I ate uncooked alligator today and bought used vinyl

I attended a small dinner party tonight where alligator was served two ways (as ceviche and fried, topped with homemade pepper jelly), followed by wild boar ragu, followed by rabbit cassoulet, followed by strawberry shortcake. 

It was an evening of firsts! I had not eaten rabbit or wild boar before, and while I'd eaten fried alligator on a stick as a child, today was my first time trying alligator meat raw. (Well, sort-of "raw" anyway, because it was also sort-of "cooked" by the lime juice.) My life is broader for the experience, and I am grateful.

Now that I am home from the party, I am cleaning the cat boxes and playing the $3 Patsy Cline album I found at my next-door neighbor's garage sale. I played "Walkin' After Midnight" just a couple of minutes after midnight tonight.

I think I procrastinate very well, and I AM procrastinating a little as I write this, but I did reach almost all of my homework goals for the weekend. Just one paper left to write before Friday to finish the quarter properly. I am living as well as I know how to. 

HERE ARE THE PHOTOS

These are the records I bought! Six albums for under $20. Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence" is one of them, and Heart's "Dog and Butterfly," and an Al Green Christmas album, too! Willie Nelson's "Always on My Mind" (he covers "Whiter Shade of Pale" on it) and, heaven help me, I decided to buy "Sports" by Hughey Lewis and the News. Maybe I will throw a Patrick Bateman theme party someday? Although this was genuinely one of my favorite albums when I was a kid, it freaks me out a little bit nowadays, because it reminds me of American Psycho. But that's art, right? Art changing art.

The pink stuff is uncooked, cold alligator meat, made edible through the science of lime juice. It was delicious but unsettling.

This is the fried alligator topped with pepper jelly, which the party hosts topped with their homemade pepper jelly. I recommend it!

Here is a friend cutting the fried alligator with a knife and fork.

This pasta dish is the wild boar ragu. I appreciated it for being interesting and well-made. There was capsaicin in the sauce and it was too spicy for my weak mouth, but I ate about half of my portion and took the rest home to try again later.

This is the rabbit cassoulet! It was marvelous. I hope that the rabbit lived a comfortable life and had a very quick death, with minimal suffering. 

And there you have it! These are some photographs of my evening. And what an evening it was!

Eat an envelope of apple juice!

One of those rectangular envelopes.

Seriously, though, I am going through such a juice boxes phase!

Kona Kitchen Spam Musubi Is Delicious

I found a place close to my house that serves really good Spam musubi! And it costs less than $3 per serving!!! 

Kona Kitchen, on 5th, just a few blocks south of the Northgate Mall.

I am eating lunch here to satisfy my "eat really good food while writing final papers" requirement, because it's finals week in grad school right now. Two servings of Spam musubi, followed by a slice of rainbow cake. (I haven't tried the cake yet.) Getting Kalua pig and cabbage take-out (under $10!!!), for tomorrow's lunch.

If you know me (hi, Mom!), then you know that I visited Maui for a week last year. Like lots of people, I ate Spam musubi while I was there, and I loved it, and now I want to eat it often, because when it's good, it's really, really good. I tried the Spam nigiri at Uwajimaya, but found it too sweet. The Kona Kitchen Spam musubi is as of right now my go-to for it.

Yeah, you WISH you were eating this right now! (I assume.)

Pie Filling For Dinner!

Shepherd's pie filling for dinner, anyway.

I will serve bread rolls on the side, because I have not yet made potatoes, and it is late. I will assemble and roast the pie tomorrow.

Fanciest goddamn pizza rolls YOU've ever seen!

Lookit that, aww yeah.

Those are just Totino's Pizza Rolls that we had in the freezer, and grocery store limeade, but now it's SO GODDAMN FANCY! And I sliced the apple, cut out the core bits, and reassembled it JUST LIKE THAT! WHAT?

I can't quit you and I can't quit food, obviously.

I tried to quit this blog, because people in my future line of work are encouraged to keep minimal to no social media presence, by one of the professors in my graduate program.

But here we are again. I can't quit you, you big pile of my own writing, you. So here we go.

For late breakfast today, I ate a big bowl of homemade beef and barley stew. For lunch I had a bowl of vegan ice cream because coconut fat is full of bad cholesterol and now so am I. And for dinner, I ate the most Spartan dinner ever (for me). Iceberg lettuce salad (for the kitsch) with cilantro dressing from Trader Joe's, apple slices, and whole-fat cow's milk yogurt with a handful (~200 kcal) of raw almonds in it. I feel adequately full of food, but over-the-top smug about it. Being smug feels good.

And now I feel like I've earned some kind of award. Like, I'm all, "where's my medal? Guys? Guys?"

Reasons why I want to give myself an award:

1. Because I fried my husband a pork chop for his dinner, and a second one for his lunch, and I didn't eat either pork chop. 

2. For a minute, right after dinner, I wanted to congratulate myself for going vegan for a day, just like the Vulcan T'Pol on Star Trek: Enterprise, who is very vegan all the time. But that would be absurd because I just ate yogurt, and I had beef for breakfast, and it seems like there was cheese in the salad dressing that I ate. But I WANTED to believe that I'd been vegan for a day. I wanted to believe!

And while I am giving myself lots of credit (too much credit?) for selflessly eating a modest bowl of vegan ice cream for lunch, that was only one meal, and T'Pol would never eat that much sugar in one sitting, unless maybe it was pecan pie and she was trying to better understand the ship's engineer Trip Tucker. Which was left unresolved, because the episode ended with her meditating in front of a slice of pie that had only one bite taken out of it. What did she do with the rest? Maybe I will know one day, but I do not know right now. 

But I did go vegetarian for 2/3 of my meals today, so at least that's something. And because I'll self-congratulate over anything, I'll self-congratulate about that. Wahoo!

3. The ice cream has "Galactica" in the flavor name, and I love that show. 

Here are pictures:

(Coffee) Roast of Christmas past

I just wanted to make that pun. Don't worry, I usually buy whole beans and then grind them a few seconds before brewing coffee because that's awesome. But these were ground beans for...reasons. Still delicious.

Of note: I'm not paid to endorse this, or anything so far. I have not (yet?) made money off of Painfully Enamored With Food.