Thu, 23 May 2013 20:35:27 -0700 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/ Lussumo Vanilla 1.1.4 & Feed Publisher http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338355#Comment_338355 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338355#Comment_338355 Sat, 11 Aug 2012 15:56:44 -0700 Horrible Warning Si
Memories are all that stand between us and Galvani’s frogs. Here is where we burn our anecdotes onto the face of the Interweb and persuade history we’re more than twitching amphibian meat machines.

THE RULES:

1. Recount a tale on the below topic. You have 300 words. Anything more than that will be flambéed with the righteous heat of Deletion. Repeat offenders will be banned.

Linking to a longer version of the story, or posting subsequent chapters, or anything which indirectly pushes it past that 300 word limit, will be similarly nuked.

2. Read – and comment on – the other entries, before you post your own. Partly that’s because you’ll look like a plum if your story is a rubbish shadow of someone else’s. Mostly it’s because you’re not an impolite shit, are you?

[3. Additional emphasis: “Topic.” TOP-IC. That means your anecdote should revolve around a specific subject, yes? The one below, in fact. Not just any old tale you care to share. Deviation = maggoty pee-hole disaster.]

THE LEGAL CRAP:

By telling us your story, it’s in the public domain. Don’t get pissy about that.

Right now you’re in a pub, surrounded by writers, artists and socialites. If you recount an interesting tale to entertain and endear yourself to your fellows, you do not get to bitch about it if a twisted version of the same tale shows up 30 years later on the other side of the planet. Stories are contagious. My advice? Be honest. Don’t make shit up. Don’t treat this like a fiction thread. It’s a chance to entertain and move us with your life experience. That’s plenty good enough.

THE TOPIC:

FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD.

[Let me repeat, for the sake of the dinlows out there: YOU HAVE 300 WORDS.] ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338358#Comment_338358 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338358#Comment_338358 Sat, 11 Aug 2012 16:37:19 -0700 Alan Tyson http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338374#Comment_338374 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338374#Comment_338374 Sun, 12 Aug 2012 12:18:35 -0700 RenThing
Cooking bacon naked is the best way to assure you don't cook it too hot.

Being the platter for a naked sushi serving was quiet fun. So was being the human sundae boat, but that one was way, way too messy for me to ever want to repeat. ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338487#Comment_338487 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338487#Comment_338487 Tue, 14 Aug 2012 11:23:52 -0700 flecky http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338493#Comment_338493 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338493#Comment_338493 Tue, 14 Aug 2012 13:34:14 -0700 RenThing What an idiot! Chilli juice! On the dick!

Oh, god, flecky. I can't imagine. ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338494#Comment_338494 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338494#Comment_338494 Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:32:45 -0700 Argos http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338498#Comment_338498 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338498#Comment_338498 Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:13:20 -0700 dorkmuffin http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338502#Comment_338502 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338502#Comment_338502 Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:51:06 -0700 StefanJ
After a train trip to Manhattan and hours setting up the display units I'm utterly famished. As I'm about to sit down with my co-workers for the meal and the big show, I get pulled aside by the boss. A TV station wants to get some pictures of me (well, my hand) shoving the modem and memory card and hard drive into the computer's expansion slots. (It's got AutoMagical device detection!)

I spend nearly a half an hour trying to get things right. The memory unit is a wooden dummy that doesn't quite fit. As I try over and over to make it look as fool-proof and smooth as it should, Nimoy is giving his pitch and entertaining the crowd, who are happily digging in.

Eventually the TV folks are satisfied with the footage. I return to the table to find one of the company sales reps in my spot. A big guy. He's had my dinner in addition to his. There are no meals left.

The caterer offered me a buttered roll, as I recall. ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338504#Comment_338504 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338504#Comment_338504 Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:11:14 -0700 MrMonk
My niece was due for her 10th birthday, which was special because, well, it was her 10th. Since I was having a special birthday the same week, we agreed that I would treat her to a restaurant dinner where she could choose from the adult menu. She spent over a week investigating restaurants with her mother, who gently steered her to a slightly upscale, but not too pricey establishment.

Seated at our table, my niece carefully studied the menu, and asked numerous questions about the items listed there. Then, when it came time to order, she looked directly at the waitress and in her best grown-up manner asked "Do you have macaroni and cheese?" The waitress said "I could ask the chef to make you some, is that OK?"

The mac' n' cheese arrived and it looked and smelled wonderful. My niece seemed to enjoy every bite. But the waitress had also brought a small plate of grilled vegetables, which my niece ignored. Near the end of the meal, the waitress asked "Honey, aren't you going to try your vegetables?" My niece again looked directly at her and calmly said "This is my birthday dinner. I will NOT eat any vegetables." ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338505#Comment_338505 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338505#Comment_338505 Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:12:47 -0700 Argos http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338520#Comment_338520 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338520#Comment_338520 Tue, 14 Aug 2012 22:03:02 -0700 city creed Even chillies - up to a point. Lemon and parsley folks, it's the only way to be sure.

With 15+ years of chef work under the fraying apron-string, all my awesomest stories are horror stories and would more strictly fall under the category of kitchen stories rather than food, glorious food, stories.

Here's one that might fit though:

Some years back I was sent to a hotel in a town on the Scottish east coast that hosts an international sporting event about every five years. Because of the cyclical nature of the business they take on a bunch of agency chefs for a few weeks and get by with a skeleton crew the rest of the time. Six of us worked 18 hour days and at nights we drank commandeered beer and slept on bunks in a commandeered beer-cellar.

One of our guys was a very skilled and experienced chef. He was also a natural "leader of the opposition" sort - we called him "Shoppy" for "shop-steward". Another of our guys was "Scouse".

Late one night, Scouse got a call from his mate Jonny. Jonny had hit a deer on the road in his gigantic hummer with eminently predictable results. He didn't want the beast to go to waste. Could Scouse help?

"Tell him tae bring it here." Said Shoppy. "I'll show yous how to butcher venison."

Sometime after 3am, Jonny pulled up and we manhandled a tarpaulin-sheathed deer carcass past hotel security and into a refrigerated portakabin at the far end of the car park. There, on a trestle under a striplight, Shoppy skinned, gutted and carved the deer. The rest of us stood around watching in awed silence, drinking solemnly, breath smoking.

The deer was freshly killed, so it was warm and its blood was lively - likely a result of the carcass not having been properly hung. Chef work tends to desensitize you to blood and gore somewhat but we were all pretty rocked by how surreally fucking ugly it got. So much blood. So much. Buckets overflowing with entrails and bones. Sharp metal flickering and Shoppy's zen singsong voice narrating his own knifework.

The next day, as we unanimously refused to return to it, Scouse asked a porter to hose out the crime scene. This guy apparently noticed nothing amiss about a blood-washed portakabin yards away from batteries of television cameras. ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338526#Comment_338526 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338526#Comment_338526 Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:36:36 -0700 curb http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338610#Comment_338610 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338610#Comment_338610 Thu, 16 Aug 2012 03:57:08 -0700 Vornaskotti
One of my jobs was to prepare the salad bar, which meant chopping an acre’s worth of vegetables. One morning I wasn’t paying quite enough attention to the fast chef-style chop-chop cutting I’d learned to do. But not too well, so I sliced off a part of my thumb. There was cursing and jumping, and more cursing when I realized there was blood on the salad. Being a man of integrity at 22, I took the bloody pieces of veggies out, staunched the blood and served the salad (fuck if I’d do it all over again from scratch). And realized I couldn’t find the slice of thumb with a bit of a fingernail hanging on it.

The only place it could’ve gone was the salad trough. And no, it wasn’t there in the end of the day. I'm thinking someone had something stuck between his teeth for the rest of the day, and little he knew that it was a part of a human fingernail. ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338611#Comment_338611 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338611#Comment_338611 Thu, 16 Aug 2012 04:11:46 -0700 Vornaskotti
Sounds fun - I know someone who moved to the countryside to butcher old race and work horses, and to sell the meat. I was there to learn how to cut up rabbits last autumn, and when the schedules finally match, I'm going to go there to see how you cook a horse stew recipe that starts with "take one living work horse and a rifle".

@dorkmuffin:

Yeah, I know of a few cases of ill-adviced diddling / oral sex after a cooking session in the house of chilli fanatics... A mistake which you do just once, apparently :) ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338863#Comment_338863 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338863#Comment_338863 Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:18:20 -0700 Conlabentis
Even worse is the problem of ensuring you have cooked the chicken all the way through. Nothing says adventure like ten days on the toilet reproducing your cooking because you didn't take the time to heat some dead animal past the point of spreading disease and bacteria.

Granted this all pales in comparison to the act of sharing your cooking with another. The bemoans of someone who typically would suck it up and appreciate the time and effort, what little there was, that you put into cooking at all will eventually leave you to reconsider spending any serious time in the kitchen ever again.

And while any sane person would at this point, as mentioned in the first paragraph, dump the whole mess in an incinerator and be done with it, I chose to eat the devil of a thing after microwaving the bits that weren't cooked right.

The smell has not come out of the Microwave. This was a year ago. For some reason if I ever plan to make popcorn the damned thing always reminds me of my failure with the fond smell of chicken and cinnamon pancakes.

Oh and don't try to drink your troubles away post-failure either. I do not think a more glorious vomit has ever been produced short of competition-based Ipecac chugging held at a forensics body farm with ten week old cadavers who also smell like your ten day long dumping marathon. ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338867#Comment_338867 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338867#Comment_338867 Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:52:38 -0700 Alan Tyson
]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338887#Comment_338887 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338887#Comment_338887 Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:35:15 -0700 Flabyo
He copied it out wrong, so where it was supposed to be 'a pinch of nutmeg' he ended up tipping in a whole 200g jar of it.

One mouthful was enough to make it very clear that that stuff was going to be fatal to eat... ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338889#Comment_338889 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338889#Comment_338889 Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:58:11 -0700 Ryan S Thomason http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338903#Comment_338903 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=338903#Comment_338903 Wed, 22 Aug 2012 08:52:57 -0700 oldhat http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=339061#Comment_339061 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=339061#Comment_339061 Fri, 24 Aug 2012 16:19:39 -0700 government spy
So, when I finally answered, they assumed I was making the grossest sex analogy in the world when I said I missed her undercooked hamburger. ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=339269#Comment_339269 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=339269#Comment_339269 Tue, 28 Aug 2012 21:03:25 -0700 Rootfireember I had this happen to a coworker. Only he'd gotten jalapeno juice on himself after trying to prank a coworker by spiking their soda with it, and then had to use the bathroom.
As with your tale, my fellows and I laughed at the guy's misery. I think it would have been less hilarious if he hadn't been such a jerk to everyone there; and some of his pranks were simply dangerous, and violations of health code. Jalapeno karma. Who knew? ]]> http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=339367#Comment_339367 http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=10789&Focus=339367#Comment_339367 Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:19:43 -0700 Anoxia
About 10 or 15 years later, the same guys lived in the same house together. Two were working and one was on benefits, the one on benefits used to be guilty of what could be called 'creative cooking' due to his lack of money and so would concoct odd meals with whatever was cheap or in the 'Going out of date' section in the local shop, oh and vast quantities of garlic. One of the other house mates was guilty of drunk cooking, but not just drunk cooking... Absolutely blind fuckfaced drunk apocalyptic cooking. This was no more aptly demonstrated by the time the other two house mates encountered the kitchen sprayed in blood which looked like arterial spray, melted cheese stalactites hanging from the ceiling that were dripping, a used greasy frying pan and him passed out on the sofa. Upon questioning he was found to be completely unharmed (confusing everyone as to where the large quantity of blood had come from), no recollection of having cooked or eaten anything.

These days it's just 'normal working guy' and 'creative cooking benefits guy', I mentioned before that benefits guy likes garlic... The most recent incident was a couple of years ago. I used to go to their new house for tabletop roleplay games and general hanging-out, one time I went I knocked on the door and went in, to be greeted by the ALMIGHTY STENCH OF GARLIC. I like garlic quite a lot, but their house STANK of it, the wallpaper had absorbed the smell completely and it was suffocating to be in. Turned out that benefits guy had spent his day roasting garlic to eat, I insisted that ever door and window in the place be opened to try and aerate the house. His house mate then arrived home from work and wasn't best pleased, but he's put up with worse, like the mustard gas incident... But that's a story for another time. ]]>