IN WHICH THE FOOD GETS WEIRD

The recipes at the blog Yuckylicious should horrify your children nicely.

LAME, LAME, LAME

Note the luxurious expansiveness of the taco depicted on the box:

Note what it looks like on the plate. Folded like the Mets in September:

And you're supposed to fit food into this taco...how? Yes, the tacos were all of the same general shape, and this wasn't the first time it had happened. Clipping coupons, waiting for them to go on sale...for this. Yeah, great. Maybe if I had an equine syringe I could have managed to get some guacamole or refried beans in there, but that's about all. Noodle in particular was PO'd in the way that only a tired five-year-old girl in full Princess mode can be.

The Man^TM may have won this round, but I haven't written a nice juicy nastygram in quite some time. I'm due.

(takes itty-bitty batting donut off his pen, cracks knuckles, gets busy)

I'D LIKE TO CHECK YOU FOR TICKS...

...although I wish it wasn't necessary after every simple walk in the woods.

November rules. At least when you get a nice day it does. The tourists are giving it a rest until after Thanksgiving, the nights make for comfortable sleeping, and I think the kids and I could have just have taken our afternoon naps out there in LeafPile 2.0, if it wasn't for the outside chance of a deer tick stopping in for a late-season nibble and a bit of the old Lyme-disease vectoring. Instead every trip out to jump in the leaves has to end with a thorough checking of little ears and scalps and rumps and such for ticks. And if we ever find one? Why, we'd extract it and eat it as if we were mommy and daddy baboons and Jim Fowler was watching us from a tree stand in Botswana.

And so here's wishing our area's deer hunters all the best this fall, especially at a time when a larger number of them really do rely on the venison to keep their larders full for the winter. I sure do wish the next administration in DC would repeal the hundred-year-old federal law banning market hunting, but even as is it's a win-win-win-win-win-win: it's free venison (or at least venison purchased with one's own sweat), it gets people outside, it's better for the deer population, and it preserves young trees and plants in the forest undergrowth for all the other animals that live in the forest. And of course fewer deer mean fewer deer ticks, although the little buggers can hitch a ride on other animals if need be.

And it's one less hundred-pound rat suddenly jumping out in front of my car.

Stupid Walt Disney and Bambi with that "MAN had entered the forest" crapola, raising a generation of boomers on the overweening cuteness of the forest world and how hunting was awful and scary and mean to the poor widdle deer. Obviously the Disney people of the day had never seen deer starve to death over the winter, or it's relative the moose, in rut, trying to make sweet love to a Volkswagen (safe for work). If I ever make a movie I'm going to be sure some melodramatic set of pipes intones "DEER had entered the southbound lane of Route 9-G" somewhere along the line.

CHOCOLATE THUNDER...KETCHUP THUNDER, TOO

As a two-year-old, Beast has long known the joys of dunking his food. This is a young man who loves his ketchup. It's a condiment! It's a floor wax! It's a body paint! It's a furniture conditioner! It's a shampoo! It's --

Dude. Duuuuuuuuude. Hold up. Are you dunking your chicken nugget in the chocolate milk. AFTER you dunked it in the ketchup?

SO not right, is what Her Awesomeness was thinking but trying to avoid saying, because here at Booger Manor we're all about celebrating the grand diversity of the culinary experience and introducing it to the little ones, and so be it if that means some odd things happen along the way.

Still, though. Nasty.

A ROAD TRIP - TO SCOTLAND?

Another one for the "let's do this when the kids are old enough" files: today's London Times has provided a most useful list of the UK's top 10 fish and chip shops, led by Townhead Fish & Chips in Biggar, Scotland. Just check out this excerpt from the menu:

Regulars

Half Chicken
Special Fish
Plain Fish
Fried Pizza
King Rib
Smoked Sausage
Chicken Nuggets (8 Pieces)
Steak Pie
Chipsteak
Cheese ‘n’ Burger
Scotch Pie
Sausage
Hamburger
Haggis
Black Pudding
Spam Fritters
Fishcakes
White Pudding

Those spam fritters really must be something to rate a placement right after the haggis and black pudding; however, a deeper reading of the article suggests I stick this in the "let's do this when we can afford to put a cardiologist and a thoracic surgeon on retainer when we get back" file.


I wonder if there's anybody down at that chip shop swears he's Elvis.

ENGLAND DISCOVERS THE BREAD BOWL

You can find those Golden Arches most anywhere in the world where the roads are paved, and the French long ago tried to chase off culinary Americanisms...but somehow, the mighty bread bowl, that staple of Super Bowl parties, poker nights and baby showers has never crossed the Atlantic to England. Until now.

David Williams, the managing director of Butt Foods, which has developed the idea, admits: "Our banks, our investors all thought we were crackers. But we've now proved them wrong."

Yeah, Butt Foods. Talk about your branding headaches. I could've sworn with a name like that they'd have been around since the 1500s, but they were birthed in 1990. Points to them for not falling for the branding craze - over here their company would have been named eStarch or Bredilent or some such idiocy.

So how does one serve jellied sheep's lungs in a bread bowl?