Weird things I have eaten recently

[corvi]

1. Pizza with bamboo shoots
   Not unpleasant, but not actually an improvement over cheese pizza, which seems like the minimum standard required of pizza toppings. Much better "only one place does this" pizzas I've had:
   • cashews and green chiles (Dirty Dave's in Olympia)
   • pickles and peas (Oregano's in Victoria)
   • apples and arugula (the late and much-mourned Al Forno in Olympia)
   Recommend bamboo pizza only for radical pizza-eating pandas and really dedicated pizza completists. Pizza completists probably aren't a thing, since you could always top a pizza with other smaller pizzas with their own toppings; I think Godel had something to say about that.


2. Pecan-flavoured sunflower seeds
   Nuts, flavoured to taste like ... different nuts. They are sort of piney/woody and vanilla-y. Quite nice, except for the random pieces of shell in the bag. It's not pecan shell; I think it's something else in the Carya genus without a good English translation.


3. Baobab juice
   Tastes like watermelon juice with tamarind in it. Nice flavour, but hard to drink an entire cup, it gets kind of chalky


4. Cactus burritos
   Always eat cactus burrito. Especially at Javier's in Portland.


5. the C U B E
   I recently attended a conference where the meal choices were:
   • Pan Roasted Steelhead (wild mushroom pesto, topped with shaved fennel and artichoke salad, creamy potato leek cassoulet).
   • Blackened Flank Steak (with a pan jus reduction, sauteed crimini mushrooms, shredded potato, green been and roasted corn cake)
   • Vegetarian option
   "Vegetarian option" turned out to be a cube made of about two dozen layers of thinly sliced pumpkin, provolone cheese, and spinach. Topped with mushroom sauce. I ... don't even know what to call that, and I guess neither did they.
   I like pumpkin. And cubes. I'm not sure this dish will ever again appear on this planet, and I was the only one who ordered it, so my recommendation or lack thereof is kind of moot. Wish I'd taken a photo.


6. Groundcherries
   I'm guessing this is for historical reasons, like maybe Canada, unlike the US, has never embargoed Colombia, so there's a history of importing Colombia fruit? Groundcherries are available in every grocery store in Victoria, even on lowest common denominator things like premade fruit trays. People eat them a lot. It's one of those things that makes you feel like you've somehow moved to a parallel reality; everyone treats as Totally Normal And Not At All Interesting a fruit you've never seen before.
   I do recommend groundcherries, for all the good it does. Either you can't buy them where you live, or I just said the equivalent of "hey, have you ever heard of "apples"? Maybe you should eat one."

Homework question: is there a particular pizza topping unique to your local pizza parlour?

Comments

[corvi]

Real Gooseberries were invented by a Hateful Deity and / or Hateful Anthropomorphic Personification Of Evolution. They are face-meltingly sour. You cook them into dessert with buckets of sugar. You do not leave a punnet of them out where young corvi, Amateur Berry Fiend, can find them and mistake them for excitingly tiny stripey grapes to be crammed into one's mouth by the fistful, and suffer trauma forever thereafter.

Though I have just learned from wikipedia that "gooseberry bush" is "19th century slang for pubic hair," which I find somewhat, er, concerning. I am not a doctor, but I sort of feel pubic hair should probably not be face-meltingly sour?

[shadesofmauve]

.Real Gooseberries were invented by a Hateful Deity and / or Hateful Anthropomorphic Personification Of Evolution.

I assume that's why they're named after geese, another personification of biological hate.