Eating the Ark

See? Food!!

Sat, 14 May 2011 21:51:26 -0400

Day 86. Animals eaten: 46.

At day 80, this is how the list looked:

Each of those dashes indicates a different species which has had one of its members stampeding through my colon.

As is clear from the photo, I have made a dent in the animal kingdom. I was a little worried that from the moment I started this project I’d face the world’s first ever meat drought, and by this stage only have ‘pig’ crossed off, and maybe an ant which I’d accidentally swallowed whilst yawning. However there’s inarguably some scarily big sections of the list which have remained untouched, with whole swarthes of species still gambolling around enjoying food and life, whilst they should rightly be dessimated chunks floating in a small lake of light vinaigrette. The animals cowardly hiding in the rough middle of the alphabet, around the G-L area were giving me a particularly hard time in getting captured. I felt like Ash Ketchum in a cave continually getting hounded by Zubats when all I wanted was a nice Geodude to eat.

I decided to take some of the easier creatures out in one big blog swoop, and so tentatively dipped my toes back into the waters of animals that actually do live in water. Anyone new to this blog, first off, hello, where have you been? You’ve missed crazy fun, I poo in a library toilet at one stage, it’s been quite an adventure. Second, last time I had a seafood platter in the interest of knocking some marine life off the big animal tree of animals in me, it was followed by, let’s say, a significant rise of interest in vomit in my body. The smart ones who had invested their stocks in vomit from the start were rewarded monumentally. And ever since I have been very cautious with any animal that even looked like it might have been near some water at some point in its life.

As a result, I almost groaned when my package of online fishy misery was delivered. It came in the exact same identical polystyrene box that all my online food deliveries arrive in, and as per usual I presumed it was merely several duvets worth of expensive packaging with a tiny little blob of meat hidden in the centre. But as is common with presumptions made both in this blog and in the dating scene, I was incredibly wrong.

That is quite a lot of seafood for someone who really freaking hates seafood.

The company must have assumed I too was a company, or a seafood restaurant or maybe just a big ol’ fat man, because it appeared they’d sent me a sizeable chunk of the world’s seas. I had 3 flyingfish, a massive tub of crayfish tails in brine, what must have been 100 shrimp, a crowd of clams, and a terrifyingly hefty catfish which looked more like a black arm with a face. The only sea-faring critter I was semi-looking forward to - crab - was very small. Certainly smaller than, hypothetically, one hundred goddamn shrimp.

When I made my list of organisms to devour that tired night some 12 weeks back I didn’t really know what I was doing where the inclusion of sorts of fish were concerned. I didn’t want to have to include hundreds of dreary species like trout and halibut, but I did want to try ones such as catfish and flyingfish, solely because they sounded cool. I understand now this is not a sound biological reasoning, as if scientists only did what sounded cool we’d just have lots of exploding sugar and genetically modified mice which changed colour every time they smoked a cigar and we wouldn’t have a cure for cystitis or indeed any bladder infections whatsoever. But the list stands, and I don’t like adding to it too often as it’s just more work for me to do, so my childish justifications stand. I understand the six new once-living foods I have for you today are hardly all that exciting, especially compared alongside exploding sugar and the constantly surprising cystitis, so I will run through them as briefly as possible.

First thing I did, as it seemed I’d slightly overbought on hideous slime you’re expected to digest, was text some friends to see if they would help me tackle this sudden onslaught of aquatic cack that was making my fridge smell like an orgy was happening in it. And with this came the usual sudden supply of information originally silenced. “Oh Matt, ox tail’s actually cow tail, you shouldn’t have bought that!” “Hey Matt, you know a place down the road sells shark soup, you didn’t have to go all that way to London at all, ha”. And the latest was that “oy Matt, you know crayfish, by far the most expensive product you bought? That’s just scampi! You could have just had scampi! Did you not know that? I knew that.”

I ignored everyone’s needling attempts at vexing me with all their annoying knowledge, and calmed myself down by draining out a bag of catfish blood out in the garden.

Angel: “God, you’ve left the evolution machine running unattended! The cat and fish molecules have gotten all combined! It’s made something hideous!”. God: “Ahh chill out man, it’s my Birthday! People will probably love this catfish shit, look, it’s freaky man!”. Angel: “You crazy, God. You crazy, but that’s why I love ya!” *bumps chests*

I can hardly speak objectively for seafood as I recently have grown to loathe the stuff, but I honestly cannot imagine how this creature could look appealing, seeing as it just resembles a big black dildo with whiskers. So too was I a little freaked out by the flyingfish.

Angel: “Dude, it’s happened again! The fish and the bird molecules have gotten all-..” God: “Eyyy what did I just say man?? Forget about it, I’ll sort it out tomorrow, have a beer!”

I wasn’t entirely sure of the best way of cooking abominations, and online recipes were more concerned about cooking methods which provided a nice meal, rather than providing a clinical, unaltered plate of meat for experimental reasons. Housemate Luke suggested I simply wrap them in foil and bung them in the oven for half an hour, with the reassuring culinary knowledge that “I mean, it can’t go that badly wrong.”

Beneath those tin-foil blankets lie a fish with whiskers and a fish with wings. I wonder when evolution is just going to give up being sensible altogether and develop us a fish with udders and wit. We would call it the ‘cheekycowfish’ and riverside commuters could ride them to work. Smart.

I checked the time on my phone, which had somehow become covered in scales in the confusion of preparing these beasts, and after half an hour had a nervous taste of each. Neither were very nice, but I consider this as a fault of my cooking process, which rather than meticulous measures was literally just “HEAT! HEAT UNTIL HOT!”, and catfish especially I imagine as being very tasty if prepared by someone who knew what a skillet was.

For my shrimp and crayfish I decided to take Ben’s advice and shallow fry them, as his mother actually owns a seafood restaurant, and also because Luke is an idiot. They smelt of rabbit food as they cooked, and pissed a vicious, cloudy liquid into the pan, but they tasted acceptable.

My crab came pre-cooked, so that was easy enough to gobble down. It was a little easier to prepare than lobster, as there were less limbs to snap off and less of its face had to get punched open, but the meat tasted a little odd, surprisingly crunchy and chewy. As I ate more of its flesh, I began to question whether this crab actually had been pre-cooked at all, as I assumed it had. Instead, it appeared I had bolted back a fair dose of poorly defrosted, uncooked seafood. Oh heavens. In reaction to this, I calmly placed the rest of the crab in the bin, and attempted to send a message to the inner networks of my brain suggesting that it was probably best not to let my stomach catch wind of what I’d just sent down to it. If it could, could it cancel those electrical signals about to be sent, just blame faulty wiring or something, we don’t want to get my tummy all worried. I don’t know if this little inner body white lie worked, but I managed not to become a spiralling vortex of puke so obviously something happy happened.

The shelled twat that almost set off my intestinal trigger for a second seafood related accident. I want to make a pun about being crabby but I fear it will inspire nothing but scorn and hatred in you, the reader, so I will resist my basic punny instincts.

Finally, I set to work on my clams. I was unaware of this, but you are advised to leave them soaking in salty water for an hour prior to cooking, so I was left with an hour to have some real food in the form of a bacon sandwich. I had had to consume my paltry array of vile sea-evil whilst sat next to Will who was eating a giant Pizza Hut pizza, and my food envy was so intense all I could wonder was whether I would hide his body before or after I polish off his side order of chicken goujons. Maybe I’d make him watch me eat them through bleeding eye sockets before I pulled the trigger. As far as I would like to advocate trying adventurous new meats, my bacon was by far the nicest thing I’d eaten all day, and it didn’t cost an extortionate amount of money, almost make me sick, or have me picking catfish whiskers off the soles of my feet. Please do try to sample as many roaming creatures as you can, but keep them roaming - anything that swims or sits hooked onto a rock I’d advise you keep away from.

Clams tasted almost non-distinguishable from oysters, the only difference being clams opened naturally as they were boiled and didn’t require me clumsily levering them open with all the grace of a rollerskating axe murder who is, ironically, not very good on rollerskates. Seeing as I didn’t much like oysters so too did I not much take to clam, and after eating a couple I had to throw the rest away. For a moment I felt a little guilty that starving African families would be going without sustenance today, whilst I decadently and wastefully threw exquisite clam meat into the bin. But then, I figured, they get to eat dog, and bat, all the time, the lucky gits! I’m going to have to work hard to get my dog and bat. If anything, I was most jealous.

Even homeless people would pay not to have to eat 28 clams. And I still have 28 more in my fridge! I’m the luckiest boy alive.

I retired upstairs to tick a satisfying six new animals off my list, but paused as I went to cross off the clams which had taken so long to prepare. Because, for some ridiculous reason, it was already crossed off. I didn’t understand, I mean I hadn’t.. eaten..

SHIT.

You stupid, sexy idiot, Matt! A couple months back, during my first entirely food-based venture to London, in March, I’d bought a pack of dried clams and entirely forgotten! And I’d just spent my time and money needlessly eating clams. God dammit Matt, you have to be more careful in future, as well as being that sexy.

Consequently, I am stuck on an only slightly admirable 46 animmals eaten. My aim has been for a long time to get to 50 animals for day 100, and whilst that’s certainly an achievable target, I am running dangerously low on ‘normal’ animals you might find in a butchers, as well as having a lot of work on for the next 2 weeks. Plus, with my ailing memory, I may well track down and eat another mouse and then scratch my head quizzically as I see it’s already crossed off on the list.

As usual, any help will be rewarded in gold. And by gold, I mean blog posts :) mattcrose17@aol.com

Edible Schmedible

Sun, 08 May 2011 12:44:22 -0400

Day 79. Animals eaten: 41.

About a week ago I was idly scrolling through my list of animals still yet to find their way into my foodchain, flippantly picking whatever endangered species took my fancy like some hungry, power-mad Emperor, when I realized somehow grasshopper had hopped its way on. I don’t know what at all possessed me when I wrote said list 11 weeks ago to include grasshopper amongst the world of walking meats, but it was there, and so I had to find a way of getting it into my belly.

The last time I had eaten bugs I’d accidentally stabbed my mouth with ant, had to rummage around on my hands and knees in the dirt to try to find some specks of scorpion, and enjoyed locust an almost worrying amount. These had been provided by a company called ‘Edible’, and a subsidiary of this did indeed sell grasshopper. To make it worth the outrageous postal costs of getting it delivered, I also decided to pick up a few other creatures they specialized in too, and a few days later it arrived.

As usual, when eating day came, all my culinary expertise was on the back of a horrendous hangover. I spent much of the day far, far too lazy to even yawn or think, so my latest schmorgasbord of exotic vermin scum was actually more of a midnight feast. I retired to my room and decided first to sample the two insectivores of my stupid lunchbox.

From that image, it may look like I’m shamelessly advertising edibleunique.com. Let me negate that by putting this - don’t buy anything from edibleunique.com, their products taste like shite. There, that’s better.

Worms did not actually previously have a place on my list, as I really didn’t imagine anyone, no matter how hungry they might be, would resort to eating worms. I would actually rather just eat dirt, or one of my cousins. But there were clearly some to whom worms were a delicacy and would turn their nose up at a Big Tasty with bacon, so I ordered some to see if they had any right to hold such an opinion..

Nope.

I know Aborigine tribes and Amazonian chieftains don’t have access to Nandos or Shakeaways or, in some really remote areas of the world, allegedly not even the simple joys of a Wimpy, I think there’s still the Western idea that if they were to come into our culture, they would still choose their accepted diet of worms and beetles and drinking riverwater out of buckets made from shit and birds nests, an idea probably inculcated from kooky films like Crocodile Dundee. But after eating worms I cannot possibly imagine they wouldn’t just look between a glistening KFC bucket, then to their foul-tasting witchetty grub, then back to the bucket, and grunt their tribal version of “oh fuck this, player!” and dig into the greasy chicken goodness.

The same could be said of the grasshoppers. I’d heard they tasted a lot of locusts, which I was more than happy with as they had just tasted like deep-fried bubbles. Before they could be eaten, though, they had to have their legs and wings removed. I’m quite happy with what a manly sentence that just turned out to be.

Weirdly though, these didn’t actually taste very nice!

For some reason these lacked the crunchy taste of their locust cousins, and I defy any tribal colony to turn down a six-inch turkey breast and ham sub on Italian herbs & cheese, toasted, with lettuce, sweetcorn and olives and then a bit of lite mayo, over a literal handful of bugs. That was, at least, grasshopper off the list for me. Unless, as was true of my last post, some smart alec pops up and tells me actually it wasn’t grasshopper, it was a cow tail.

This still left me disappointed though; my hungover snacks weren’t satisfying my hunger as much as they were keeping my gag reflex muscle in a job. And it looked like it’d have to work even later than usual tonight, as I opened a tin of my next creature, which took the form of sea urchin:

Now I understand you’ve probably leapt to your feet and are screaming “No Matt you blind, heroic fool! That’s dog food! That’s not sea urchin! You’re eating the wrong thi-i-ing!”, racked with sobs. But no, this is actually sea urchin roe - for those unaware of what sea urchins are, they’re the spiky things you see in the sea; if ever you’ve played a platform computer game in which you swim underwater, sea urchins are probably an enemy. Crash Bandicoot hates them. I hope that’s cleared things up.

Sea urchin roe is supposed to be mixed in with scrambled egg or some similar food rather than eaten by itself, but as was the aim of this project, it had to be consumed in a stand-alone mouthful to truly see how sea urchin tasted. I armed myself with a spoonful and stood over my sink in a vomit-preparation stance.

Fortunately, it didn’t taste as bad as it looked, as if it had I probably would have passed out. If we take our first instincts to be our truest, then my first comment as the urchin slid down my throat was that “it tastes of rainforest”. A second later, I modified this to “no, wait, it just tastes of humidity”. Looking back now I have no idea how I could have come to those taste conclusions, but there we are. Urchin tastes of weather.

The final animal I had remaining was snail.

Not just gross. Tres gross!

I have had snail before, in France, and I didn’t enjoy it one bit, so I didn’t expect myself to like the very same creature when rather prepared in a gourmet Parisian restaurant it actually came in a tin bought off the Internet. I picked one of the de-shelled badboys out, prompting Rowena to mutter the sentence no girlfriend should have to say - “Ohhh don’t get snail juice on the bedddd” - and plopped the thing onto my hand, staring at it with nothing but hatred.

Snail? Or one of the Elephant Man’s balls? Do you know for sure?

I didn’t feel very Parisian and cool sat in my smelly Guildford room surrounded by tacky posters and grasshopper legs, and snails were a food so quintessentially French I wanted an element of authenticity. They recommended washing the snails with hot water, but I endeavoured to do as a douchey French painter might do, and decided to wash my snails by the pure rainwater of the night sky.

Ze rain, she is nature’s tap, oui? Et ze snail, she does not deserve ze most natural treatment, non? Ahhhh let us have sex.

The rainwater approach didn’t change anything, however. Snails still taste foul and French people are still fools.

Never had snail? Like your food made of slime? Tempted by the sort of meat that melts if salted? Eating snail can be easily replicated by folks at home by filling a condom with seaweed and sage stuffing, and then chewing for 15 minutes. Please, go ahead!

And so, my latest retch-worthy meal came to a close. I crossed grasshopper, snail, and sea urchin off my list. Then I wrote “worms” on my list and then crossed it off. So all’s good there.

As for further project developments, errrm.. ooh, I saw a huge dead dragonfly on the pavement the other day. It was half squashed and semi-buried in cigarette ends. From my angle it actually looked like it was smoking, maybe it had died of lung cancer. I wouldn’t know, I’m not a dragonfly doctor, but then you should know that by now already. Anyway my very first reaction was not whether or not I could stomach it, but merely whether it was on my list. I remembered it wasn’t, but if it had have been, I’d have gulped that sucker back in a second, just as soon as I could rope in a probably fairly scared passer-by to take a photo of me doing such.

Whilst we’re on the topic of eating quite disreputable meals, I’ve decided it’s time to turn to the rather awkward subject of which human I’m going to eat. It has to happen eventually, and hey, where’s the harm in being a forward-thinking cannibal? I bought a book t’other day about odd cuisines, largely for a laugh, but it’s actually been fairly useful so far, informing me little facts like dog meat is largely referred to as “Three-Six meat” in Asia. Feel free to use that fact at dinnerparties. The book also mentions eating human and came up with the fantastic idea of eating a placenta. I do not intend to get my girlfriend pregnant purely for this project, but I am going to start putting some tentative adverts out there to see if any pregnant women will let me have a bite of their afterbirth. If you’re pregnant reading this.. hey.. I’m a nice guy, maybe let me nibble on your placenta?

Infact, if anyone knows of any possible way I could bag human meat, placenta or not, please let me know. It could just be a little wedge of toe. It doesn’t really matter, just.. human. Little bit of human.. Wonderful. mattcrose17@aol.com

Ox tail is cow tail? What a country!

Fri, 06 May 2011 06:40:50 -0400

Day 77. Animals eaten: 37.

So since posting my last blog I have learnt apparently my oxtail does not constitute ox. It only used to be made out of ox, is now just plain ol’ beef, and at no point did anyone think to stop and change the name so good, hard-working unemployed students like Matt Rose might not accidentally spend money on what they thought was ox.

A girl called Laura was at the BBQ in which I’d been proudly flaunting my fake ox and she’d told me that it was nothing but cow, and I’d hastily ignored her. In retrospect, she is a connoisseur of odd meats such as squirrel and rabbit and all I ususally eat are Soleros so I should probably have paid her culinary knowledge some credit. But I was too proud. How could ox be cow, I argued. The letters are all different! It’d be too confusing for ox to be ox but oxtail to be cowtail!

Not a clue.

Anyway, so that’s something new I’ve learnt. What a learning curve this is turning out to be. What an educational experience of self-growth and knowledge.

FUUUUCK.

Capital idea old chum!

Fri, 06 May 2011 06:11:16 -0400

Day 77. Animals eaten: 38.

I’d been itching to get back to London with its plentiful resources of endangered and occasionally illegal foodstuffs for a while now. Save ordering meat online and then being forced to spend the entire day watching the letterbox like a paranoid dog waiting for my delivery of visceral grub, London, and more specifically Chinatown, seemed one of the few remaining ways of getting a taste of the exotic. I managed to swing the trip by reminding Rowena of all the fun things London offered we could see on our day there! What I did not mention is that we would be seeing none of these, and instead be spending the entire day around various restaurants, meat rendering plants, and butchers. What joy.

I really did need a big stomach-filling day out to the capital to boost my figures somewhat, as I’ve been having a fair few swings and misses of late. I’d placed a lot of faith in an online company which sold the unlikely Disney pairing of moose and grasshopper, all chopped up in a tin, only to find them constantly out of stock. A lot of places proudly advertised oven baked tarantula for sale too, though only back in 2008 when it was a fad, it seems. Since then, environment-humping protestors must have put a stop to such a cruel practice, and everyone got very sensitive about the poor, poor spiders. I mean.. how could you, in all good conscience, eat a spider? Look how cute and fluffy and adorable it is! Blinking at you innocently with those big blue eyes, those hundreds of big blue eyes. No no, got to save the spiders, oh yes.

Proprieters of websites boasting unrivalled extreme cuisine have all weakly e-mailed me back saying in this current over-protective environment about the most “extreme” food they’re allowed to sell is unwashed raisins. Butchers have got back to me sadly informing me that they can’t sell me any wholesale rattlesnake meat because I’m not a company. And I phoned up what I thought was a Carribean restaurant asking about their goat dish in great detail only to finish and be told by a man “that’s all well and good mate, but.. that restaurant closed down years ago, this is a house now. My house.” Plus, he didn’t have any goat in his house. More annoying than all this, however, are the false leads I stumble across on Google which raise my hopes to an astronomical level then instantly pull them down to burnt-out disappointment. Idly searching the Internet for “wolf meat”, for instance, lead me to several sites which promised me my wolf at a very reasonable price, and it was only after letting myself get excited that I realized they were talking about the sale of wolf meat in online role-playing game World of bloody Warcraft! I should probably have figured something was astray when rather than giving me protein information it was telling me how many Hit Points it restored, but I was excited is all. I thought I had some delicious, tender wolf meat, and instead all I had was a few pixels, and some nerds bleating at me that “you can find wolf meat from Gizrul the Slavener at Blackrock Spire but be careful its bite delivers 250-270 damage on a 10k armour rearrgggh”.

The only new animal to migrate through my bowels had been the previous day where Rowena had had a barbecue. Everyone else invited had brought the conventional, humdrum meats that grace every BBQ, namely burgers, sausages, and a couple of ambitious chicken breasts. But did this meat-murdering protagonist fall into such a food routine? Was your ridiculously humble narrator happy to settle for the everyday yawn of pork and beef?

Nah mate. Ox mate.

The packaging recommended broiling in a stock or wine for 2 and a quarter hours, but cooking instructions are for the scared and the weak, so I threw those away and endeavoured to cook my ox as quickly as possible, eager to impress the meat novices about the BBQ with my tight but sensual grip of the edible animal kingdom. I roasted the mini-islands of meat for 20 minutes, plated up, and sat amongst the burger-munchers to demonstrate the joys of trying something a little alternative.

Yum!

Unfortunately, I’d completely ballsed up. Turns out the ox meat is actually only supposed to be used to flavour stews, such as old person’s favourite - oxtail soup! Eating ox meat straight from the bone is a little like drinking nitrous fuel because you heard it’ll make you go faster. It was absurdly tough, I genuinely think it would have been easier to cut through an atom than it was that ox meat. In the end I resorted to cutting whatever meat I could find into tiny, aspirin-sized chunks and washing them down with swigs of warm cider. Eating it was pretty much exactly like taking a medicine, except… it wasn’t a medicine. It was a meal. Everyone else’s burgers looked delicious.

I am unsure whether it was the ox, of which I’d shaved a neat 2 hours off its cooking time, or just generally standard, woe-prepared BBQ food, but from about 5 in the morning until 9 I felt extremely sick, and had to drink about 3 pints of water an hour to try to wash the taste of suffering out of my mouth. It’d take more than a little nausea and chronic water consumption to keep me from London though, and later that day I troopered on to the capital to see if I could snoop out any animals in need of a nice colon to live in. I’d booked myself and Rowe a restaurant for this evening by the name of Archipelago, which a lot of newspapers said was essential for exotic meats, but that wasn’t until half 7, and there were many hours before then to be spent stuffing my mouth with lifeforms. My first port of call was a little ‘street cuisine’ takeaway place called Mooli’s, apparently selling zingy corn rolls with fillings such as:

Goat is meant to be the answer to that. Not chicken. I’ve had chicken.

Having never tried goat meat nor even heard of what a ‘mooli’ was before, I had no idea what was about to be presented to me. All I had to go on was the owner of Mooli’s, interestingly not called “Mooli”, warning me that I had better be able to handle spicy food if I chose the goat. I flippantly laughed his warnings away, deciding not to mention that my tongue might as well be made out of dry kindling for its ability to deal with spicy foods. When my goat mooli came it wasn’t quite what I had in mind, it resembled a casserole or hot-pot, in a wrap, I could not understand why a person would do such a thing. And then to call it a ‘mooli’?? Why was this insanity being encouraged??

One truth abounded though - it was mind-rattlingly hot. I could scarcely savour the goat meat seeing as all I could taste was mouthful after mouthful of fire. I breathed into a napkin and was surprised the heat from my mouth didn’t cinder the thing to a crisp. Eventually I managed to battle through and was rewarded a stamped card, requiring I stomach another 8 goat moolis to achieve rank of “goat hunter”, for my efforts, which I lost about a minute later. Goat, then, when not seasoned with hellfire and essence of the Sun, seems very similar to stringy beef. In a casserole it may be nice, but in the flaming hot breaded liquid insanity of a mooli it’s just confusing.

After buying a milkshake to soothe my ashen mouth I was on my way to Chinatown to see what sort of pets they were roasting today when my phone rang. It was Archipelago confirming my booking, which was all well and good. My eyebrows were raised when the guy told me “and the password to get in is dragonfly”. “What?” I asked after a pause. “The password is dragonfly” he whispered again. “Dragonfly?” I confirmed. “Yeahdragonflyseeyoubye” he quickly signed off, and hung up. I had not thought this fun, tacky little restaurant I’d booked would need a password, especially one like ‘dragonfly’, which just sounds like a password to some incredibly gay HQ, or maybe a secret dungeon where Louis Spence keeps racks of phallic-shaped fruits and vegetables. What if this place was really swanky? I was wearing a kooky T-shirt and jeans smeared with mud and ox, they’d just chortle disparagingly at me and comment “I hardly think you’re dragonfly material”, and wander off to serve Louis Spence a big, thick courgette.

The sights, noise, and skewered animal carcasses of Chinatown soon took my mind off matters however, and I set about trying to find the creature I had originally come to eat last time I found myself here: jellyfish. Irritatingly, this time I could only find one restaurant with jellyfish on the menu, and upon my asking they snapped back that they’d sold out. As a result I was left in Chinatown at a bit of a loose end still with a couple hours to kill. I certainly didn’t want to experience any Chinese culture or any of that dross, I just wanted whatever weird shit they could shallow fry for me. I guess I could have taken Rowe shopping or something, but she was getting to watch me eat! Girls love that! I was spoiling her, if anything.

I spotted a Chinese medicine outlet across the street, and came up with a brainwave. I’d been searching every cranny of the Internet for a supplier of seahorse meat, but it appeared the only way to get some was via the medicinal route - the Chinese use dried seahorses as one of those bullshit pharmaceuticals to apparently provide, dependent on your symptoms, the notorious cleansing of the seahorse. Or the notorious tranquility of the seahorse. Or the notorious virility of the seahorse. Or the notorious asthma-curing properties of the seahorse. Also take this inhaler.

Anyway, I figured it couldn’t hurt to take a peek through the window to see if they had anything of the sort, so I did, and that is where my problems began. As it was Chinatown, instantly a chirpy Asian woman came outside, popped up beside me and asked if she could help. “Yes, I was wondering if you sell dried seahorse here? I mean you probably don’t, but..” I began. She looked at me puzzled, and tried repeating what I had said. “No, dried seahorse” I repeated. “Like… a seahorse” I then added, helpfully. “What does it do?” she inquired. “I think it helps stress and anxiety” I reeled off from the top of my head. “Anyway, you probably don’t have any, so I’ll..”. “No, you come in, you come see doctor now” she insisted. I protested, but she ushered me inside the medicine store, alongside a patient with a bandaged and bloody hand. “You wait, I bring doctor” she told me. “No I-..” I attempted. But she was having none of it. “You sit down, doctor’s coming, you sit down.”

Oh Jesus…

Shortly, a woman in a doctor’s coat summoned me and asked me what was wrong. Feeling very childish and embarrassed I muttered something non-committal about seahorses with my gaze averted. “What?” she asked loudly. I groaned. “SEA HORSES” I practically yelled. “Do you sell any SEA HORSES HERE?”. Just when I thought this whole affair could not get more torturous, she asked me to write it down. I actually wrote the words “dried seahorses” and handed it to a doctor. By now the original woman was trying to help too, as I bristled awkwardly and could sense Rowena behind me struggling not to laugh.

The doctor eventually resorted to checking her iPhone for clues on what this strange medicine could be. Have you ever seen a Chinese iPhone before? There’s lots of buttons. From there, eventually, my request was deciphered. “Oh sea horse!” the doctor exclaimed, wiggling her finger around in the air in what she must have thought was a perfect mime of a seahorse. “No, not here, we’re not allowed to in England” she explained. I thanked both of them amicably, said my goodbyes, walked out the store and out of sight, and promptly crumpled with embarrassment.

I decided to take this as my cue to leave Chinatown, so Rowe and myself took to the pub for a couple hours instead before trying to find this Archipelago. The place was nothing like I expected. For one, there was only about 10 tables in the whole restaurant. And for two, they had really gone overboard with the exotic theme. There was rainforest plantation on the walls, the menus came in crumpled, furled scrolls, the lot. Before I even checked the prices, I had the suspicion that the reason this place was so exclusive, why it required its own furtive password system and such, was that it was very, very expensive. A few tiny hints gave it away.

For one, they seated me in a god-damned throne.

With every further inch my ass cheeks sunk into its plush velour I could feel my wallet getting lighter.

Predictably, as I checked the prices my heart clenched, my pupils dilated, and my brain face-palmed. Turns out one of the key factors to why humans are restricted to the standard meats of the world is financial - when prepared correctly, exotic meats are very, very expensive. But I was here now, so I ordered a bottle of hilariously expensive Mauritian beer and a starter of vine leaf-wrapped crocodile.

It came served not on a plate, but two avante-garde slabs of granite. Of course it came served on two avante-garde slabs of granite…

For anyone who hasn’t had crocodile meat before, it is absolutely exquisite. It tastes like a chicken had sweet, embracing intercourse with a salmon, and their offspring was birthed into a cool birthing pool of balsamic vinegar. That’s not how they described it on the menu, but still, it’s freakin’ delicious, easily the best meat so far.

Zebra was less delectable. Zebra was more resemblent of a tired sheep engaging in violent S&M with a sinewy bull, and their offspring being brought up from the moment of birth in a very rough primary school. Basically, it was very chewy and dense. It also cost me 20 Great British pounds.

For an extra £50, a side-order of ‘flavour’ could be requested.

Overall though, apart from the terrifying bill at the end, the meal was nice and it scored me another 2 fresh kills for the list. I also noted they sold a dessert topped with “a baby bee”, and upon inquiry found that, no really, they did indeed sell a dessert topped with a baby bee. One they couldn’t legally serve at the moment as it was Summer and the bees were all busy bees making honey and stinging people. Bee was not on my list, but this did prove that certain cuisines eat them, so they have rightly been added to the carniverous compendium, just below “beaver”.

Anyhoo, thus closes my moderately productive London day. I have another big food hamper arriving soon, and then after that… well after that I’m pretty much stuck. So please do let me know if any ‘Bat Baps’ or ‘Koala King’ establishments open around you soon at mattcrose17@aol.com . Lovely.

Get your rat out

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:40:00 -0400

Day 69. Animals eaten: 34.

Hello there, today we’re going to be exploring the humour of Borat. Not the Sacha Baron Cohen film though, no I’m actually referring to the ‘boar-rat’, the extremely rare amalgamation of D.N.A which fuses when boar meat and rat meat combine in the stomach.

For those not street-smart enough to have read my last post, I was expecting two meat deliveries today. The first was a cut of wild boar, which was supposed to be here yesterday and consequently a pathetically grovelling man told me I was now receiving for free, which I knew could need to be signed for at any point between 9 in the morn and 5 in the eve. The other package, which I was looking forward to fractionally less, was a single frozen rat I’d purchased from the ‘pet snake food’ section of an exotic pet food store. However this particular rat was not headed for an anaconda, it was headed for Matt Rose, and his by now probably fairly confused digestive system.

Unfortunately, as is pretty much the case for every alternate morning, I woke up with a steaming hangover, my alarm rising me at 9 so I could keep guard of the door. I kept drifting off and dreaming I heard the doorbell, and my head felt like a prison piñata, so I felt a bit listless towards this whole stupid meat project for some of the day. Man, this is stupid isn’t it? What am I doing?? God dammit.

My boar arrived at half 10, in a massive box. I’m not kidding, it was the size of a midget’s coffin. I rummaged through the small universe of packaging to find my meat, which was really pretty tiny compared to the box it came in.

Sorry if I’m boaring you. Ha, hot dayum, you are so lucky to have an amusing narrator such as myself.

I imagined the boar to taste like regular pork, just I guess a little more.. swampy, but it actually had a whole new flavour to itself. Apparently if you overcook exotic meat it becomes incredibly thick and chewy and a bit akin, I imagine, to trying to eat a dictionary, and I fear I may have let my boar fall into the grasping claws of the overcooked Gods as it was mercilessly difficult to cut apart. You may also notice I am eating this particular creature off a paper plate - part of a small bid towards keeping our house cleaner so we might not wake up to find mice and badgers and small Mexican children scurrying around the unwashed dishes of our living room. As a result as I was trying to saw through my meat I did not realize for a worryingly long time that I had also cut through the plate and my shorts and was now carving into my leg. A part of me wishes I hadn’t realized at all - it’d have been a simple way of getting ‘Human’ off the list. In the end though, all I could cross off was wild boar, or ‘warthog!’, as I’d previously incorrectly added.

However, today’s main course, le plats principaux, was rat. A good ol’ hobo dinner of rat. The box came of a similar size to the boar - the sort of dimensions of the box Gary Coleman was buried in - and like the boar, I presumed there would simply be tonnes of packaging and the rat itself would be very small.

No.

It was fucking huge.

Look at the size of that thing! LOOK at the size of that rat! That’s not a rat! That’s a goddamned baby polar bear with a tail! They’d sent me a bloody monster, look it’s as big as my massive head!

I was, I believe the watered-down term is ‘unsettled’ by the size of the Abominable Rat I’d been sent, and tried to put off actually having to eat a slice of the thing for much of the day. This was uncharted territory as far as I was concerned, I had no idea of the health, moral or legal aspects of buying a dead rat from a pet shop for human consumption. I started fretting that maybe this rat was pumped full of chemicals that a snake’s stomach could handle but a human’s couldn’t. It certainly looked like it had been exposed to some sort of radioactive growth hormone.

I realized with a lurch I was going to have to phone up the pet shop and enquire as to whether it was safe to eat one of their rats. Believe it or not this isn’t actually a problem I’ve had to tackle before so I was a little unsure how to go about it. My housemate Cecily suggested I try pretending my son had eaten a bit of the rat by accident and I was phoning as the concerned father, and this seemed as good an idea as any, and probably less likely to get me sectioned than if I called casually asking how long most of the customers they deal with roast their rodents for. So, dredging up the cringe-worthy dregs of my Year 9 Drama class skills, I rang up the store and tried to get into character.

A chirpy Manc woman eventually answered and I tried to mix the right measures of fretful concern and good-humoured patience at what my crazy kids had got up to now. “Yes”, I explained, “my son managed to get hold of it and took a bite straight out of it! Do you think he’ll be alright?”. The woman, whilst constantly repeating “I’m not sure, I’m not sure”, was also having a right old laugh at what could possibly have been my beautiful son’s death. She told me the rats were gassed in some sort of rodent Holocaust so they shouldn’t have any harmful chems in them. Awkwardness abounded when she asked how old my son was. “Errrm..”, I stammered, forgetting all the numbers in the world. “Ermm.. 4, I think..”.

I cringed. “4 I think”?? So this woman had me pegged as the sort of father who doesn’t even know his kids age, and lets them eat rats for fun. Social services would love this. I ended the call as quickly as possible, secure in the knowledge my giant rat wasn’t pumped full of cyanide, and started Googling recipes.

Unsurprisingly, the only real rat recipes out there were real hick ones, that recommended skinning the thing, skewering it and cooking it over an open flame. It probably would advise it served immediately on an upturned dustbin lid, with a chilled glass of chewing tobacco, and side order of incest. However our garden does rather conveniently have its own fire pit for just such campfires, and this method did seem the best to keep in with rat’s authentic taste, so I decided to give it the ol’ college try. Plus if I used our kitchen oven my housemates would probably hang, draw and quarter me. Or make me clean the oven. I’m not sure which is worse.

So myself and 3 friends stood around in the garden, me with a knife, looking down at the Godzilla rat and trying to work out how best to skin the thing. We were a far cry from the sort of guys that spend long weekends in woods being manly, skinning squirrels for fun and cocking shotguns after every sentence. The only experience we had in this area was from the PS3 game ‘Red Dead Redemption’. And me, of course, from the mouse I’d decapitated last week. Eventually I decided just to guess and plunged the knife in.

Instantly I realized how naive I was to assume a 4-year-old, especially one raised by such a negligent father as I, could have the capacity to nibble through a giant rat. Its skin was unbelievably tough, the knife just danced off its impenetrable super-mouse armour. It was a giant, indestructible rat is what it was; when it was alive it probably could have shot lasers out of its eyes.

Eventually I gave up and let housemate Joey have a go. He was a bit better, and managed to peel away the skin and cut out some intestines with murderer-like efficiency whilst I sat nearby dry-heaving into a bucket and occasionally offering a supportive, trembling thumbs-up.

I cut off, I will confess, a very small chunk of meat, it was only about the size of a penny, but I wasn’t willing to eat any more of this colossal rat nightmare than was absolutely necessary. You don’t like it, you go eat your own rat. Are you gonna go order and eat a rat? And then eat all that rat, prove me wrong? Are you?

That’s what I thought.

I got a fire going, using my usual trusted technique of burning largely noxious plastic materials, skewered my chunk of rat, and went about the sort of cooking process you will never, ever see on Masterchef.

When I glance back through all the photos of my life, wondering which to show my grandchildren, I think this one of me in a hoody and shorts toasting a chunk of dead rat meat over an open fire will probably go in the bin.

I was left with a surprisingly well-cooked little pebble of meat on a stick. It took me a while to get the guts to stick the tiny rat kebab in my mouth, largely from fear of then losing those same guts to explosive nausea. On taste alone, it wasn’t actually that bad, but half-way down my throat the crippling realization of quite what I was putting into my body hit hard and left me gagging, but I managed to pull myself together and rat meat found its way to my stomach. My 34th animal. Done.

A before and after shot of, unless my life violently veers off course sometime soon, the one and only time in my life I will be eating rat.

It was hard to feel proud of myself at the time, as I desperately needed a liquid to wash the taste of rat away so resorted to lapping out of the paddling pool we have, meaning I looked a little like some half-human, half-beast hybrid, scrabbling about in the dirt and howling at the moon. And I doubt I’ll ever be properly proud of eating rat; it will, for instance, not be making a place on my CV. But I quite like the idea that I prepared, cooked and consumed the same animal that caused the plague. Rats mate? I eat those for fackin’ breakfast. Quite literally.

That is all. Thank you for reading and I do hope my talks of rat ingestion have not made you queasy and/or considering massacring your beloved pet rat and serving it with hollandaise sauce for brunch. If it did, please let me know at mattcrose17@aol.com , and I will laugh.

It’s been a funny sort of day hasn’t it?

Arranging another meating

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:03:00 -0400

Day 68. Animals eaten: 32.

I had thought that my previous post in which I dismembered and ingested a dead mouse would prove to the unbelievers that I am still very much in the game where this project concerns, but the overall reaction from this blog’s paltry readerbase was one of disappointed murmurs, that I’d let too many days slip by, that I was never going to do it now, you might as well give up Matt, despite your die-hard spirit and sexy, sexy haircut. Not my words ladies and gentlemen, the words of those with too little faith in my belly.

The only other reactions to my last post were hatred and nausea, and a quiet, curious interest in when I was going to keel over and vomit up my shin bones. Actually, my insides remained very much inside me after my mouse meal. I didn’t get ill from backyard BBQing a disease-riddled mouse and eating its legs, but I did from some Tesco-bought oysters, so make of that what you will. Maybe I’m just a terrific cook??

I’m not a terrific cook.

So I was motivated by this disenchantment to throw myself with even more passion into my life of meals which are gradually taking on more of a resemblence to satanic rituals. However, it was Easter, so I had to spend some time in my home in Reading. My mother can get a little snitty with my diet sometimes, not even letting me have 3 sugars in my coffee - she gives me two and I have to sneak an extra third spoonful in like a scene from the freakin Great Escape - so no prizes for guessing what her reaction would be if I hefted the bleeding carcass of a komodo dragon onto the cutting board.

When I was home then, I was bound to mere Internet research for later feasts. I spent literally an entire evening trying to find where a gentleman like myself might sink his teeth into some turtle, and found an American site which sold snapper turtle soup. Indeed, you can see it here: http://store.asianfoodcompany.com/53007-5.html . This was getting me all excited and frisky until I saw the charge to have it exported to the UK was, and you’ll like this readers.. $110. Now for a gentleman like myself.. that’s fucking bullshit. There was no way I was paying $110 to have some soup delivered. This is why this project would be so much easier if I was an American! Americans eat everything! So do the Chinese! Why do us Brits mince around in our porcelain existence eating nothing but chicken? Goddamn, I think I’m being modest in saying that the entire weight of national pride is laying heavy on my shoulders.

Fortunately, my home town of Reading took a note from our Oriental brothers and recently introduced one of these:

Like a much more condensed, and much chavvier, version of London’s chinatown they sold all sorts of crazy dandelion-flavour milk, and packs of sweets with donkeys humping rainbows and yelling “SUCCESS TASTE!” on them, and more importantly, some nice frozen eel, which I purchased. As I left I asked if they sold any other “weird meats”, which in retrospect was probably not the best way of posing the question as it made me sound like the health inspector, and unsurprisingly they shiftily looked around and said “no”. They were probably worried the ceiling would buckle and a deluge of shark fins would fall out from everywhere.

Of all the animals I’ve personally cooked so far, eel was prepared the worst. For one, it thawed on the hot train ride back to Guildford, and it suggested it be microwaved, when our house does not have a microwave. Consequently I had to boil it, and this was whilst Luke was preparing a delicious BBQ in the sunshine and urging me to hurry up outside from my steamy, eel-smelling pit of a kitchen. ALL THIS whilst my phone, which I’d had to tinker with to get photos off following the bastard-heist of my iPhone, was alerting me to literally every sneeze on Facebook. It was like an annoying younger brother, tugging on my trouser leg and going “Matt! Matt! Matt! Owen Moore ju-.. hey listen. Owen Moore just posted “lol” on Sarah Gulliford’s photo Matt he did.”

As a result it tasted pallid and undercooked, like eating wet paper. Actually I think I’ve eaten wet paper before and it was fractionally better. Worse than wet paper then, is this educated food critic’s appraisal.

A couple days later I was in Tesco, I believe shopping for supplies for another BBQ. I don’t know why everyone celebrates sunshine with cooking meat, it’s like we’ve all rediscovered fire, but I’m not complaining. Again I was with Luke and as we strolled past an aisle he nonchalantly reported “there’s a meat down there you haven’t eaten yet, Matt.” And indeed he was correct, a guinea fowl nonetheless, which I hastily added to the list a few weeks back upon realizing it was an animal, and not wanting some angry guinea fowl protestors outside my house demanding their rights.

There’s no point labouring over this creature’s demise as nothing funny happened. Cooked it, ate it, tasted like chicken, bish bash bosh, next animal death please.

Also over the Easter break I found myself in Oxford. For anyone who’s never visited the place before, it’s famous for excessive bicycle use, some of the old buildings used to film Harry Potter which you can’t come within 100 feet of unless you study there, and more importantly, the sort of snobbish pompous eating establishments nestled very comfortably in their own anuses which specialize in gourmet, specialized meats. I instantly found a pub called the ‘Oxford Retreat’ which had both pigeon and wild boar on the menu, and continuing the popular trend of not giving any consideration to what Rowena might have, I ushered us both in and ordered two list-ticking meals. The pigeon came first, it was very nice. But don’t take my word for it, look at the following photo:

Very nice. Probably because I wasn’t in charge of cooking it.

My wild boar, though, was less nice. Probably because it wasn’t fucking wild boar. Just as I’d ordered the waitress offered me a calming, saccharine smile and informed me “Yes sir. Although I should point out, it’s not boar, it’s just a cumberland sausage.” I should have explained politely that those are entirely different, much like if you’d asked for a parachute before you leapt out a plane and you were actually given a frisbee, you’d be in a lot of trouble. Instead, I uttered the monosyllabic, Neanderthal cry of “NO BOAR?!”, and my meal tasted much worse as a result, only being able to tick pigeon off my big list.

I was not to be beaten though, and upon returning home the first thing I set about doing was ordering me some boar. Committed readers to this blog might recall my associate Ryan recommended a website which sold boar amongst its produce. He was the one with the nice hair, have you met him yet? If not, look about harder for him. His hair is very nice, so look out for that.

The issue with ordering meat online is that you are given a delivery time usually between 9am-5.30pm, and you have to ensure you’re at home ready to sign for it at any moment. If no-one answers the door, they can’t risk leaving a stagnating crate of meat on someone’s doorstep, so they’ll just take it back with them and leave you boarless. Boarless I say!! As a result I’ve spent the whole of today sitting around with my thumb up my arse staring at the front door, whilst I could have been out going to discotheques or smoking mad reefer or whatever it is the kids do these days. This was all to receive a phonecall at about half 3 courteously informing me the delivery would now actually take place tomorrow, so I have that whole deliciously dull routine to look forward to then as well.

However. However. There is another animal to be delivered to my house tomorrow also. Oh yes. Your Uncle Matt has been most clever. You see, during the fiasco in which we were trying to catch that pesky mouse in elaborate and fearful means, Luke recalled how he used to feed his pet snake mice. That was until, rather hilariously, he had to get rid of his snake because it kept trying to eat him. I like that story.

This gave me a bit of an idea. Surely I could buy a rat, which is still on my list, from a pet shop, pretending it was for my snake. What the pet shop wouldn’t know is that I call my stomach “snake”. There’d be much less risk of disease than catching the damn thing, and I wouldn’t have to wait for my house to get infested before I could eat it. It would be a single, large, frozen rat, ready for me to grill until golden brown in the George Foreman. I mean.. I meant.. feed to my snake.. of course.

Anyway, I ordered it about a week ago, and it should be here tomorrow, alongside my boar. How exciting.

Not much to report on whether this experience is making me any more squeamish or vegetarian. I was in the car with my friends t’other day and almost crashed the thing urging Joey the driver to stop and let me get out to collect some roadkill I espied mushed into the side of the road. For some reason I’m going through a phase of thinking ducks are cute and I feel somehow a little guilty for eating them whenever I see one, but that’s probably just because their beaks look like dog masks:

You cannot unsee that.

There’s a big, worrying gap of uncrossed animals forming in my list too; it stretched right from fugu to llama before I managed to get guinea fowl in the bag. Hopefully though my piggy, ratty little meal tomorrow will get me incredibly fired up to start eating things whether they be animal or not. I will update very soon, my fellow fans of watching animals get eaten.

Also, you know my email address is mattcrose17@aol.com right? Good.

This is a fabulous idea. I applaud you, sir.

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 20:24:02 -0400

Why thank you my friend! I graciously accept your applause.

Mouse-atouille

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:37:00 -0400

Day 56. Animals eaten: 29.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Well, obviously it has been a while since I have graced and disgraced this particular Tumblr with my efforts in eating the world. I don’t know if I’ve somehow pissed off the Fate God or sweet lady Karma by constantly joking that I’m going to eat them, but I’ve fallen into a spectacular run of bad luck lately which has really prevented me from successfully swallowing any stoats ‘n goats for the past 3 weeks or so.

For one, as tear-jerkingly retold in my last post, I had my iPhone stolen. This has been replaced by some particularly terrible Nokia contraption which can’t really take any photos or go online or be good. But it does look quite fancy. So I may well get mugged for it again. As soon as this had been resolved, I was left to wipe the weighty, swinging ass of my dissertation, and so for a tragic week the only real sunlight I saw came prickling through the windows of the library. During one fantastically sunny day I saw a rainbow shining through the glass over my study notes and I almost wept. But I did not. You can’t weep in the library. It’s a quiet zone. A foreign girl would “shh” you.

When my dissy was finally completed I was full of spunk and beans and eager to get back to my old ways of pouring gravy over petting zoos and going beserk. Infact so lively was I that I spotted a wee 3-foot wall and thought, well hey, I’m going mental here, how about I, y’know.. hehe… walk along this wall!! I thought this would be an action symbolizing me rebelling against the State and would show that clearly, striding along a wall as I was, that I didn’t take any shit from anyone. So I leapt up, lost my footing, and then saw the other side of the wall took the form of a 9 foot drop. I landed squarely on my mouth, destroying my chin and chipping my front tooth, and this made me sad. You can sort of see the state I was left in in this photo, except my friends have all simultaneously discovered the iPhone app which lets you take photos which look all old-fashioned and sepia-toned and Beat, and accordingly, it is not a very good photo:

So there I was, suddenly with all the time to feast on the gristly hides of hummingbird and man, but without the teeth to do it. I had to endure yet another few days of subsiding on just mush, poking slivers of kiwi fruit through my tattered mouth whilst that decadent Capitalist brick wall stood strong and upright, mocking me. And whilst I maybe could have smushed up some wallaby into a paste, or tried snorting chunks of puffin into my system, my heart wasn’t really in it.

BUT, I recovered. A recovery was made. A lazy Irish dentist fixed my tooth, my tear-streaked dissertation was handed in, and my iPhone had been replaced by a sigh-Phone but was a phone machine nonetheless. And then one hungover morning I checked my wallet and found I’d lost all my cards! But that was easily resolved also, and you’re probably as sick of hearing about my problems as I am of experiencing them, so we shall move on to tonight’s main course.

For the past while then, I have not really been in the best state of mind or money to try to find new animals to digest. I’d done some tentative research into the site http://www.thailandunique.com/ , which sells bottles of whiskeys with seahorses, geckos, snakes, and the like in them. The only downside was that quite literally EVERYTHING in the site is Sold Out, so I’m not entirely sure what happened there. Maybe Thai alcoholics don’t like seahorses? I’m afraid I am not the man to ask.

The only other animal encounter I’d had was in the squalid pit of despair that I call home. My student house is… hellishly messy. The washing-up is done about as often as an eclipse comes around, more food gets ground into the floor than eaten like some sort of Medieval Inn, and through my last torturous month I’d succeeded in saturating a lot of the natural fabrics of the house with my blood. If Kim and Aggie of ‘How Clean is your House?’ fame popped into our residence, I’m pretty sure they would pass out and wake up 48 hours later in a hopsital bed attached to lots of blood pressure machines. So it really should not have surprised us as we sat watching TV to see a mouse saunter out from under the stairs and into one of our bedrooms. Of course the 4 guys, sorry excuse me, lads, that we are, we boldly stood up with manly authority, and agreed in gruff, rugged voices, made croaked through years of battlecries and aggressive sex, that this intruder could not last…

Nahhh. Nahhhh. Shrieked like bloody pansies didn’t we? I leapt up on the sofa screaming like the black woman from ‘Tom & Jerry’, and we all flapped our hands about in a panic before finally calming ourselves down with a bit of ‘Loose Women’. Bliss.

We didn’t see another whisker of our little rodent intruder again, although we left peanut butter outside the door of where we suspected it lived and/or conducted business, and every morning it was gone. I tried mixing bleach with the food once, but to no avail. We had a mouse, and any attempt at catching it would probably end with one of us swallowing a pool cue in true cartoon fashion, or blowing ourselves up with our ACME pogo stick, so we’d just have to live with the little tyke. I was a little annoyed as I’d have liked to have eaten it, the bastard probably tasted delicious from the amount of peanut butter and cheese we’d given it, but it was against my rules to kill it, so I thought that would be that.

This morning, my housemate Will knocked at my door and woke me up. He said he had a present for me. In my still quite dozy, only semi-conscious mind, I thought he may have actually bought me a legitimate present. In retrospect, this was a stupid thing to assume. I groggily opened my door, looked in the empty PG Tips box he was holding, then panickedly recoiled back with a good morning salute of “What the fffuck is that??”.

For anyone medicinally allergic to guessing, it was a mouse, a dead mouse. Not deadmau5, the Canadian progressive electro-house artist. Obviously. No, it was the corpse of a mouse Will had found in the garden, and now he was looking at me with the assumed stare that I would soon be feasting on its innards. I knew I wouldn’t have much of an opportunity to pick up mouse again, and I had neglected the project so much that I needed a way of smashing back into it, so within 10 minutes of waking up into a bright new day I was Googling ways of cooking mice.

Here’s a surprising fact I have learnt: not many people eat mice. Google gave me precious little help, the best I could find was the mention of a boy cooking a mouse in a fairy tale, and predictably it kept unhelpfully offering that I meant how to cook a ‘mousse’. No you cocky search engine, tell me how to eat my pests! In fact they were such little help I was forced to phone up 118118.

For about the three people in the world who might not know, 118118 is a service which provides you the answer to any question you ask, however this is almost entirely just ‘Can I have a taxi number?’, occasionally followed by ‘Can you repeat that taxi number?’. I, however, was instantly put through to a grumpy sounding woman and explained my situation, ending with “so, how would be best for cooking a mouse?” ”Mmmhmm..” she said, ushering my on. There was a pause. “I have now finished asking the question” I said. Another pause. “What??” she asked. And I explained the works again.

Essentially, she didn’t know. But the basics I had garnered were that it was important to skin it. At this moment, my landlord suddenly burst in, unannounced, almost giving me a hernia as I leapt to hide the mouse from view so he mightn’t think that his respectable student tenants are skinning and eating things they find living in the walls. He’d come to fix the shower, which was another problematic little development, as he’d be in and out of the kitchen where I’d intended to be cooking up my mouse fillets. Will suggested a disposable BBQ for the garden, and within a couple of hours of being snuggled in my intestinal-parasite-free bed, I was staring at the embers of a barbecue with a dead mouse in my hand, trying to prevent my landlord from seeing this whole odd little sacrificial affair. What an interesting turn of events.

I apologize to everyone.

Now call me a nerd if you will, but I’d actually never beheaded anything before, so I wasn’t quite sure how best to tackle it. In the end I just grabbed a knife and guessed what to do, like a plucky young rapist, and well, the result speaks for itself:

This little mouse should have quit whilst he was still ahead, hahahahah-nahhh it is sad, that.

I remind you this little critter was dead when found, so all of this butchery, whilst disgusting and soul-killing, is both legal and morally acceptable. I was just making use of what the Earth provided me with, like ‘Stig of the Dump’. Oh yes they tell you all the loveable stuff about him, wearing a sack for a shirt and whatnot, but they miss out all the reprehensible stuff like him tearing the heads of magpies to eat and shitting in old milk bottles don’t they? Think about that.

Seeing as I can’t even play the board game ‘Operation’, I doubted I had the steady hand to successfully skin a mouse, so I just lobbed the torso on the flames and watched. It cooked surprisingly well, but the smell of it cooking was absolutely insane, an utterly unholy smell, like God dying. I retched several times but was able to keep my stomach lining together long enough to pick the charred mouse carcass off the BBQ.

‘It’s just a tiny turkey’, I kept telling myself. ‘Just a tiny little turkey to eat Matt. You like tiny turkeys’.

I cut into its midriff to find just a small lake of goo oozing out of its body. Sensing this was probably not the best place to dig in, I picked off one its tiny mousey legs. ‘Just a tiny little chicken drumstick Matt, come on…’

As you can see from my nauseated face at the end, mouse does not actually taste of cheese and peanut butter. I did not give my tastebuds enough real chance to savour mouse lest it cause me to throw up everything I’ve ever eaten, but all I can say is that it tastes much like it smells. And that is a smell only the lucky few who have spent a morning secretly huddled around a cheap Tesco BBQ cooking the rotting, decapitated corpse of a mouse will know.

I write this about 3 hours since this meal and I am yet to turn into a huge radioactive rodent or, more likely, develop crippling salmonella, so I can only assume that all is well, mouse is off my list, and I have rightly returned to my post as animal eater. Which of mother nature’s children should I eat next, hmm?

Please send all disgusted complaints of mouse atrocity to mattcrose17@aol.com

Letting my food go down

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:15:00 -0400

Day 39. Animals eaten: 28.

No new creatures eaten this week. Yes yes, shoot me in the face with a massive gun, etc. Actually there’s a very good reason behind this which will make you feel very guilty, so just you wait for that.

My friend Ben who lives in my house despite not actually being a housemate there had his friends down on Wednesday of which several had understandably had their balls blown away by how exciting and innovative my project is. One of them, called Ryan, seemed most taken by the idea and even gave me a handy link on boar sausages. You’ll recognize Ryan if you ever meet him, because he has very nice hair.

Anyway it was during this discussion mention of the fact that apparently a photo included in my last post (I just lost the game for that) of my pheasant heart didn’t upload properly, as I am having to do all this on a library laptop which may as well be built out of string and sequins and dried raisins and have “Comquter” scrawled along the bottom in crayon. It’s quite an amazing picture of the sort of autopsies I have to eat so I thought I’d have a shot at posting it again:

That may, or knowing my luck, may not, have worked. Whatever, I’m not uploading it again, if you can’t see it just imagine what you look like inside if it’s all spilling out into the outside and you’ll gather an idea.

Getting back to Wednesday, I was rather taken by all this fuss so proceded to get obliteratively drunk and the upshot of this all is that I began talking to some rather disreputable gentlemen who then beat me up and stole my phone. My iPhone. My iPhone FOUR. WITH ALL THE ‘FRUIT NINJA’ BLADES!!

So yes, whilst those chavs have ran off merry with my phone to boast proudly about it to their sisters who they’re probably screwing, I have had to put eating all the meats on the backburner whilst I’ve been at the hospital and the police station and all kinds of fun administrative enforcement buildings. I fortunately have a new phone now, but 3 side-effects still prevail:

1. Photos of the bleeding wrecks of animals I take from now on will probably be even blurrier than the smudged fugs they are already. 2. For a short while my blog posts will probably be a bit more pissed off. 3. I now have even less money than before to spend on different breeds of dinner.

On a lighter note, the prison riot in my bowels has subsided, if only for the present. I can also only pray that the trio of dickless musketeers that nabbed my phone are suitably scared shitless that they appear to have ticked off someone so mental that their phone is entirely full of photographs of meats. That’d be nice.

Anyway, I will push on, the hunter-gatherer that I am, and should proudly present to you a rodent platter within a week or two. Or, if my bad luck snowballs as it has been doing, the next you will see of me will be a hostage video of me in Ukraine having my toes cut off. Whatever happens, you’ll get a laugh, so that’s the important thing.

mattcrose17@aol.com

The Game

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:54:44 -0400

Day 32. Animals eaten: 28.

I exhausted the last animal my local butchers could supply today by inquiring as to their game meat. And to anyone who plays ‘the game’, I am afraid this means that you have just lost the game. Sorry. I found a pheasant or two wedged at the back of their industrial freezer and decided that would suffice for another list-ticking dinner.

“What a pleasant pheasant” the butcher replied as he held up what looked like a frozen mini-chicken to the light. I of course laughed very hard at this remark, thinking to myself ‘maybe the more I laugh, the more different meats he’ll offer me’. Instead he just bagged my bird and looked pleased and surprised at how well his remark had gone down. That bastard, not offering me any owl burgers or chinchilla weiners I knew he must have frozen out back. Finding laughing was getting me nowhere, I decided to ask if they had any alternative meats they weren’t telling me about before rendering this butchers now redundant.

“Hmm, well we used to sell ostrich” the guy mused, “but you won’t find that cheap anywhere, that’ll come to about £26.99, you won’t find ostrich any cheaper than that..”. I frowned and pretended to agree with him even though I’d literally bought ostrich for £3.50 2 days previous. I was actually more qualified than them now; I was actually more meat-conscious than these men of meat. I didn’t leave with any extra steaks but I did leave with a few extra kilos of smugness knowing that.

I got home to defrost the pheasant and found another little interesting zoological fact from my demented hungry pain rampage:

Pheasants actually have hairs. At least, my pheasant had hairs. Just a sprinkling of eyelash-type hairs. Fascinating! How much intricate beauty and majesty there is in the simplest of organisms. Makes you feel like each and every single creatures life is… special.

Anyway I tenderized the fuck out of this bird and then left it roasting in the oven for about 50 minutes.

Seeing as at no point thus far in my life have I, even briefly, accidentally become an old man with a family, I had no idea how to carve a cooked bird and did not have the sharp enough skills or utensils to bother trying, so instead I plonked it on my plate and tore into it with my bare hands, stuffing big wads of flesh and sinew into my mouth whilst making tribe-like hollering noises. It must have been a gruesome sight to behold, like something out of ‘28 Days Later’, with a side of buttered bread.

The thing had quite a lot of flavour but to be honest I was too involved in tearing apart its entrails like a clumsy surgeon to notice. I tore open it’s ribcage like the King of Everything but stopped when I saw what looked like an odd rubber bulb sticking out from it’s torso. It looked a bit like a tongue. I didn’t think pheasant’s had tongues in their chests but then again I didn’t know they had hair either, so maybe I’ve been getting it wrong all these years, embarrassing myself at dinner parties and UV raves with all these incorrect pheasant facts.

Actually what it turned out to be was the bird’s heart. Obviously as the butcher had left the pheasant unaltered, apart from apparently shaving his eyelashes over it, it still had all its organs intact in its chest cavity. Look, I took a photo to show you. Don’t worry if you’re squeamish though, I took it in such a way so that it doesn’t look disgusting.

Oh wait, sorry I forgot. It does. Ol’ forgetful Matt, eh?

I decided that seeing as I was cockily strolling about God’s planet flippantly eating all the stuff he’s made, plus I was still a little caught in the flesh-tearing, blood-soaked-laughter voodoo cannibal craze that ripping apart an animal brought, I should probably, probably, eat it. Yes. A lot of successful people eat hearts. The bad guy from Indiana Jones 2 did and he got a lot of important work done that day. So I severed all its arterial tendons and popped the light little conveniently snack-sized blood-pump in my mouth.

I don’t really think I had the tastebuds to take in any of its flavour - my palette is more used to poptarts than vital bodily organs. It just tasted quite meaty, albeit a little more gooey. I think it’s fair to say that you’ve made your point clear to anyone and anything that you’ve just literally torn the heart from, so I decided to check pheasant off the list. WHICH REMINDS ME: I added guinea fowl to the list, I realize now that it is an animal with its own rights and feelings and I respect that, so now that gets to have its heart consumed also. So basically, this entire pheasant episode has been negated, and is useless. Huzzah.

Meanwhile, I also spent part of my day trying to track down kangaroo meat at an alleged Australian meat depot naught but a sprightly 20 minute jaunt from my house. I got to the address with a cheery smile and that special ‘about to eat a marsupial’ twinkle in my eye to find:

The douches had shut down! They’d been forced to close shop, probably due to a lack of customers. Was that how we treated our ivory poachers and endangered animal hunters these days? With rudeness? I am very disappointed in you all. It’s boring meat purchases like having yet another bacon sandwich for lunch that mean places like this can’t stay afloat and I can’t sink my teeth into any kangaroo baby spine! Why in a few years in a disgusting, dystopian future you probably won’t even be able to buy any kangaroo baby spine at all. At this rate the only meat on offer will be unidentifiable brown slop channelled into metal bowls and distributed on conveyor belts. Well not me, I won’t become that, I won’t let that happen, I’m a radical, I’m like in ‘Logan’s Run’, GOD I’m making a lot of film references tonight.

On a side-note, whereas I thought making rare animals suffer to sate my appetite might make me feel slightly more inclined towards vegetarianism, if anything the opposite is happening. I’m becoming a wee bit obsessed with meat. I saw a crow today and thought how incredibly useful it would be if it could just instantly die so I could cook and eat it. Rather than considering maybe I might give carrots a go instead I’m actually walking around looking at sentient beings and praying for death. I’ve also picked up the unsavoury habit of scouting out every kerbside for possible roadkill to take home, I’ve already accepted that’s probably the only cheap way of getting a fox or badger meal. I came across some pigeon feathers by a bush and actually did a double-take to make sure there wasn’t a nifty little corpse I could steal. Freakin’ mental.

The only other change seems to be within the delicate topic of my bowels, ‘delicate’ being the operative word. They don’t really seem to know what they’re doing, or when they want to do it. As I was walking to the library this evening I suddenly felt a meteorite brewing in my colon and had to speed up my walk, only to bump into my friends Robin and Adam and make hasty conversation with them whilst clenching tight, lest they have to watch as I quietly and sadly voided myself before them. Suffice to say when I finally did get to a throne in the library toilets it sounded like a rifle shot, it even made me jump. I’m not sure if this is the fallout from some of the odd and/or fantastically undercooked meats I’ve had of late, or simply my bowelarama being as skittish as ever. Whatever the cause, it’s quite shit. Well.. very shit. All the time.

Do not fear though, for the year is still young, my colon as yet does not require the use of a special bag I have to empty when nobody’s looking, and I have a rather ingenious plan to bag myself some rodent steaks very soon. If there is anything you would like to send me, particularly tip-offs for meat locations and/or funny puns for titles (I’m thinking ‘Pie of the Tiger’ for when I finally get round to eating it - yes/no?) then those can be aimed towards here: mattcrose17@aol.com .

Those crazy Chinese

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 15:13:00 -0400

Day 31. Animals eaten: 27.

It was a very excited Matt that was sat on the train to London early yesterday morn. After weeks of procrastinating I was finally hauling my lazy ass to Chinatown. If there’s something that can be learnt from my Asian buddy Peter Cryer, who consumes more than an imploding galaxy, the Chinese will eat anything. Anything. You have only to skim down the menu of an official Chinese restaurant to see this. If not for the severe health risks involved they would probably eat entire bags of marbles. When they disposed of all their cutlery and all they were left with were two thin sticks each, they still found a way of eating with them. Effectively, it is not a great idea to be an animal hanging around the Orient end of town, unless you love sweet and sour sauce and/or being digested.

So you can imagine how aggravatingly excited I was as I wondered what meats Chinatown might hold in store. Although I’d visited before, I’d never really explored it in earnest because it scared me, with all its spices and dragons. Now though, I wanted to delve into the weirdest produce it could spawn me. What little research I’d bothered to do lead me to believe some restaurants sold jellyfish. Jellyfish! Not jelly and fish, but an actual gloopy, membranous jellyfish wobbling about on a plate. Hot dayum, what is up with these Chinese??

However, even before I’d reached this mythical town of mental on a plate, I realized London, with its huge range of odd boutiques, was perfect for this project. I almost instantly stepped into a candy shop; I can’t remember its name but I seem to recall it self-promoting itself as ‘crazy’, infact not just ‘crazy’ but ‘kerrrrazy’, which piqued my interest. And if they didn’t bloody sell scorpion lollipops, the same scorpion lollipops I’d been fobbed off with last week by that online butcher’s own Little Miss Understand, and vastly cheaper too. They also sold crickets in amber. At no point did anyone pick it up and quietly say to anyone, “this isn’t candy.” Kerrrrazy.

On an unrelated note, a few doors down they sold breast-milk ice cream. I didn’t order any not only because it was shockingly expensive but also as Rowena was there and I didn’t want to look like I was cheating on her with any dairy products. Still though, this would have been perfect if my project actually involved eating all the body fluids. I imagine I’d have been sick a lot more though. And then had to eat it.

A while later on my journeys I stumbled across a shop which sold everything typically Australian - didgeridoos and hats with corks dangling from them and things, neglecting to sell sunstroke and having your baby eaten by feral dogs. It was a longshot, but I decided to venture in and see if they specialized in any meats from down under. And bloody bonzer what did I spy?

That in the middle there, for those unable to read the deliciously blurry definition of my iPhone camera, is ostrich meat. That’s a rack of bags of dried ostrich. This means somewhere out there, a person’s job is officially “ostrich hunter”. Every day they wake up… and they are an ostrich hunter. Instantly an ostrich hunter. I took my jerked bits of ostrich meat to a pub to gorge on the winnings fallen from the ostrich hunter’s huge, sinewy, generous hands.

It tasted damn good I must say, but then again, when the person responsible for the taste you’re experiencing is, get this, an ostrich hunter, what do you expect? It was chewy and smoky and everything a good dead ostrich should be. This was mere fodder though, simply energy for tackling the big boys, the culture that had been doing what I was doing as a sheer way of life for generations now. The highs and lows, pies and toes, of Chinatown.

I instantly knew I was going to have fun when I turned the corner and saw this:

You know both restaurants and mob dens mean business when there are carcasses hanging from the ceiling.

Rowena blanched a little at seeing this. As a newly cured meat-eater, recovering from a nasty spell of vegetarianism, she still wasn’t wholly up to speed with all the meats yet, especially when blood was dripping from them inches from her face. I felt a little responsible for this as I’d been the one to slowly wean her off of eating mere leaves and roots, through gradual and careful methods: one day I tricked her into eating some ham by hiding it between two Pringles, for instance.

Chinatown seemed an awesome place to get down to eating some legitimately weird creatures. I wouldn’t even trust walking my dog through the place incase people thought I was going around advertising free samples. We began browsing menus for places and, to my delight, jellyfish was present on several. I was feverishly excited for what the Internet promised would be its “wobbly on the outside, crunchy and gristly on the inside” consistency. Rowena had gone very pale and quiet so I presumed she was extremely excited also.

I intended to get jellyfish, I really did. But I became distracted. Terribly, terribly distracted. I glanced at a menu, saw the first dish under the ‘Miscellaneous’ section, and became far too distracted from any thoughts of jellyfish or indeed the world. Because how often in your life are you offered the sort of meal you could only rightly expect to find in a Dr.Seuss book as:

How delightfully absurd. I assumed it would come served in a top hat by an ironic peacock who farted metaphors.

I knew shark fin was a rare find. There’s recently been a Gordon Ramsey exposé which apparently startled the world with the revelation that sharks need fins, and so places in London have quickly taken it from their menu and hastily hidden all these fins under seats and inside pillowcases and things. Quite a few places I saw in Chinatown had offered ‘shark’s fin soup’ but the dish was now visibly scratched out from their menu. When in a Chinatown supermarket I asked about shark fin soup, and the cashier very quickly and guiltily said I wouldn’t find any here, shoving his hands in his pockets I imagine to ensure that a load of fin didn’t acidentally fall out.

Without so much as a thought to what Rowena might have, I demanded we enter before shark was pulled from their menu also. Upon ordering, the waitress didn’t seem happy at all. She continually repeated my order and then glumly noted it down. Maybe this was because she would now have to wrestle a shark. However she returned a while later dry and with all her limbs. And, more importantly, my plate of shark:

If you are like me, then firstly, well done, for you are intelligent and sexually daring, and secondly, that is not what you were expecting. I was hoping for a huge, Jaws-style fin poking out of a sea of egg, with maybe a tiny destroyed dinghy made out of bean sprouts for authenticity. Actually, the shark was cut into tiny chunks, and basically just tasted like regular fish. I’d have rather just had the scrambled eggs to be honest, and at least you know when making those all you have to do is make sure you whisk enough, rather than having to fight, capture and de-fin the murderer of the sea. Whisking right can be tough though.

I also saw the place sold frogs legs, and in a rash decision decided to plump for those as well. The waitress was even more exasperated at this order and actually asked: “do you not even want any rice or anything??”. I confirmed I did not and asked once more for my plate of frogs.

A wee confession - I do have a fear of frogs. Ranidaphobia I think it’s called. Infact I know it’s called that because I’ve looked it up because I hate frogs and they scare the shit out of me and they’re nasty and poo and they make me sad. Thankfully they didn’t bring out whole frogs on a platter, which would probably make me throw up or pass out or throw up and pass out, but even nibbling away at their slimy little demon legs was slightly unsettling. I did so bravely though, because I am bold and courageous, and also because I didn’t want to waste my ten pounds.

Somewhere in hell there is a frog missing a leg. Satan makes sure this happens because even he too is scared of frogs.

There eats a brave man.

Because I’d had less a meal and more a counselling session helping me face a phobia, I was still pretty hungry so I dragged the now almost faint Rowena into a nearby store for a snack.

As it transpired, this was not the wisest of places to take a slightly ailing freshly-recovered veggie, as the first thing we saw was a butcher’s section selling pig trotters, pig ears and pig tails, all splayed out in dripping glory as if it had just fallen apart seconds ago. So Rowena turned away and stared fixedly at the rice cake aisle for the rest of the time in there, as I picked through the freezers and found they sold both packs of snails and thick wedges of eel, which I’d have probably been more happy about if they didn’t both look incredibly terrible.

For my snack I landed on a box of dried, ready-to-eat clams, my 26th animal which I tucked into on the train home:

I also bought a Lion bar in the vague hope the manufacturers had gotten all confused and accidentally made a batch out of actual lions. It hadn’t happened. I was furious.

Like I imagine much of what I will eat from this period on, the clams tasted pretty grim, like Coco Pops doused in BBQ sauce, and then sat on by a sweaty, menopausal woman for a while.

I even sort of felt like I could taste it through my hand. That’s when you know you have a pretty horrid foodstuff before you.

In less exceptional news, I was in Tesco the other day browsing with palpable distaste all the normal boring meats being bought by normal boring meaty people when I came across some nice braised Bambi:

I’d been looking forward to trying deer for a while now, it was an animal I imagined would be made tender just through its own cuteness and innocence. Unfortunately I’d forgotten to defrost it until noon, so as I went to cook it at half past midnight it was still fairly frozen. But I didn’t have time to wait until the next day, and no-one’s ever gotten ill from poorly cooked meat, right? So I fried that deep-frozen, potentially-harmful shit up to see how deer was.

By eating meat, and hence not eating vegetables, I’m making potatoes smile.

After managing to stop the fire alarm which went off at 1am, definitely waking up Rowena’s neighbours who I’m sure smiled to eachother and rose their eyes to the ceiling good-naturedly knowing that silly Matt was doing another funny, silly project, I tucked into my meats. It was very, very tender, either because it was of excellent quality, or because the improper defrosting of it caused a sponge bacteria to form in its centre. Either way, I ate a deer, and a deer didn’t eat me, so I win that.

Overall then, things are coming.. OK. It’s been a month and I’ve eaten from 27 different species, plus I have a positive ID on the locale of eel and snails and, should I need them, a bouquet of bleeding pig tails. This is a gift I am certain Rowena will appreciate.

Anyway, thank you as ever for stopping by. What’s that? You know where to buy a racoon burger? Then tell me you swine! mattcrose17@aol.com

I forgot to mention this in my last comment, but in America we have big Asian specialty stores that have imported foods from Japan, China, Korea, & Vietnam in them. I've only been in a few times, but I've seen lots of weird meats (especially seafood, and I think even snake). Do you have anything like that over there?

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:49:03 -0400

Ah wow, I’m very glad my efforts are even going down well in the veggie world. How long have you been a leafeater for? I recently managed to wean my girlfriend off of vegetarianism and she is all the happier for it, so hopefully a few more photos of steaks and you might consider joining the dark side too.

I’m pretty excited to eat rat, I’ll let you know how it goes down. There’s not much I’m too worried about, although I’ve heard eating polar bear makes you go blind, so that’d be a bit annoying, maybe save that one for last.

Not much in the way of Asian speciality stores like that, though there’s Chinatown in London which I’m going to scope out on Sunday, see if I can’t find myself some shark fin or something. Glad you’re enjoying my foolish venture anyways, give me a shout if you ever consider turning back to meat-eating.

Everything's at steak

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:07:40 -0400

I’ve also just seen this website:

http://exoticmeatclub.com/index.html

They sell beaver meat, they sell iguana meat, they even sell damned peacock meat. They sell squab and I don’t even know what animal that is. And they only sell to America or Canada. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH EASIER THINGS WOULD BE IF THEY SOLD STUFF TO ME??

Lots.

Bug Bites

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:31:00 -0400

Day 25. Animals eaten: 22.

Insects were a tricky area when working out which animals deserved a spot on my worldwide menu. Blobs of life like snails got a place because there are obvious cultures who eat them, like the French, or that weird kid at school invariably called ‘Justin’. But I wasn’t sure if there was literally anyone in the world who chowed down on crispy moths in a Philadelphia dip for a snack, or anywhere possible I’d be able to tuck into a nice juicy dustmite steak. In the end I decided to jot a few down, out of morbid curiosity, and decided if any others revealed themselves as delectable then I’d give them a try.

This brings me neatly to last Thursday. I haven’t found time to update this thing in the last 5 days as I’ve had much more important things to do, like lying down on my back, or staring at my feet, sometimes both at the same time!! I awoke with a particularly virulent hangover meaning my head felt like a karate class floor and I instantly wanted to go back to bed. My girlfriend, Rowena, came round and started asking about the animal project, partly from understandable awe at what I’m undertaking, and partly because if this project becomes huge and gets turned into a smash film she’d like a lead part and get to be played by Zooey Deschanel. She does not have the authority to enforce this though, and that’s why if this DOES become a film, she’s being played by Chris Rock. I’m being played by Nicki Minaj.

ANYWAY, she asked what I’d been up to and I slurred miserably in response. She came up with the suggestion of eating insects whilst watching ‘Titanic’, and somewhere in my broken, still-slightly-drunken mind this seemed like an excellent idea, and I rushed online to find what bugs I could buy. The same site which taunted me with it’s ridiculously expensive snakes I found also supplied ants, scorpions, crickets and locusts. I ordered all of it, at first accidentally to my presumably bemused mother, which took a couple of panicked phonecalls to rearrange. And then I drank 11 pints of water and fell asleep.

I was awoken the next day by the yells of my douchably lovable housemate Luke that I had “a big smelly box waiting for me downstairs”. This was not the most alluring of calls into the waking world, but I figured either I’d angered some vegetarians who were now posting me their protein-deficient shit, or my creepy crawlies had arrived. I wobbled downstairs and there was indeed a box for me and it did, indeed, smell like the board game Jumanji.

There were insects to be eaten. I had no time for opening lids.

I think both I, and especially Rowena, thought that because these bugs were being sold by a legit website that also sold ham and trust, they would taste nice and look nice and have other nice qualities. So bravely, she dove straight in, not literally, and picked out the ants.

“Edible”, it proudly boasts.

I was a little saddened that they were plastered in chocolate, because I’d wanted everything eaten to be as natural as possible. But then I realized I didn’t care and popped one in anyway.

They tasted, well, they tasted like a motherhumping ant of course. They were salty and crunchy and not particularly nice, and my appetite wasn’t bolstered further by the sight of Rowena retching on hers and having to spit it out into my hand like a sicky baby. Out of curiosity I tried sucking the chocolate off one, but all this did was succeed in removing the chocolate from a vicious little pincer of the insectoid bastard which became embedded in the roof of my mouth, which is even more painful than it sounds. So with Rowena still dry-heaving and me trying to work out which part of my gums were shredded I decided to move this particular appetizer aside.

Crickets were next. No preparation needed, just bung them down the hatch. Not a lot of taste, a bit like dusty Rice Krispies your Gran might serve you. I’m not sure where the suppliers get off saying they’re ‘Thai Green Curry’ flavour though. I’m yet to have a curry which tastes of legs, actual legs, tickling my throat.

In the cold sober light of day my Bushtucker breakfast was not panning out to be as flavoursome as I’d hoped, and my already fairly distended stomach somehow dropped further when I saw what was next:

For anyone who has not seen ‘Fear Factor’, or… a plague, those are locusts, a big freakin’ bag of ‘em and all. It recommended they be stir-fried with vegetables, for that delicious taste you can only get from things with antennae. After frying they didn’t look any different, they still looked like a lot of locusts, but I bravely plated up, and tucked in.

And Oh. My. God..

They were awesome!

I’m not even kidding, if you mentally block the fact the animal you’re eating has feelers and almost definitely crystallised and ate its own parents, it literally tastes like pork scratchings, or deep-fried bar nuts. People in countries you don’t want to go to are always bemoaning how locusts ate their crops; just eat the damn locusts! They taste nicer than bread anyhow! I merrily feasted on all my locusts and could easily have had another pack.

Yeah I’m eating locusts sucker, and what? And WHAT?

Even though my stomach had become what I believe zoologists refer to as a ‘hive’, I was feeling very content and turned to my scorpion for dessert. Now I had stressed over the phone to the supply company that I wanted my scorpion as unaltered as possible, I didn’t want it beer-battered or covered in SlimFast tirimasu, I just wanted a scorpion. The woman on the other end murmered uncertaintly that she’d see what she could do. And what did she do?

Bitch.

She’d put my scorpion in a lolly! It was a tiny scorpion! And it was stuck in a ‘fuck-you-world’ sucrose lolly! Not only that, but a vodka flavoured lolly! What the hell was I supposed to do with this?

I had things to do in the day aside from snacking on garden pests, and a tiny whisper of my previous day’s hangover remained, so there was no way I had the patience and intestinal fortitude to spend hours sucking a vodka lolly. All I wanted was my scorpion. I know I probably sound like a petulant little infant pharoah, but that’s what I wanted. I wanted my scorpion, NOW!

So after several failed attempts at carefully cutting sections of the lollipop away, eventually I lost all patience, walked outside, and chucked the thing against the ground. And that, children, was what us grown-ups call “stupid”.

Like a dragonfly in amber or a corpse in ice, as soon as it hit the ground the whole thing smashed apart and with it did my nightmarishly expensive scorpion. So I did what I thought I would never do in my life. I got down on my hands and knees, and rummaged around dirt and fag ends to try and find some bits of scorpion to eat. I’m sure you do the same of your Friday mornings also.

I eventually found a chunk and ate it, enough to tick the thing off my list, but it just tasted of vodka lolly and pebbles to be honest, and I was not very satisfied. Although it’s technically off the list, if I find the chance to sample some again, I certainly will, presuming this time it’s not encased inside a donut made out of menstrual blood or some other foul-tasting tomb.

Anyway, I think I’ve had enough of insects for the mo. I’ve been quite inactive of the last couple days so I’ll make sure to eat a panther or a landmine or something soon to keep everyone happy. You know by now that if you come across any unusual meats you’d think I’d like, you can let me know at mattcrose17@aol.com , and in recompense, I will keep some locusts warm for you. Ta.

Ray Meals

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 10:11:00 -0500

Day 18. Animals eaten: 18.

Slow progress these past few days I know, largely as I have been chasing the elusive ray. My drinking buddy, ex-work colleague and token Asian acquaintance Peter Cryer apparently succeeded in buying some ray wings from a Morrisons several weeks ago, and for that time has been teasing me with the possibility of getting a bite and netting another animal for the list. However, whether it be down to his anger at me cooking reindeer and camel in the same pan last week, or just sheer fubby idiocy, he has been refusing to let me have some for so long, dangling the tempting ray carrot infront of this workhorse’s face, that eventually I’d had enough and this morning I took the train to Morrisons myself.

After managing to evade a panhandler who, after telling him I had no change, very curtly and sarcastically suggested “maybe getting a fiver out’s a good idea then?”, like I was the biggest idiot in the world for not thinking of that sooner, I came to Morrisons and my big floppy ray wings were found.

I’m not entirely sure what the ‘M’ stands for. Manta? Morrisons? Perhaps ‘Mutherfuckin’ in slightly more gangster store sub-outlets.

Slapping the damp, fluttering wings down out of the packet made me feel a little queasy, might have been that I was still a little shaky with seafood having had marine life perform an intestinal exorcism on me a while back, or just the fact that it looked like an alien afterbirth:

Carrying on with my pure, zen-like, and stupid decision to keep all animal flavours as natural as they could be, I decided to have my ray with unflavoured supernoodles, and ended up with an anemic blob of beige on a plate:

I have earnestly thrown up meals that look more appetizing than this.

The ray wasn’t actually that bad, it just tasted like fish really, albeit a fish with infinite bones. Just endless tiny fluid-filled bones. So I guess like eating a really bony fish trapped inside another bony fish. Oh, and it looks like a quivering mess of exotic misery. And all served with flavourless noodles, poorly cooked. I hope your tastebuds are sufficiently excited now.

Whilst I was at Morrisons I lingered around a while longer, not wanting to make my train journey in vain, and also not wanting to confront the panhandler again, who might sarcastically implicate that just maaaaaybe my shoes might look better on him? So I had a bit of a search to see if they had any other alternative meats; I mean odds of them opening up a tinned marsupial aisle weren’t great but I thought they might have some venison or something. I asked a man.

“Alternative meats??” he spluttered, like I’d just asked if they sell bottles of my Nan’s piss. “Like what??”

I suggested venison, or rabbit, or pheasant, or what have you. The man suddenly lit up with an idea. “I’ve got an alternative meat for you!” he exclaimed. I leant forward eagerly. “Try the vegetarian section!” And then the man laughed and laughed.

How DARE that spod call me the V-word, eh? A vegetarian? A vegatation-eater?? Annoyingly this did bring to light the issue that as far as supermarkets go, their selection of new animals has ceased. Same with butchers really. It looks like it’s mainly weird alternative restaurants in bougeois areas of London that sell pieces of iced buzzard out of teacups and the waiters all speak in haikus and nothing is as it seems other than the £1,000 bill, or online butchers akin to ol’ Gribbles.

Speaking of which, I tried ordering rattlesnake meat online the other day. I thought this was a good idea number 1, because I’d have a freaking snake, and number 2, because they wouldn’t be able to pawn me off just an odd shaped bit of gammon, it would have to be clearly snake when they sent it. You can’t make steak from a snake, that’s the rhyme. I rattled them off an email inquiring about prices and they instantly replied saying it would cost £83.55. So that’s a shame. Maybe I’ll just rummage around the mongoose pit at a zoo somewhere with a portable stove and some handheld mustard canisters for my snake then..

As usual, if you know of anywhere I can sink my teeth into something endangered, let me know at mattcrose17@aol.com This email can also be used if you want to send me money so I can buy a snake. Or maybe just send me a snake? No, send me money, then I can buy sauce for it as well.

Merci.

Getting the hump

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 13:13:17 -0500

Day 15. Animals eaten: 17.

As you can probably tell from that mercilessly good pun, my camel arrived yesterday, as did my reindeer, of which I could not think of a pun. The online butchers I ordered from, called Gribbles, which sounds like a name you’d give to an ugly cat in a fairytale, didn’t specify when it would have me my meat by, so I had to get up at the unholy hour of 8 (in the morning!!) and hang around for dead animals, which I hoped would turn up preserved in some huge, Terminator-style cryogenic tanker, but would probably turn out to be a dingy, diesel van driven by a fat man storing my meat in his trousers. Eventually I got bored and went to the pub, and on my return..

There’s reindeer in that box.

With feverish excitement I tore into my box’o’meats and found two steaks surrounded in polystyrene. They looked fairly homogenous, to be honest this Gribble character could have pawned me off with some slightly different smelling wedges of beef and I wouldn’t have known, but I put my suspicious aside in place of my trusty frying pan.

What we have learnt from this wildlife documentary, of sorts, is that camels are bigger than reindeers.

I plated up my beasts of sand and snow and looked at the dish infront of me. I liked to think that in the history of God’s fine Earth there have not been many people to sit down to a meal of camel, native to Egypt, reindeer, native to Lapland, and waffles, native to.. potatoes, to prepare for a night of drinking. What a delicious batshit main course.

Reindeer’s the one on top, it was very tough and flavourless, kind of like trying to eat a burnt tennis ball. I’d imagine. Camel was a bit nicer, more succulent, although halfway through eating it inexplicably began tasting like sick. I battled through, sat back, and realized that shit, there was a freakin’ camel in me!

I’m becoming quite the expert on meat now. I’d start calling myself ‘Lord of the meats’ if that didn’t sound quite so much like it had been lifted from a porno. I’m only two weeks in, and I’ve had 17 different animals. In a fortnight I’ve sampled 10% of the living creature populace of Earth! I don’t want to make this phrase crass through overuse, but, nigga please, that is some damn good progress.

In other news, for some reason the other day I was sitting around thinking about warthogs, and suddenly realized they do not have a place on my list! For some reason, down to rampant pigism, Wikipedia do not mention them on their big list of animals, so until now they have not been threatened by me. I quickly added their hog ass on my list of bloodlust.

So that’s about everything. I’m still alive and meat still exists. And you can still get hold of me at mattcrose17@aol.com if your local cafe starts selling eagles in buns.

Hiccups

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:42:00 -0500

Day 12. Animals eaten: 15.

I have found precious little time to document my zoolicious progress of late. For one, I’ve had dissertation work riding me like sex-horse-gimp-slave for a few days, an entirely unproductive exercise obviously, because it doesn’t involve me eating any animals. However the more engaging distraction kicked off the morning after the day after my sea creature binge.

I woke up hiccuping (any English students critiquing my blog in future years see how I’ve self-referenced the title there, maybe there’s more meanings to be explored? Who knows, we’ll see, let’s continue). These were more fluid hiccups than regular though, as if my pancreas was trying to flee the nest to get its own apartment. Predictably, by the evening, everything inside me seemed attempting to flee, and I found myself spending an entire 36 hours retching up lobstery bile. I swear I even puked up those prawn eyes again, still staring, though this time with a smug sneer. Bastards! Always one step ahead!

I couldn’t tell if it was food poisoning from my cack-handed preparation of potentially hazardous seafoods, or just my greenhorn stomach’s reaction to all this foreign food which, ironically, did actually include some green horns. All I knew was that in the space of a day I had five episodes of sick. I didn’t just vomit 5 times, I’m talking extended, distinct periods of puke with ad breaks inbetween. 5 episodes of sick. That’s one shy of a British TV series. And as you can imagine, the toiletbowl now constantly resembled a Roschach test. A Roschach test of me, shitting.

Please do feel free to imagine all that as poo.

It wasn’t the nicest of days as I huddled in bed, desperately clawing at my pillow and praying for all the bad things to go away, occasionally having to stagger off to rectally explode, but it’s par for the course I guess. If I get so sick just sampling prawns I cannot imagine how I’ll fare when I’m picking at cat eyes cooked dangling by a coathanger over a burning bin, hopefully my guts might have strengthened up a bit by then.

However, even though I was ill and weak and old and famous, and all I had eaten in about 2 days was a single party ring biscuit, the day after this I hit up a tapas bar called El Sabio to once again fill my empty stomach with unfamiliar substances. I saw the place did swordfish, shrimp, rabbit and octopus, 4 big hitting names still unchecked on my list, and ordered them all.

Six lovely dishes, all themed to be pretty much the colour of the table they’re served on. To talk you through them, that there on the bottom left is rabbit stew (it wasn’t a stew, it was a bowl with a rabbit in it and some cloves on top), middle bottom is octopus, and top right is swordfish and squid. Yes, it is battered, and I was trying to ensure every animal I had was pure and unaltered as far as I could get it, but I was still feeling a bit shaky, and so county law dictates that you have to shut up and leave me alone. The other 3 bowls are all vegetarian, and so as far as this blog goes, strictly taboo.

I wasn’t sure what I thought of my bunny, the meat was pretty tough and it didn’t help my queasiness that the sauce it came in smelt of B.O., and it tasted of B.O.

This photo unfortunately does not give an accurate expression of how it smelt, unless you do suffer from B.O. If that is the case then you have an upper hand in this part, you lucky swine.

Octopus was a little dodgy too, probably as last time I’d ingested any marine life it just as soon left my body in puke, tears, shit and nightmares, but I choked its rubbery tendrils back as best I could.

Seafood connoisseurs and aspiring perverts will no doubt have noticed the three-fold sucker cushion of one particularly appetizing chunk right there in the middle.

Overall, the meal was fairly unsatisfying, but it did the job in netting me a fresh 4 new animal tastes to my palate, and passed through my body without turning it into a big gastrointestinal waterpark. AND, it’s that little bit closer to finally ridding my list of seafood, which I have now realized, is all horrible, all of it.

Fortunately I have now healed completely and am back to full beast-biting mode. After some Googling I found an online Devon butchers that delivers camel and reindeer steaks, which much to my chagrin I thought you had to be part of the secret butcher alliance to order.. But regardless, I let it slide and ordered one of each, they should be here in two days.

Until then, go ahead and tell friends and people you know and see if they’re aware of anywhere I can buy some sautéed starfish or something. Tell anyone in fact! Tell the RSPCA if you want hahaha!!

Please do not actually tell the RSPCA.

Thank you.

In Paris you can eat snails, frogs, horse, wild boar....you name it and the French eat it

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:20:54 -0500

This is delicious news Anna, I was worrying where I could sink my teeth into a horse, many thanks! I’m sure I will find myself treading French soil in the next year, I will bring my finest boar fork especially x

Frying Nemo

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 10:51:00 -0500

Day 7. Animals eaten: 11.

These past couple days, it has been a very bad idea to be a sea creature.

Just a twee update to keep the haters from trolling. I won’t usually update this often, but I’ve been a very good boy of late, eating up all my animals. I don’t particularly like sea food because I don’t trust things that can swim, and that includes you, reading this now, so I decided to get most of them out of the way in one foul, fishy swoop. A trip to Tesco provided me concisely with fish, lobster, prawns, mussels and a single oyster, to tick a fine 5 animals off my list of death, kind of like a hungry Uma Thurman in ‘Kill Bill’. I was at my girlfriend’s house when doing this, so her and her housemates had to bear it as I overtook their kitchen, cooked heaps of marine life, and ultimately made their entire house smell like vaginas.

I instantly found this harder than any of the creatures I’d stuffed inside me previously, largely because some of these had faces. I never want to be looked at by the eyes of something that I’m about to feast upon..

“If you don’t eat me… I’ll give you love..”

Stoically though, I deconstructed all these wonders of the sea, until my hands were covered in legs, and I had a small pile of ruined beast beside me. Still staring.

It’s eyes just asked… “why?”

Lobster too was tricky to prepare, and just that tiny bit monstrous. Not the same ‘monstrous’ as keeping bits of children in your freezer, or tricking a diabetic into eating a poptart (can you imagine though? The hasty scramble for insulin. Totally worth it), but there’s surely always a slightly villainous feeling to viscerally planting a knife into a crustacean’s brain, then yanking its claws off and guzzling on the innards, barking with laughter at how painfully it probably died. Still though, it was pretty delicious, even if my red-green colourblindness meant I accidentally ate some of its heart and soul. If Bear Grylls had been there, I’d like to think he would have applauded, if he could stop trying to build an ice hut out of his frozen piss for more than 8 minutes.

Oh, I forgot to say, don’t look if you’re squeamish. Ah well, you’ve probably developed a nice pasty hue and fainted now, so you’re not going to complain, are you?

Lastly, oysters, a generously dubbed “animal” I had never encountered before. First of all, I had to crack the poor sod open, and lacking as I did an oyster knife, a screwdriver, or strength, it took a pair of scissors and a lot of angry shouting and misery before I finally had the slimy bastard exposed infront of me, looking a bit like a flustered slug, a slug that had just been caught touching itself by its parents.

If you have never cracked open an oyster before, let me tell you their shells are tough. They are certainly a lot tougher than, for example, my house. So it seemed to me that this animal was one that really did not want to be eaten. I’m not saying that quails are literally hurling themselves into vats of gravy, desperately trying to tenderize themselves, but combined with all I had heard of oysters riddled with toxins and poisons if not prepared correctly, this was the first real animal I had any hesitation over.

Still though. Down the hatch.

Just slime. Just slime in a shell. Well done ‘evolution’. Douche.

So having plucked 5 different animals from their magical sea paradise, and transporting them back there a while later via my toilet, I decided to give my body a break from almost overdosing on Omega 3. I still have crab, clams, shrimp, eels, whale, dolphin, shark, jellyfish, and now that I’m writing them, actually a hell of a lot of underwater creatures left to sate my never-ending appetite for species. But for my first week, I’d like to think I’m making fairly good progress and, of course, being very hilarious. Would you agree? You have to agree, really, because if you don’t, I’m going to eat you. I’m going to break apart your brain and eat your memories.

Ha, just kidding!

(I’m not kidding)

Entrée the fray!

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:17:16 -0500

Day 6. Animals eaten: 6.

So far, everything’s coming very smoothly indeed. I am yet to contract any vicious strain of meat poisoning, or have any irate vegans pouring cow blood over me and yelling that I’m a “MURDER GOD!”. This largely has been down to the fact I started this week eating only mainstream animals - I wanted to get the likes of chicken and pig out the way, just to make sure I didn’t accidentally spend months searching out and devouring jackals and peacocks and businessmen and suddenly realize I hadn’t eaten a sausage yet. So after a few trips to my local butchers, I had swiftly chewed through the fats and tendons of cow, sheep, pig, chicken and duck:

Now THAT is my kind of petting zoo.

Considering I have the sort of culinary talent that most of the mashed potato I make has to be drunk, I was quietly surprised I managed to cook all these well enough that I actually didn’t go blind! I spilt quite a lot of lamb blood on the floor and over my shirt, so it looked like I was settling down to eat in a ‘Saw’ film, but aside from that I managed to eat 5 animals in 3 days with no bad trauma whatsoever.

I attempted to feel guilty, trying to imagine cute piglets gambolling about happy ducklings, whilst little fluffy lambs poured out cups of tea and witty chicks said they should stop being baaaashful, but if anything this scene just made me feel hungrier. They were just slabs of slightly varying meat, it was tricky to link these dripping hunks of sinew to anything cute and fuzzy and alive.

Rather worryingly, that seemed all the animal my butcher provided, and there were still 167 on the freakin’ list. I scoured the Net to try and find anywhere else which would help me make endangered species just that little bit more endangered, but aside from actually moving into a Chinese panda meat ring, there seemed scarily few businesses in the UK which were willing to sell the meat I needed and risk getting giraffe blood all over their reputation. Even as we speak, restaurants serving controversial food like kangaroo and ostrich are having these exotic creatures pulled from their menus by ecomental protesters and the last of the hippies, who are all very good at making big signs with their opinions written on them.

However, I did manage to find a butchers, which I will not name for legal reasons, in a little town called Claygate, and it was purported to sell bison. I hadn’t heard of anywhere else selling bison steaks, and Claygate was only a short train journey away, so I decided to pay them a visit, even if bison would probably taste like a bathmat.

A butcher who looked like Chris Moyles served me, and asked me in casual conversation why I was buying a big tough expensive bit of bison over the usual animals we kill and eat. “Did you see us advertised on the TV and just want a bit of a laugh then?” he chuckled. I replied that actually, no, I was eating bison because, see, I wanted to eat the meats, all the meats. He instantly stopped chuckling and looked at me with suspicious interest. Looking around to make sure we were alone, he muttered conspiratorially “Come with me…”, and headed out into the furthest corner of his butchers.

I promise you this is true. And whilst normally I would never follow a shady man I had just met into a dark corner for him to show me his own personal “exotic meat”, my eagerness for the project prevailed and I went after him to see what he had. He presented me with a big ream of papers. They each had the names, descriptions and pictures of different animals on. Camel, reindeer, buffalo, animals I hadn’t seen sold anywhere else. What was this shady Chris Moyles up to?

“We’re not allowed to say we sell these..” he whispered covertly, “but if you give us a ring, I can get them for you..” Just at the moment where I was about to wonder if I was going absolutely insane, a woman walked in, and the butcher suddenly flung the papers out of sight and loudly called “Hello there! How can I help?”, shooting me a warning glance as he served this woman her boring, normal, non-camel meat.

I was speechless. There was an underground butcher system! And I had been let in! Into the inner circle! Who knew how far this rabbithole went? I probably shouldn’t even be mentioning this to you “normals”. This was mental. As I left with my frozen bits of bison, I muttered that if he could keep some camel for me, I would be very grateful. He replied, quick as an arrow, that I shouldn’t get the hump. So that was just perfect; I was now in a secret organization with punny butchers. How wonderful was the world now I could honestly say that?

The bison, if you’re interested, was very tough and bloody, although it did make me feel like a cowboy.

I’ve only been up to this a week, and already I have been trusted into the secret butcher society. I bet they all meet up on Thursdays and wear cowhides and set fire to heads of lettuce. Ace.

Anyway, although you yourselves are not a member of this most prestigious organization, you can still help me by letting me know of anywhere I could get my hands on any rare paws, wings or gelatinous tentacle membrane, or just to let me know what you’re opinions are on what I’m doing, at mattcrose17@aol.com . I have only heard one take on it so far, and that was from my vegetarian friend Guy, who said he “hated it”. So that was a shame.

Peace out meatbags.