michael lambe

Back in the day, when we were all busy bees in Tokyo, working away at the Lado group hive and rocking out every Sunday for band practice (the band that never played), my old friend Kumar Sivasubramanian would get great pleasure out of trying to wind me up about my diet. I don’t eat meat, see. This was a source of endless entertainment for old Kumar, who if we had dinner somewhere would taste a bit of whatever I was eating and say something along the lines of “Hmmm, not bad, it just needs a bit of hmmmm…. I’m not sure…it’s lacking… something… oh! I know what it is! – MEAT!! AHAHAHAHAHA- HAHA-HAHAHA!!”. He would role away laughing and I and Anne Kobayashi would wrinkle up our noses at each other and grimly return to our Tofu steaks.

He’s at it again. Here’s the mail he sent me today, short and to the point with two links:

Have you ever heard of Turducken? IMAGES LINK WIKI LINK

So I click and discover that Turducken is an American dish (those wacky Americans!) that consists of deboned chicken stuffed inside a deboned duck, which is then in turn stuffed inside a deboned turkey. You bake it very slowly for a long long time. The juices of the meats intermingle and soak into the sausage-meat stuffing you have somehow squeezed inside that inner chicken and then you carve this meatstrosity and serve it so that every slice contains three soft succulent meats. In short: A VEGETARIAN NIGHTMARE!!!

Good ole Kumar. Well, I had to laugh. To be honest, I’m not particularly militant about my eating habits – they’re my habits and I don’t especially want to share them with anybody. I guess a lot of people expect non-meat-eaters to be more like these guys: PUNK YOU! Sorry to disappoint. I’m just not like that. Maybe I should be. But I’m not. But anyway, oddly enough, this stuff fascinates me. It really does bring carnivorous gluttony to a whole new level of awesomeness. Especially this entry from wikipedia:

The largest recorded nested bird roast is 17 birds, attributed to a royal feast in France in the early 19th century (originally called a Rôti Sans Pareil, or “Roast without equal”) – a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an Ortolan Bunting and a Garden Warbler. The final bird is small enough that it can be stuffed with a single olive; it also suggests that, unlike modern multi-bird roasts, there was no stuffing or other packing placed in between the birds. This dish probably could not be recreated in the modern era as many of the listed birds are now protected species. LINK

SEVENTEEN BIRDS!!! Awesome. What would that taste like? Can you imagine? Well, at least the smaller song birds were free range eh? That last bit: the final bird is small enough that it can be stuffed with a single olive… That kills me. Those zany French!

*Sigh*

Getting a mail like that from Kumar reminds how much I miss him…

It also makes me realise that Turducken would have been a great name for our band.

Here are some other random links I have been meaning to get rid of:

Agnostic Bus – Good moral here.

Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene – If only it were true…

THE BROKERS WITH HANDS ON THEIR FACES BLOG (Updated today! Revel in financiers’ misery as our economies crumble! Some of them are even starting to cry!)