MINGE
/end qotw
(The Archduke of South London I'm in your Girlfriend eating her organs, Fri 27 May 2011, 9:21, 2 replies)

Bought a deep fat fryer years ago and proceeded, as one does, to make fritters of everything in the food cupboard and fridge, finishing with exotic mushroom fritters.
This went well and our little family went to bed nicely-filled and happy.

However, being hugely pregnant, something upset me and I started throwing up violently in the night. As we had a problem with the upstairs lights, I had to grope my way around in the dark and do my best not to barf anywhere too sensitive on way to the bog.

Eventually the nausea subsided a bit and I went back to bed, exhausted, with a towel under my chin to catch the dribbles of bile that I still kept bringing up.

In the morning light I found that the 'bile' was in fact blood, and that I had chucked up blood in several places. The bedding and towel were heavily stained. I'd barfed so hard that I'd had some sort of minor stomach haemorrhage without knowing.

Feeling perfectly healthy by that point I shrugged, stripped the bed and got the washing on.

As the mushroom fritters came last I blamed them and have avoided them ever since, and haven't had any more trouble.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Fri 27 May 2011, 9:21, 3 replies)

chilled monkey brains

(TheManWithThePlan cussed your mum on, Fri 27 May 2011, 9:00, 6 replies)

Best
Should you ever find yourself in northern Catalonia, I recommend you head to Castello d'Empuries. It is a small town, not far from Empuriabrava. Head there for around 7 o'clock.

Go to the top of the hill in the town, and look for a place called Palau Macelli. It is very close to the cathedral.

I went there several years ago, best meal of my life. You eat at tables outside,next to the cathedral, looking out over the Spanish countryside. The setting is sublime, and it is matched by the food.

I had a beef carpaccio, followed by a steak in 5 pepper sauce, both of which were so tender that they could have been eaten with a spoon.

Highly recommended.
(anvil, Fri 27 May 2011, 8:26, Reply)

Some of the best food is drunk food.
Can of baked beans with half a block of cheese melted in. Hell yes!
(nolongernuts, Fri 27 May 2011, 7:58, 28 replies)

Living in China, slowing munching through the animal kingdom...
A few years back I moved to China to work in the fastest growing sweatshop in the world.

There are many sights, smells and tastes that are very unfamiliar to the western senses, it is all worth it for the best of them. However in the culture of ying and yang there is also the opposite to balance it all out. Nothing like your local Chinese take-away.

Drunken prawn. Not unknown in the west: fill a bowl with ice and big live prawns, then liberally fill it with Chinese rice wine (an acquired taste in itself, smelling much like a stale bar floor mixed with formaldehyde) which makes the prawns twitch and jump as they die of acute alcohol poisoning. When they stop, peel and eat, only to discover they are not quite dead. Would be delicious like raw shrimp sashimi, if the rice wine wasn't there.

Sea Cucumber: long dark knobbly thing, often served whole on a plate with a dark brown reduction. Basically looks like a turd on a plate. Tastes of nothing particular and has an unappealing bouncy texture. Famous and unreasonably expensive.

Fish swim bladder: A thin wrinkly membrane which is basically a vehicle for a sauce. Expensive and used for pointless showing off like the sea cucumber.

Abalone: Odd but interesting. Also show off food to your guests.

Snake: while it looks like Japanese eel in the teriyaki sauce, it tastes less interesting an tends to be a bit tough if fried.

Dog: didn't know it was dog, but not bad really.

Goose head: Duck is common place here, not the expensive meat it is in the west. So goose is the next up, and BBQ goose (think Peking Duck, sort of, but richer and tender) is sublime. Nothing is wasted from head to toe, and therefore all on the menu. Goose head soup it surprisingly good, once you get over the bisected heads floating around on the surface, brains showing. The nostril meat isn't all that, but the brain itself is nice, spiced in the soup with a very soft pate texture.

Chickens feet. Cooked in a light sauce for breakfast you nibble around the cartilidge and bone. Tasty when hot, unappealing (to me) when served cold as a snack

Scorpion soup: a pork and scorpion broth. Very tasty. As the venom is not removed I cannot be sure if it was that or jet lag which was causing the dizziness.

Durian fruit: Mentioned below, this is a love it or hate it thing. It stinks to high heaven, but of what no one can agree. It basically stinks of durian. But the flavour it incredibly complex. First notes are of buttery banana, then almonds, then... Oh heavens its good (or disgusting)!.

Stinky tofu: this is rotting tofu. i suppose the equivalent of stilton cheese. I smells so bad even I won't try it. Yet...

Country chicken: I haven't tried this, as it is basically rat. Well I don't think I have...

Always get a translation if you are not sure what it is, as you may prefer to avoid genitals in your dinner...
( jagwap, Fri 27 May 2011, 7:08, 8 replies)

One of my dear deceased cats really had a thing for boxes. He loved sitting on them (that's how my 18th birthday cake got squished), and he especially loved peeing on them.

One day I was looking forward to having some chocolate that my aunt had sent me from Chicago. The box was innocently sitting on the counter, and looked normal. So did the chocolate. Yet it took me a second to realize that the piece of chocolate that I was eating tasted ABYSMAL. Cat urine can apparently seep through chocolate boxes, thus marinading the chocolate in salty ammonia nastiness. Blegh.
(Babbeyroad, Fri 27 May 2011, 6:29, 4 replies)

Durian Fruit
Throughout most of South East Asia you see signs in hotels and airports saying 'no Durian fruit' the problem is, it smells like old sweaty socks mixed with wet dogs and the stink is hard to get rid of.

Tried some a few weeks ago, its quite nice if you ignore the smell.
( Terry Oblong There's nobody here but us chickens on, Fri 27 May 2011, 6:10, 2 replies)

The best and worst
I've eaten all kinds of things in all kinds of places and it is really difficult to pick winners and losers. As this challenge doesn't really work unless we do, then I'll offer these two.

Worst. It was a toss up between the reconstituted remains of some shit found in the kitchen bin of a hotel in Pontypridd, the concentrated vinegary mush that claimed to be a Chicken Vindaloo at the most expensive Indian restaurant in Portland, Oregon or the utterly vile pizza I tried in the canteen of Ericsson's electronics factory near Stockholm. On balance I'm going for the pizza, if only for the exotic topping of chicken curry and banana.

The best is even more difficult. Kobe steak in Japan, followed by fried ice cream, was pretty sensational. The barbecued brisket and ribs served at Rudy's in Austin, Texas makes my mouth water. The awesome curries available almost everywhere in the UK, the half shoulder of lamb served in many Cotswolds pubs. Schweinshaxe in Germany, Shawarma in Israel, everything in Italy. Picking a winner is almost impossible, but one taste I will never forget are the tiny wild strawberries I tasted high up in the Pyrenees on a school trip many years ago. It was like an intense explosion of concentrated strawberry with every bite. Utterly amazing.
(ianisme, Fri 27 May 2011, 5:41, 2 replies)

Drunk rather than eaten.....
When in my late teens I suffered horribly from keloidal acne. It was awful. Think huge bumps on my face and neck that, when they opened, looked even worse. I could have been an extra on ‘Shaun of the Dead.’ It was ruining my social life, not to mention my self-confidence. My parents sent me to various doctors, and I was given a string of antibiotics that did nothing but give me an upset stomach, and this for months on end. This was before retinols came on the market (now, I imagine that one would be prescribed Accutane).

At a loss, I began to look into alternative therapies. I spent hundreds, if not a thousand dollars on herbalists, ayurvedic doctors, traditional Chinese medicines…. One alternative practitioner even hooked up electrodes to my neck and upper chest, sending shocks into my skin and claiming that such treatment would cure me. Needless to say, it was money down the drain.

Finally, I turned to an acupuncturist in San Francisco (where I was living at the time). On entering the small office in the basement of a home, I was ushered into a room with a medical table. The doctor ordered me to strip down to my y-fronts and to lie down, which I unquestioningly proceeded to do as she hit play on the tape-recorder. As the Chinese classical music droned in the background, she looked at the unsightly lumps on my neck and face, shaking her head. On came latex gloves, and then the needles. All over – on the soles of my feet, on my face, stomach, legs….. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The pain was minimal, and paled in terms of discomfort, with what was to come.

After a lengthy treatment, I was told that I would need to also take some "herbs." No problem, I thought. 20 minutes later, as I waited at the front desk the doctor reappeared with a paper bag and a small clay pot. Do NOT open the bag until I was ready to boil the contents in the clay pot with water, I was told.

Ready to try anything, I rushed home, rinsed out my new clay pot and opened the bag. Inside were what looked like twigs, dessicated mushrooms, and some sort of insect exoskeleton. But the smell. It was indescribable…. Pungent, heavy, bitter yet slightly sweet. A couple of years beforehand, a mouse had crawled into the engine of my car and died. The smell of the herbs came closest perhaps, to the odor that had wafted through the air ducts of my car on the hot, late summer day when I turned the ignition and realized that something was seriously awry.

Not to be deterred, however, I heated the water in the pot as instructed, and when the water began to boil, I poured in the "herbs" and covered the pot. A fetid steam rose forth from the spout and filled the house with its noxious scent. With all our windows open, it would take 2 days for the smell to completely disappear. My family would later be furious. “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?” my father yelled as he entered the house that evening.

After the required 30 minutes of boiling, I turned off the stove and, escaping the stench, went out for a walk while the pot cooled. I returned home and to the smell, and cautiously poured out the contents of the pot into a glass. I sat there staring at the viscous, thick black liquid. With memories of endless antibiotic regimes and painful skin peels, I made my up my mind to drink. Think bitter and powdery with a whiff of rubber and a complex, moldy, acidic finish. I barely managed not to vomit.

I returned to that acupuncturist 3 more times, and on each visit was given more "herbs." My family was furious. But it worked. I am complimented on my clear skin to this day, and I rarely, rarely break out.

Edit -- THANK YOU for reading!
(neil4ad, Fri 27 May 2011, 5:18, 6 replies)

Dumplings!!!
I just made dumplings, dough and all; gyoza/potsticker-type things, with chicken and spring onion and chives and cooked cabbage and they were pretty good if I do say so myself.

I love dumplings.
(IdlePeAcEsign if trouble were my mistress, i'd send her to them, Fri 27 May 2011, 3:35, 2 replies)

Grapes
from a vag. Much better than chocolate because they don't fucking melt.

If you leave them in the fridge beforehand then they are really quite something.
( clockworkrat has nice pants, Fri 27 May 2011, 3:01, 2 replies)

While not technically what I ate...
...it was definitely the most memorable meal of my life.

My parents divorced when I was about 6, because of my father's workaholic tendencies. Because of this, when he did make time to see me, it tended to mean sitting in the car for hours at a time zipping all over the country for his meetings. (Exciting, I know).

On one particular trip, we stopped at a Little Chef to grab something to eat. He had something in gravy, I had something not in gravy. Then...dessert...

Little me chose the chocolate fudge cake with ice cream. Top choice. Made in a factory 500 miles away, but yummy. My father chooses some warm sponge mutation filled with jam. Microwaved with care.
Thing is, jam has a tendency to superheat when microwaved, so when he cut it open, the superheated jam reacted with the air and burst into flames, releasing plumes of black acrid smoke.

It was at this point a waiter decided to see how things were, took one look at the sponge-fire, and walked away.

EDIT: Just got off the phone with the missus, who is currently training for her new job in California, and the company just took her out for a $300 Wagyu (Wagyu? Waygu?) steak, topped with a wild mushroom sauce, and actually cried at the table because of how beautiful it is. I had a potato for dinner...fucksocks.
(bobman500 enjoys a grope as much as the next fella, Fri 27 May 2011, 2:31, 2 replies)

Fine meals
Aren't just about the food; they're also about the company, the surroundings, the ambience. My finest meal was probably when I was on holiday with my girlfriend in Mull and Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. We had only been going out for a few months and this was our first holiday time together. In Tobermory we ate at a beautiful, elegant little restaurant, with the finest seafood I've ever had in my life, and drinking ridiculously expensive and ridiculously good wine. Very much in the first flush of love, sparks ignited whenever we made eye-contact; our very auras smouldered with passion.

Then I took her back to the hotel and give her one up the shitter. Perfect.
(McChinaman banned, Fri 27 May 2011, 2:21, 4 replies)

Best thing I ever made
Background: I went to the US last summer and was very keen to try some of the food there, though obviously at first attempting to avoid all of the greasy shit. Okay, well I did have a Boston hotdog as soon as I got there, but that was great (decent quality Italian spiced sausage with fried onions and peppers, plus standard hotdog roll and ketchup).

The best bit was the chowder that I had at every opportunity, first time at a restaurant by the sea just on the Massachusetts side of the border with Rhode Island State. First spoonful and I had fallen in love. The creaminess, but with a sensible amount of bite, the warmth, the comfort, and the subtle but perfect amount of that "sea-food" flavour wrapped my tongue in a blanket of dopamine.

Once I got home I went back to being vegan (I've played with it for a while, but frankly the taste of animal is too much for me at the moment). It was only recently that I completely dropped all pretences at having an environmentally sound diet, and so one of the first things I did was to try to recreate that sensation, the mouth-swaddling delight of New England Chowder.

I used this recipe: 2 small Zucchini (or 1 medium), thinly sliced
1 sweet Red Bell Pepper, thinly sliced
1 onion, diced small
1 medium Potato, cubed (1/2" cubes)
2 tablespoons Butter (or marg)
1 (10 ounces) can Chicken Broth (I used 1 teaspoon of veggie stock powder in 300ml of hot water)
1 teaspoon Seasoning Salt (or just use salt and add, as I did, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 teaspoon of mustard and 1 teaspoon of black pepper. If you don't have mustard, chuck in another teaspoon of pepper or something)
A few teaspoons of paprika
2 tablespoons flour
3 cups Milk
2 (6 ounces) cans Crab Meat, drained, picked
1 (3 ounces) package Cream Cheese, cut up

1: Heat up the milk and melt the butter (or marg) in a fairly big pan at about medium temperature until it starts to sizzle, then add the flour and stir until it there aren't any lumps left. Once this is done start adding the milk and stirring. At first you should just add the milk slowly and try to keep any lumps out, but once it has gotten fairly runny you can just chuck the rest of the milk in.

2: Throw everything else in except for the crab and the cheese, stir, and keep it on a low heat for four hours, stirring occasionally to make sure it doesn't stick.

3: Add the crab and the cheese and keep stirring until the cheese has fully melted.

4: Eat with a bit of good bread and enjoy!

Now, there is a slight problem with this recipe, and that is that the result looks very approximately exactly like vomitus. However, when it comes to taste it is sublime. It has that exact comfort food 'umami' sensation, and with the wee bit of black pepper and mustard each spoonful slowly and gently warms up your mouth with just the smallest hint of fire.

I think the problem of presentation could be solved by specifically using cornflour/cornstarch, and mixing that with the milk first in much the same way as you might make custard, i.e. heat up the milk and slowly add it to the flour whilst constantly stirring. If anyone tries this, please get back to me to let me know if it works.

P.S. I was particularly looking forward to trying some Mexican food while I was in California, and had visions of mounds of spicy bean sauces with rice and tortillas. Instead I was served a side of runny brown slop with a fairly sad looking burger. I made a much better chilli when I got home.

No apologies for length. I'm the one who eats it all the time.
( clockworkrat has nice pants, Fri 27 May 2011, 2:21, Reply)

Best meal I ever had
Going back to the UK for the first time in 7 years, and eating a proper full English brekkie my first morning. Proper greasy spoon cafe one at the cafe below mums flat. And it was free when they realised I was their tenants daughter.
(nolongernuts, Fri 27 May 2011, 1:54, Reply)

Had this just the other day
Grilled (using gobs of real butter) cheese sandwich. Swiss, mozzarella and mild yellow cheeses as binder for sliced roast pork loin, crispy bacon and braised pulled pork butt (with all the gelatinous goodness). yum
(sloremonger, Fri 27 May 2011, 1:35, 2 replies)

Thank you Thatcher
The worst ever is the free milk we used to get at school in the mid seventies.

Small foil topped bottles that came with a straw that you pierced the foil with and supped up the goodness inside. The milk was delivered in crates that would be left outside.

I hate milk, can't stand the taste. To me it tastes a bit like vomit. I will have it in tea, on cereal etc, anything as long as the taste is disguised.

But the worst thing was we used to get given the milk late morning. In the summer this would mean that the milk had been sat in the sun for maybe up to six hours. Going off and curdling. The taste was appalling.

If you didn't drink it you were told off (sometimes smacked, this was the seventies after all), even sent to the head teacher. No human rights acts in those days. No parents who would phone the school up and say "Now hang on a minute . . "

But then it stopped. I've heard the rhyme "Thatcher Thatcher milk snatcher". Not sure if this is true or not, but if it is then I salute her.
(Bitter and Twisted, Fri 27 May 2011, 0:59, 15 replies)

Your Mum's Mum

( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Fri 27 May 2011, 0:39, 7 replies)

Peeeeee Roast
Not so nice toffee.
While waiting in the car for my mum so we could go around to her friends place I spied some toffee looking substance in a bowl so not wanting to miss out on some sneaky toffee I broke a chunk off and stuffed it in my gob.... lo and be hold after a few chews found out it wasnt toffee but wax for my mother to wax her and her friends legs! Guess the joke was on me.
( jakedamusss I understand, and dont care., Fri 27 May 2011, 0:16, Reply)

This could have been funny. It wasn't.

(twattybanjo, Fri 27 May 2011, 0:02, 2 replies)

Flash BANG
My dad works with a fair number of outdoors people due to the nature of his work (usually land surveying) and so can occasionally come across the odd one who can do what one might call "man work". One of these blokes hunts roe deer.

For those who don't know, if you eat venison it will probably be red deer which are larger and, although they will often not be kept on a farm as such, they will still not be entirely wild. During winter the estates will dump masses of grain feed to keep the herds from thinning out during the winter so that there are plenty of beasts for the gentry to shoot come spring. They also use salt licks soaked in all manner of anti-biotics, worming chemicals and the like. Due to all of this, the meat may be alright, but it's also not quite as lean as it could be, and you'll likely be ingesting chemicals that aren't exactly intended for humans.

Roe deer are not treated like this at all. They are smaller and live in woodland (as opposed to open moorland), the woodland providing a better diet due to the range of plants they can consume, and the deer that survive the winter will be the healthier and fitter (more muscle).

So to hunt these deer this guy has a technique far more ingenious than churning up the ground with land destroyers, hopping out in tweed and wellies, and using an expensive, high powered rifle. Instead, he creeps around quietly at night until he hears a rustle, then he turns on his massive spotlight, freezing the deer on the spot like they do in front of headlights, then blasts the fucker in the face with a shotgun.

So this venison is already far better quality than what you get in most supermarkets and butchers. Not only that, but his work mate happens to know another guy not too far from home who has his own smoking oven. Right, so the venison my dad got was a whole fucking haunch of the leanest and most tender venison you can imagine, home-smoked, and we slow roasted it with onion and garlic.

It was abso-fucking-lutely delicious, like finishing Buddha inside my mouth after he has lubricated himself with God's own vaginal juices.

Worst food? Brussels sprouts. Cannae stand the wee things. There must be a processing plant somewhere where there's a retarded midget who is fed nothing but beans, eggs and cabbage all day and all the sprouts that end up on my plate have been specially treated with an hour's maturation inside his rectal cavity.
( clockworkrat has nice pants, Thu 26 May 2011, 23:54, 13 replies)

Your mum.

( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 26 May 2011, 23:31, Reply)

Have we had
"Your mum" yet?
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 26 May 2011, 23:31, 4 replies)

Tongue
A few years ago, I was dating your typical Californian stereotype - long blond hair, surfer, used the word 'dude' quite often, although overall he was pretty smart.

He offered to cook me a traditional English dish one night, so I said sure. He went on Google, painstaikingly picked out the ingredients and drove 15 miles to the only British butcher around.

He presented me with some slop I can only describe as 'not English' - boiled cow tongue in boiled cabbage.

I broke up with him a week later.
(nolongernuts, Thu 26 May 2011, 23:22, 14 replies)

I'm eaiting a pizza right now(pizza hut pan pizza with beef)
And I can't really READ some of the stuff on here and eat. Thanks b3ta.

Edit in caps. Thanks.
(CactusZack Shaved his coin purse on, Thu 26 May 2011, 23:03, 1 reply)

Eating after a serious illness.
Had a similar 'ritz cracker' experience with appendicitis. Having had a finger inserted up my bum no less than 4 times before finding out what the problem is, nearly dying of complications on the operating table, living off a saline drip for 9 days and my weight dipping into single figures (which at 6'2" is an achievement), I was finally able to eat my first piece of solid food.

I had a bowl of Rice Krispies and that first mouthful was better than the day I discovered masturbation. When you factor in I had only tasted the bile I had been constantly throwing up since I was admitted, the kaleidoscope of flavour that exploded on my tongue from a spoonful of puffed rice and semi skimmed milk left me wanting to do nothing else but eat for the rest of my life.

The second spoonful was even more intense. It had some sugar on it. In my state it might as well have been crack, given my bodies' reaction to it. The SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETness was easily the most intense flavour I had ever tasted and this, combined with my body devouring the nutrients it was receiving as I ate meant my time of being ill was over.

From that point on, that very moment, I started getting better.
astraboy.
(astraboy, Thu 26 May 2011, 22:46, 2 replies)

Worst? That'll be the gauze pack...
Totally a repost, and a long one at that, but I think you'll find it entertaining and relevant.

A couple of years ago, I had all my wisdom teeth out. In the weeks preceding the operation I spent an inordinate amount of time looking it up on the internet, practically memorising the wikipedia page on wisdom teeth, googling every possible complication, reading the entirety of the "dentists" QOTW (damn you all, you made me terrified) and even typing "wisdom tooth extraction" into the search bar on YouTube, which I do not recommend anyone does under any circumstances. By the time the day of the operation dawned, I thought I knew what to expect. I thought I was prepared. I had painkillers, sleeping pills, mouthwash, ice packs, everything I could possibly need. I had become an expert on wisdom tooth extractions and all of their possible complications. However, I suffered a terrible complication that not even google, YouTube or b3ta could have prepared me for.

There were quite a few complications with the operation itself which I won't go into in great detail, but most importantly, the nasty fuckers at the bottom were impacted not just in the gum but also in the jaw bone itself, meaning that they had to remove chunks of my jaw to get them out. Although I had taken my surgeon's advice and taken a maximum dose of painkillers well before the anaesthetic wore off I was, as might be expected, in a fair amount of pain. However, it was much more bearable than I had feared. "This is fine," I thought, "I can easily handle this for a couple of days..." It then occurred to me that it was probably time to take out my gauze packs. For anyone not in the know, when you have a tooth extracted, you're given a rolled up bit of damp gauze to bite on to soak up the blood. Mine had become decidedly gross and soggy and I seemed to have stopped bleeding, so I removed them. Within a couple of seconds I was in unbearable, excruciating agony. Remember how they'd had to break my jaw to get the teeth out? Well, I basically had two open fractures in my mouth, and the gauze packs had been the only things stopping my mangled jaw bone from being exposed. I made myself another couple of gauze packs immediately, and the hideous, excruciating, mind-mangling pain abated swiftly. By the time I went to bed, it was still excruciatingly painful taking the gauze packs out, so I went to sleep with them in.

Now, after extensive research, it's my opinion that no amount of alcohol, in fact no substance whatsoever, is capable of producing quite the level of sheer stupidity, wooziness and general moronic behaviour that is possible when you haven't yet woken up properly. At about 2am that night I had a great dream that I was chewing a really yummy piece of French bread. It was the best baguette I'd ever tasted - crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, with really good unsalted butter... It did occur to me that crusty French bread wasn't the most sensible thing to be eating in my current condition, and I was having serious difficulty chewing it. A sensible person would have admitted defeat and spat it out, but alas, I am not at all sensible and also phenomenally greedy. I swallowed the bread almost whole. Then, joy of joys, I found that I had another yummy piece of baguette on the other side of my mouth! I began chewing that too. Then my semi-conscious self was jolted rapidly into full consciousness by the realisation that I was gnawing at one of my disgusting, bloody gauze packs, and the other one was making its extremely uncomfortable way down to my stomach.

I phoned NHS Direct for some advice, and they laughed at me. Oh yes, they laughed at me! I had serious difficulty explaining the problem seeing as I was about as articulate as a chimpanzee with a cleft palate, but I managed it in the end. I got the distinct impression that every time I was put on hold, the whole office was probably exploding into hysterics. The nurse I spoke to asked me a few questions ("Do you have bloody stools?" Why would I when I'd only swallowed the thing an hour previously?) and told me that it would probably make its way through my digestive system with no complications. However, she did tell me that if I had any abdominal pain whatsoever I was to get myself to A&E immediately, where they would do a barium x-ray and probably operate to remove it. This did not sound pleasant. If it hadn't made its way out of my system within two weeks, I would also need a barium x-ray to check it wasn't stuck somewhere. And guess how I was going to have to track its reappearance? That's right - by dissecting everything that came out of my backside until it turned up!

I really had thought that the low point of my life had been on the day of the operation, drugged up to the eyeballs with two open fractures in my jaw, but no, nothing beats kneeling over a toilet bowl 24 hours later, still looking and feeling as if you've done ten rounds with Mike Tyson, poking at your own bowel movements with an old toothbrush. Since I wasn't eating much at all, my digestive transit was a little on the sluggish side, and I had to dissect three poos before I found the offending gauze pack. I then did a little victory dance around the bathroom, still smeared in my own excrement. I would not wish this experience on anyone, and have since had great sympathy for pathologists examining stool samples for a living.

Length? The surgeon said they were the longest roots he'd ever seen in such a small person.
(grandmasterfluffles Come to my Armageddon party on, Thu 26 May 2011, 22:41, 3 replies)

simple, but wonderful
about 3 years ago, i had 3/4 of my stomach and about 6 feet of intestine removed. for the 4 days i remained in hospital after the operation, i could eat no more than 2 or 3 spoonfuls of thin soup.
for the following 6 weeks, my meals consisted of half a small jar of baby food, which i often couldn't finish. i don't know what babies see in it.
when the 6 weeks were up, i was finally ready to try solid food again. knowing that i wouldn't be able to handle much, i bought a box of ritz crackers.
oh. my. GOD.
as i sampled that first savoury, crunchy morsel, i thought i'd died and gone to food heaven. i'd waited so long to eat something with a bit of substance, something i could actually chew, that it tasted like the finest foodstuff ever created, instead of a small and salty cracker.
believe me, once you've gone that long without eating anything nice, whatever you eat first will be as ambrosia to your deprived palate.
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Thu 26 May 2011, 22:32, 8 replies)

We used to clean the grill
with the spin rinse on the old "two tub" washing machines of the 70's. Obviously washing a grill with luke-warm water filled with dingle-berries from the skiddies, semen from wanking, snots from make-shift hanker-chefs, and all that made us have the runs on a regular basis, we were slim guys during that period, like living in Africa.
( The Scrunt Wants a Dozen Pints, Thu 26 May 2011, 22:25, Reply)