For Your Halloween Dining Pleasure: Weird Wild Foods

        After being challenged by Susan Kane at thecontemplativecat, I have been digging through my brain archives to think up some weird foods that I've tried that were surprisingly good.   As I began thinking about this I was taken back to my mid-twenties when I was on a national tour with the Ken Griffin magic show.

         In a post in June of 2010, I told how Ken Griffin was the one who first introduced me to menudo.  I had always thought of myself as a pretty adventurous person when it came to food, but once I started being around Ken Griffin I was introduced to some foods I had never considered.

        Ken had been around a lot in his life.  He grew up near Deming, New Mexico not far from the Mexican border.  He'd spent years as a saddle maker and leather craftsman in the ranch country of Montana.   He and his wife had toured Viet Nam entertaining the soldiers during the war.  In his broad range of life experiences he had also encountered a lot of different foods that I had never tried.

         One of the favorites that he was known to whip up in a crock pot in the motel rooms was chicken hearts and gizzards.  The thought of these did not appeal to me at all.  However, he doctored them up with onions, an assortment of spices, and other ingredients that I don't recall and set them cooking all day in the crock pot.  I was pretty adamant about not trying these at first, but after a while the aroma started smelling pretty good.  They weren't the best looking things in the world, and I'll warn you if they're not cooked right it's can be darn close to eating rubber, but after twelve hours or so cooking in the crock pot they were tender and savory in taste.  Haven't eaten them since, but enjoyed them several times with Ken.

          He also talked me into trying pork brains and eggs.  I guess I was up for anything back then.  It's not your normal restaurant fare--you're not going to find these at Denny's or I-Hop--but when we stopped at some truck stop and he saw them on the menu he knew what he wanted.  And though I wasn't too enthusiastic about it I let him talk me into ordering them too.  Maybe I was just so hungry that anything would have tasted good, but I downed the plate with no problem and with no bad after-effects.

        Then there was the time in Indiana when a friend of Ken's invited us to a local bar where they were having a happy hour special of sorts and were serving lamb fries.  The place was rowdy with congenial working folks chowing down on platters of lamb fries and downing them with beer.  Everybody seemed to be enjoying them so I got a platter.  They were thin sliced, batter covered. fried crispy golden brown discs that looked similar to home fried potatoes.  They had a pleasant chewy texture with a light meaty taste that was maybe closer to clams or something like that.

         As I enjoyed my lamb fries and was working on my third or forth beer, I asked our host what lamb fries were anyway.  He informed me that they were sheep testicles, sliced thin, battered, and deep fried.  That momentarily gave me pause.  Then I looked around the room and saw everyone happily munching away.  What the heck!  They tasted darn good and I still had beer to wash them down with.  We ordered another platter and some more beer.  I was hungry.  And my philosophy is that if I see a whole bunch of people eating something and enjoying it then I'll be willing to try it too.

        I hope I'm never in a bar full of cannibals or worse yet, zombies.

         Have you ever tried lamb fries or rocky mountain oysters?    Do you have a good recipe for hearts and gizzards?   Does it unnerve you when you're having breakfast and the group of unkempt half-dead looking people at the table next to you tell the waitress they want brains?




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Dressing Up for Halloween

         Some of you, especially those of you with children, might be thinking of shopping for Halloween costumes these days.  Maybe you've already bought something.  Some will choose to be creative and make the costumes yourself or patch something together from things you have lying around the house.  Pumpkins and Halloween decorations are all over the stores.  It's kind of difficult not to notice that Halloween will soon be here.

          I won't be dressing up for that festive day, but I have been dressing up--or dressing down--my blog of late.  Over the last few weeks we've looked at some of the changes and you readers have been giving me some fine feedback.   I've done some major blog cleaning, split up into multiple blogs, and you may have noticed a new header design.

         I've altered the color scheme of my header and removed the reference to the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge.  After all this is where the Challenge started, but now it's got a new home.  If you haven't visited the A to Z Blog and become a follower I hope you will do so today.   News about the Challenge should start coming in soon and I don't want anyone to miss it.

          Tossing It Out may have a new header with a new slogan--Juggling words and phrases--but the blog content will remain pretty much the same.   Although now if I write anything about dreams it will most likely appear on A Faraway View (my dream blog).   I will still include some memoir material on this blog, but some of that will now be diverted to the memoir blog Wrote By Rote.

          Speaking of which, Susan Kane of thecontemplativecat challenged me a while back to write a blog post about adventuresome food.   I decided to delay this challenge to deliver as a Halloween post.  It's not really all that related to Halloween, but there was just something about the topic that made me think the post would be appropriate then.  I'll be posting this story coming this Friday October 28.

           On Wednesday October 26,  I'll be visited with a guest post by Stephanie Campbell who hosted me earlier on her blog So You Want to Be a Writer?.  Stephanie's got a special Halloween story that features characters from her latest book Poachers.  Don't miss this fun little tale and say hello to Stephanie.

           In the upcoming week I may be more lax than usual making rounds to visit your blogs since I'm here in Tennessee and may not be on the computer as much.  Next Monday, which is Halloween, I'll be back to normal--kind of.  What the heck is normal anyway?

             Are you dressing up for Halloween?   What are the hot costumes this year?  Have you linked to the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge Blog yet to encourage your readers to join up?

         

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