Tag: weird

Odd Planet has a highly amusing short list of weird cookbooks. My favorite, obviously, is the Poison Cook Book.

You know what I'm talking about. Big Easy, someone with no idea what that phrase means may have mistakenly referred to it once. I'm talking about the poor man's mirepoix, replacing onions and celery with more geometrically-correct peas and corn.

You can get this stuff after a mere thirty minutes of panhandling, pickpocketing, or rolling drunks in an alley. [Note: I mean with money, from the store. Don't take a drunk man's last bag of mixed vegetables.]

The key behind mixed vegetables, besides conserving valuable hobo calories by avoiding the cutting board, is that you can use them for anything. After all, plain old mixed vegetables have the bland and somehow demeaning taste of grade-school cafeteria hot dogs. That taste that makes you think of crying and stripping for your uncle as soon as your fishing boat is out of sight of the rest of your family.

After cooking the vegetables to the desired tenderness, I mix in a healthy amount of butter/margarine (to tell the truth, I never measure). This is to pump my body full of wholesome and nourishing polyunsaturated fats and lecithin. Some black pepper, salt, and perhaps a spice duo (I'm weird; I like cayenne and a tiny bit of cinnamon) and I have instantaneous nourishment for the modern tramp, even if I pass out from hunger before I can actually get any of it in my mouth.

Sometimes I pretend I'm a Rockefeller and use my uncashable paychecks as napkins.

Welcome back to Hobo Fortnight at Edible Unknown, where I'll put down my tin-can soups and edible whatnottery until such time as my pile of paychecks become fungible. Tonight, I'll be using the metaphysical SCIENCE!! of alchemy and antimatter.

Now, every red-blooded American child has known one fact since their vagrant mother sent them a cheap Radio Shack science kit (with magnets!!) in the mail: opposites attract. And, in so doing, they change the fundamental properties of the whole. Riddle me this. Hydrogen is 'splodey. So is oxygen. Together, they make water, which under most situations won't ignite no matter how many times you hold a blowtorch to it. So, in the quest to drink myself into a coma until such time as I can afford to buy the food that makes this site exist, can several horrible tasting things that have lurked in the fridge since the ancient ones first founded their aquatic R'lyeh underneath the cruel tides somehow... synergize into something wonderful and tasty? Especially if it contains alcohol? In the name of American Science, I was willing to find out.

Now, the ancient Aztecs did this. They took bitter cocoa, mixed it with pepper, and made a drink. Of course, nobody knows if it was tasty, but I bet anyone who complained turned into the next 'virgin' crop sacrifice. Here's what I had in the fridge that I was willing to sacrifice:

1. A twelve-pack of Vault Zero.

This was a mistake buy. Vault tastes like an energy drink; Vault Zero, which is presumably lacking in calories, fats, tars, nicotine, vitamins, and drinkability, tastes like an extremely diluted septic tank which has, through the miracle of years of decay, begun to produce its own internal bubbliness.

However, on the way home, Vitamin A (ever sensitive to my plight of not having booze to turn my Seroquel 1-2 into a knockout punch) told me that she had some flat Rockstar and vodka in a water bottle.

My interests were noticeably piqued.

Did I dare do it? Did I dare mix two energy drinks with booze? WOULD THE EDIBLE UNKNOWN KITCHEN BURN LIKE GOMORRAH AT THIS UNHOLY CONCOCTION?

Obviously, the perceptive reader can tell from my vomitous prose that the experiment has already taken place.

First, I sampled the mixture. I'm not sure what the origin of this rancid bile was, but at some point in time she'd come home reeking of distilled grain and managed to lose two bottles of liquor in my car (I discovered them today. Joy!)

Apparently, even running off of alcohol combustion, she wouldn't drink it. I don't blame her. The energy drink portion had somehow lost its spirit, soul and essence; it turned normally bitterharsh vodka into something mellow and thoroughly unpalatable, like regurgitated scotch.

In the interests of being a Patriotic Citizen, I forged on.

Upon an equal mixture (the Rockstar/Vodka, by my estimation, was about 70% vodka), I took a sip. Then I immediately poured in more of the R/V mixture, to get rid of the horrid taste of Vault Zero.

Now it's a sippin' whiskey.

UPDATE: I think I just found a chunk in my drink.

UPDATE: Upon closer examination, it was just a really weird bubble.