Fruit

OK, sure, I knocked the 30 new fruit thing off my list. Still, I want to share some new fruit I tried. So here is the first one.

I came across a cherimoya - also known as a "custard apple" - at the Kirkland PCC a few days ago. It was bright green and about the shape of an avocado. It was a little spendy at $7.99/lb, and the one I got was almost a pound.

The cashier told me I needed to wait until it was mostly brown and spongy to the touch before I ate it, to make sure it was ripe.

Today I took it, in its scaly-brown goodness, to work.

True to the name, it smelled strongly of apple before I even cut into it. Once I cut it in half, I found a cream-colored fruit filling a leathery skin. The name was doubly fitting; it was creamy but with a taste of apple. Imagine an apple pudding, and you've got it. The only drawback was the fact that it was full of seeds, each hard as a rock and about the size of a lima bean.

It was a delicious fruit, though, and I wish I could afford to eat them often.

Secret Exercise Goal Update

OK, so I have until June 19 to get where I need to be for this thing I want to do. Vague enough? As I said earlier, I am trying to have a secret goal so that the wind doesn't come out of my sails by blabbing about it, and so if I fail, the only people who will know are myself and whomever answers the phone at the suicide prevention hotline.

By June 19, 2011, I want to be able to run at least 6 uninterrupted miles, and in decent time. I also want to be able to do at least 30 uninterrupted pushups. Right now I can hit about 50, but need to take breaks in between sets of 10 or 15. (Boo!)

My workouts haven't been great the last week and a half, but I've been eating really well, excepting Easter, which is a feast day, so fasting on it is a sin, I think. Sorry I'm not totally clear on the details; Catholic school was a long time ago...

A month and a half plus should get me where I need to go, if I stay focused. If I can get there, I have another month or so to keep cranking until the event I want to take part in.

More regular progress updates will be forthcoming. Wish me luck!

Bug Museum

OK, this fell in with a post on my other blog, so I'm just copying and pasting.

"Since I had missed my planned trip to the Bug Safari, I hopped a bus and made a visit. It was a cool little zoo, very professionally maintained and fancy. It lacked, however, the thing that made the Victoria Bug Museum so cool: hands-on interaction. The fancy, climate controlled, padlocked (?) terrariums were not opened, and even when I specifically asked if I could hold some tarantulas, scorpions, or giant stick bugs, I was told “no.” They don’t do that. Bummer. On the bright side, the goliath bird eating tarantulas were much larger than those in Victoria. The bigger one could have taken down a deer, I think."

Also available is my Yelp! review.


No pics...terrible lighting and glass tanks, along with the fact that I was stuck with the pocket camera, made for terrible photos.

Ethnic Food Is Gross

I had the recent experience of tasting some "meat" products from two distinctly different cultures: scrapple, from the U.S. South, and blood sausage, from many cultures, but in this case from Ireland.

Scrapple is made up of the pieces of pigs deemed unfit for hot dogs mixed up with cornmeal and spices. I must admit, I'm not against it. I really thought I would like this dish. It may sound gross to you, but I promise you, you have eaten worse. Frozen Salisbury steak? SPAM? Chicken McNugget? You have eaten some questionable shit. Don't judge scrapple.

That said, scrapple is horrible. I'm not a big fan of breakfast sausage. I do, however, enjoy pate. That said, scrapple is has the unpleasant flavor of sausage mixed with the wretched texture of pate. Yuck.

Blood sausage, a combination of pork, spices, and dried pig blood, all mixed together in pig intestines, had a great flavor. That great flavor, however, is cancelled out by the consistency. Another name for blood sausage is blood (and black) pudding. The name is fitting. Imagine getting a dish of pudding. You look at it, and assume it's chocolate. You stick your spoon in, take a big mouthful, and OH MY GOD, it tastes like pig meat!!! It's weird. Even knowing that you're about to eat something called blood pudding doesn't prepare you for the image of cutting into a sausage casing and having scabby pig glop come gushing out. A shame, really. Stupid Brits and their gross meat dishes.

That said, next up: kidney pie!  Woot!

So, two more to go...

 Scrapple. Yum. Oops, sorry, that's a typo. It should have been "yuck."

Blood sausage. What it sounds like.