That’s Life: Bunnies for Easter Dinner and other culinary atrocities
I’ve always thought that for Easter dinner we ought to eat rabbits. Because I’m subversive. And for Christmas, reindeer sausage. Really, it hardly seems fair that bunnies and reindeer get all the glory, and then we eat ham. At the very least, pigs should have their own holiday.
I’ve eaten rabbit. It was years ago when I was custom combining in Oklahoma. Or Kansas. Someplace forgettable like that. Our hosts proposed a bunny buffet with one provision. I had to choose and dispatch the rabbit. If it had been up to me, we would have starved in Oklahoma. Or Kansas. Or Nebraska, wherever we were.
I may have been soft, but not too soft to eat fried rabbit. Delicious. It probably comes as no surprise that it tastes like chicken, which is the chameleon of meats.
Sometimes I wonder how certain foods became acceptable in some cultures and not in others. I mean, who decided that goat milk—or worse, fermented goat milk—was a delicacy? I assume alcohol was involved.
I’ve actually milked a goat but I don’t put it on my resume because I lost the big goat-milking contest at the Ashley Rodeo about 20 years ago. Being a second place goat milker isn’t all that impressive. I was pitted against Super Valu grocer Kirk Rueb which seemed a little unfair. After all, the man has his own dairy section. To make matters worse, he got a mellow goat. Mine was rambunctious. Also, I think Rambunctious Goats would be a great band name. Dibs.
The next day, however, we learned that Kirk’s goat had died. I was conflicted. Was it a moral victory? All I know is milking a goat to death is worse than finishing second.
You know, if you get right down to it, in Germans From Russia Country, we do objectively eat some interesting things. Head cheese. Liver sausage and such. You can get in a bar fight defending the honor of your local liver sausage.
Heck, I was politely threatened by a lovely elderly lady from Reeder years ago for impugning the honor of lutefisk. I described it in a column as coagulated snot and she took umbrage to that. It’s not easy getting a Norwegian fired up, but that’s one way to do it. I wrote a correction describing it more fairly as “tasty” coagulated snot.
The worst of it is not the fact that lutefisk is soaked in lye. Poison, essentially. A Norwegian lady at Norsk Host Fest recalled that as a child, her fisherman father would dry fish on the docks. She was aghast when she saw dogs peeing on the fish. “Don’t vorry,” he said. “Dat’s da stuff ve send to Sveden!”
I lived in Juneau for three years and developed a real appreciation for seafood, including octopus. And you know alcohol was involved in that initial taste test.
I did radio commercials for Jerry’s Meats. Slogan: “You can’t beat Jerry’s Meats!” Imagine the possibilities. Jerry sometimes gave me seafood that had been abandoned by sports fishermen.
One day, they were cutting up a 90-pound halibut, diminutive in comparison to some of the other monsters pulled from the deep. “Do you know what we call those?” Jerry asked. “Ping-pong paddles.”
When my Grandpa Ben came to visit, I prepared an aromatic pot of King Crab legs. He stared for a while, not sure if it was some kind of joke or not, before declining. “Ach, they’re too ugly!” So, I punted. He got a 15 cent package of ramen which he loved. In fact, that became a mainstay for the duration of his visit.
I remembered Grandma Bender serving up a steaming bowl of chicken feet more than once when I visited, and really, are crab legs any more off-putting than chicken feet? Perspective, I guess.
Generally, I have an adventurous spirit when it comes to exotic food, but I won’t eat insects. Unless I’m on my motorcycle. But paying for chocolate-covered crickets? I don’t think so, even if they have a high nutritional value. They’re much lower in fat than pork, chicken, beef, and liver sausage—100 grams of crickets has 13 grams of protein and only 5 grams of fat.
Still... maybe I’ll just have ramen.