Life is an
adventure. New experiences broaden our
horizons, and what better place to start than with the stuff you put into your
mouth. We are on our way to an Easter
dinner where our host is cooking lamb.
For some people, lamb sounds terrible.
I happen to love lamb. Oddly, I’ve
known people—hardy carnivores through and through—who’d never think of eating
lamb. Perhaps it’s an emotional
response--they’re picturing a cute, fuzzy creature whenever the word “lamb” is heard—
something that doesn’t occur when beef, pork, or chicken are mentioned. These creatures may not register as high on the cute and cuddly scale.
I’m willing to
try anything, except things I played with as a kid, such as toads and live
insects. I think I could eat a cooked
bug, perhaps on a dare, but I’d need a beer or three beforehand. Also, things like brains or Rocky Mountain
oysters (large cow testicles, but I suppose anything on a cow is large) would
take a lot of convincing and again plenty of alcohol beforehand, but
someday…well, you never know.
In essence,
everything I’ve tried food-wise was something I’ve either enjoyed immensely or tolerated,
at least to some degree.
Except
Menudo.
I’ve tried Menudo
twice. It was not very pleasant, to put
it mildly. Menudo is a soup of cow
intestines cooked in such a way that it tastes remarkably like…cow
intestines. I’m ashamed to say the two
times I’ve tried it I could not finish the entire bowl. I pride myself in being able to eat
everything on my plate, schooled by Mom’s conventional wisdom back in the days
of my youth. “Finish everything on your plate or no dessert!” she’d say. Yet, I could only choke down about 3 or 4
spoonfuls of Menudo. It has a very
unsettling flavor, that of chewy fat with a not-so-subtle hint of fecal
overtones. One wonders whether the cow
should have gone through a proper bowel prep, you know, the same prep we humans
go through to thoroughly clean our bowels prior to a colonoscopy. Perhaps this would make the taste of Menudo
more tolerable.
The last time I
tried Menudo, my daughter chimed aloud for the entire restaurant to hear: “Eew!
That looks like Zombie food!” My son was
busily masticating on a piece of Menudo with a puzzled look on his face, and
when he finally realized he was chewing a piece of bowel, he gagged and
choked and expelled the vittle, whereupon it flew through the air, across the table
to land onto his little sister’s plate.
She screamed,
“Yuck! I’m gonna puke!” We were almost kicked out of the joint.
I love beer. The mere thought of beer is pleasant enough
to wipe away the nasty memories of Menudo.
After the Menudo incident, a bottle of Dos XX cleansed the palate quite
well.
So what’s the
moral of this story? Don’t knock
something until you’ve tried it. Experiment
with things, whether food or other novel experiences life presents to you. You might be surprised. Afterwards you can make an honest assessment
of whether something is good or bad, but you’ll always come out afterwards a
person whose horizon expanded just a little more.
©Randall S. Fong, M.D.
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