The Potty Mouth at the Table (12 page)

At one happy hour, a friend ordered a Gardenburger. During a bowling excursion, someone refused the community cheese fries and then made a frowny face, shook her head, and rubbed her belly. Another friend looked at the pizza that had just arrived at our table during a birthday celebration and said simply to the waitress, “I can’t eat that! Can I just get a side of olives?”

This is what happens when you drink too much at social gatherings; you don’t put the pieces of the puzzle together until you start inviting people to break turkey with you and you find out who it is they’ve become. At first, a couple of them converted to vegetarianism, which is fine: there’s no meat in pumpkin pie and I just made more green beans. Then came the confession of intolerance, and in Eugene, that means no dairy, no gluten (also known as no joy in life, and it shows). Then the ultimate, which almost felt like a
complete betrayal: “We are Vegan, and that’s with a capital
V,
thank you very much, pet eater.”

I spent almost two days making three versions of each dish to accommodate all of our guests. Mashed potatoes with olive oil and garlic. Sweet potatoes with maple syrup and almond butter. Pumpkin pie with agave and rice flour pastry. I had to buy something with the word “namaste” on it. Did you know that gluten-free rolls are eight bucks a bag? Did you? And do you know what vegans bring to Thanksgiving? Hummus. Hummus and nut crackers, and believe me, when you look at your dining room table and there are twelve tubs of beige shit, it is very clear that there is such a thing as too much frigging hummus.

In the end, the bathroom was the most popular spot that holiday as the dishes got mixed up (or purposefully ignored) and the dairy-free people ate the real mashed potatoes, a green bean accidentally grazed a piece of dead fowl, and the rolls and the hummus went absolutely untouched. Then someone announced she was allergic to wine and did we have any Martinelli’s?

Allergic to wine?

I made a vow then that if we were ever going to host another Thanksgiving, it was simply going to be a platter of Lactaid and Imodium A-D.

So when Louise asked us to her house for the holiday,
I breathed a sigh of relief. She had just saved me a big trip to the pharmacy and the urge to bludgeon a sulfite-adverse hippie with a wine bottle.

“We’d be delighted to come to Thanksgiving,” I told Louise. “Any chance for a hummus shoot? I still have eight containers in my fridge.”

A
ll right. It’s high time someone stood up and said something. And no one else seems to be making a move, so here I go.

For the second time in a week, I’ve seen nettles on a menu.

Nettles.

This is what I know about nettles: they invaded my front yard last year to the point that I’m sure I poisoned my portion of the water table trying to eradicate them; they have stinging hairs that make them the Chinese stars of plants; and I don’t want to pay twenty-two dollars a plate for them.

Now, I know it’s on trend for chefs to incorporate nontraditional ingredients into their cuisine to add unexpected elements and ingenuity to their dishes. I know it’s important
to shake things up in the culinary world to drum up some excitement and entice people to dine out instead of cooking the same old meals at home. I mean, how many ways can you fry a chicken? (As it turns out there are only two: good and not good.) Unfortunately, some of the more inventive restaurants attract the sort of people who say reprehensible things like “Those two flavors play on my tongue, basking in their season” or “The wine tasted like jam and sunshine,” thus making asses out of themselves on Urbanspoon.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so old-fashioned that I want all of my meals served in aspic. But every now and then, the trends start going a little haywire (the Wedge, anyone? It’s a quarter of a head of iceberg lettuce and a teaspoon of Hidden Valley for $6.99 at a chain restaurant near you). I will be the first one to admit that I’m not a foodie and no ingredient has ever “basked in its season” or “played on my tongue”; I just like to eat and I know good food when I chew on it. Bad food makes me angry; silly food sends me into a rage. Yelp makes me want to put out hits on people. And I’m starting to see an awful lot of silly food creeping onto the menus of some of my formerly favorite restaurants.

It’s happened gradually, as all poxes do, the weirdness creeping into the food like weeds until there is nothing left on the menu that I want to order at a restaurant I used to
love. For example, creamed rabbit makes my throat spasm and my hand fly to cover my mouth while I dash for privacy, and if I wanted to eat a pigeon, I would have learned how to use a slingshot when I lived in Phoenix; it would have solved a droppings problem, too. Seriously. I’m not eating pigeon. Or veal cheeks, or pig’s stomach, or parts of a little lamb’s brain. While I agree that all are great conversation starters, I’d rather stand by the punch bowl and talk about the felonies I’ve committed than admit that I just ate things the Donner party wouldn’t have considered.

I suspect this trend of exploratory cuisine is rolling to a fever pitch because everybody who ever boiled water wearing a paper hat wants to be on
Iron Chef
or
Top Chef Masters,
and one way to stand out is to serve what no one else is serving—whether it’s lion from a supplier who was once convicted of selling federally protected animals or the mouth of a pig, with or without lipstick. Throw stuff that should be ground into sausage straight onto the grill and make a sauce for it. Froth up a nice, spitlike foam and people will think you’re a genius.

But it’s not genius or inventive or even showboaty. It’s just silly.

The thing is this: My grandfather got on a boat in 1914 and sailed from Italy to New York City in hopes of making a better life for his family for generations to come. I’m
nearly positive that when he reached Ellis Island, the reason he gave for coming to America was so that his son, his grandchildren, and all of his descendants would never have to eat pigeon.
Never.
If he’d been served nettles back then, he would have turned right around and got back on the boat. I can picture him storming out, crying: “Nettles are bullshit! I didn’t come all the way here to eat a garden pest that leaves splinters in my mouth! This is America. Give me a tenderloin!”

Nettles are things you eat when the potatoes get blight before you can pull them out of the ground. Pigeon is something you attack when every other animal has already been eaten. These are foods of last resorts. It’s the menu for the apocalypse. And while I can appreciate the objective of butchering an animal and using all of it, isn’t that the precise reason we shove things in casings, tuck them into buns, and squeeze ketchup all over them? Everything gets used, really,
I promise.
I’ve eaten pig lips before and so have you, I’m certain of it. We just didn’t know it because it plumped when we cooked it.

Frankly, I’m sorry to say that there’s nothing smart, nouveau, or exciting about eating the things our ancestors ate when they were hungry, poor, and couldn’t afford the decent cuts of meat. It’s the same food they sailed across an ocean to escape.

Just consider this a warning before your favorite restaurant goes a little beastly and tries to slip hooves onto their menu. Even if it has marmalade pesto foam on it, refrain. The day may come when you have to eat a foot.

Today, however, is not that day.

S
ome people, such as readers of Eatocracy, followers of food blogs, and Food Network devotees, consider themselves inductees into a special club of “culinary provocateurs,” whose standards have risen so far above your average chewers that they have closed ranks and invented their own language, like twins who didn’t eat each other in the womb or a feral Jodie Foster living secretly in the woods.

Chicka, chicka, chickabee.

Anyway, here are the most horrific examples of foodie speak. We all have to eat; but when you start acting kinda Big Ike about it, you ruin it for everybody. Naturally, I believe a punishment schedule should be enforced so the rest of us don’t have to tolerate this nonsense as it invades
menus, cooking shows, and conversations overheard from the asshole in the booth behind us who will soon be the victim of a spoon-related attack if he doesn’t shut his piehole, mark my words. If you can understand them.

I’d like to permanently strike the following vocabulary from the record, posthaste. (That’s big-shot for “starting now.” See how that word just sucked the fun out of that whole sentence? That’s what foodie speak does.)

Thanks, Padma Lakshmi, for bringing this gem to the forefront when you could have just said “appetizer” or, even more truthfully, “jalapeño popper.” Now every guy who owns a can of hair fixative is busy telling his guests that spray cheese on a Triscuit is something superclassy, like dip in a bread bowl. Amuse your own mouth, Padma, you have an illegitimate baby. You do.

Punishment: Being forced to eat dip
and
the bread bowl.

This is an asshole word meaning “texture.” The only time people should ever be concerned with mouthfeel is when they are under the influence of narcotics.

Punishment: Suck on sandpaper and
then
tell us how your mouth feels.

Jesus weeps, I swear. These bubbles are nothing but food spittle. For all you know, there could be a station in the kitchen of assisted-living people sitting and chewing your dinner first and then dribbling all over your food. These are the things you need to consider when you see that on a menu, because any food that can create foam is either going to cause a disease or cure one.

Punishment: Being forced to eat any Hometown Buffet dish covered in its own foam.

How much Adderall are you on that you can’t handle eating one piece of meat the same way
for the whole meal
? How about a hearty helping of
shut up
two ways? One with a disgusted look for the level of pomposity it takes to explain why you fried a piece of pork and then also roasted one, and another using my “finger feel” to determine which piece of meat is hotter so I know which one to throw at your face.

Punishment: Style Donald Trump’s hair, because if you want to attain that level of tooldom, you need to understand the root of the word.

This means jam. It means nothing but jam, except in Italy, where phonetically, it means “butts.” Not so fancy now, is it?

Punishment: Having a dream in which Anthony Bourdain is allowed to do anything to you with a pork butt and you like it. The shame when you awake is paralyzing.

Okay, so in a way I like her because she has the gut of a Teamster and still insists on wearing sweaters. But I also realize that anyone capable of such atrocities as BTBRTS (“bring to boil; reduce to simmer”) also has the power to kick out someone’s teeth after two Long Island iced teas. I think this one is an arcing wire, the work of a madman. And so what if I can tell where her belly button is when she’s wearing a turtleneck: “Sprinky Dink” is exactly what I would be doing out on the lawn after drinking two Long Island iced teas.

Punishment: Having your eyelids pinned open and being forced to watch Anne Burrell saying “Sprinky Dink” on a loop for one entire prime-time block while wearing a sweater three sizes too small.

I just hate it, and it makes you sound fatter.

Punishment: For every offense, you must donate a toe to Paula Deen.

Yeah. My mom used to use this cooking technique when she got her first job in the early eighties, called herself a “modern woman,” and tossed almost every meal into a pot of hot water. We ate fowl, beef, and even some vegetables this way, but it had a different name back then. The English translation of
sous-vide
is “Banquet cooking bags” and if you ate dinner between 1975 and 1986, you are probably going to get cancer from it.

Punishment: Eat expired banquet “Tur-Qee” dinners bought at Grocery Outlet for ninety-nine cents apiece.

Or, in other words (such as the words that you use when you’re not completely determined to impress somebody on the same level of jerkery as yourself), “sauce.” Yes.
Sauce.
Simply sauce. If you really want to ruffle the feathers of the comment section, call it “gravy.” Hee-hee. Gravy.
Gravy gravy gravy.
Although honestly, if you have ever been to the ocean on a superpolluted day and seen the bubbly, sometimes green, sometimes brown, always stinky residue that the waves have left on the beach and that looks like melted Styrofoam, I’d call that gastrique, too. Like what happens when the ocean farts.

Punishment: Say the word one hundred times in a row or drink a shot glass full of brown ocean foam.

I honestly can’t call who would win if Rachael Ray and Naomi Pomeroy were pitted against each other in an Annoy-Off. Can we just find a way to exile Naomi Pomeroy? She was the winner of
Big Fat Top Chef
or
Who’s Afraid of Top Chef?
or whatever that show was called and is the proprietor of Beast in Portland, Oregon, and the woman simply cannot take a photograph without a dead pig slung over her shoulder. Google it.

That just says something about a person, doesn’t it? If glaring at the camera with your dead eyes and consistently dissatisfied frowny puss isn’t enough to get your message across, a dead farm animal should do the trick. Her finest moment, naturally, was when she was horrifyingly mean to her father, whose identity was concealed to her, on
Top Chef
as he tried to help her prepare a meal during a challenge. If you could be that awful to anyone who was trying to help you, you deserve to have that pig be the first thing you see every morning when you wake up. Plus, she charges $125 for a vegetarian dinner, and I don’t think that includes a copy of the picture with the pig, either.