Hi Avis. Wings may have come from the south but now they are hugely popular up north. In fact if chickens could drop their wings off somehow they probably could be spared a butchering. I wonder when a brood of wingless chickens would look like.Mike
This was a fun article! I agree with your assessment, except where rhubarb is concerned. I good rhubarb anything should include some kind of sweet berry, and not too much sugar, so the sweet-tart flavors speak for themselves.That said, I have a question. What kind of freak of humanity would eat turkey fries?! I thought I'd heard most everything, but... ew! I thought that kind of "cuisine" was kept in the deep south. No offense to any Southerners, but y'all do eat some hilacious stuff.Anyway, thanks for some entertaining breakfast reading!VictoriaThanks Victoria. At least for the most part Americans don't eat bugs.That is the difference between us and aborigines. We complain if there are bugs in the food. They complain if the food isn't bugs.Mike
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.