Square sausage
Square sausage is just that - sausage meat cut into flat squares. Also called Lorne sausage. Delicious fried and placed on a roll. Egg optional.

Which is why, when my mate Iain's friend told him the name of her new baby girl, he said, "Is that Lauren as in Bacall, or Lorne as in sausage?".

For the record, it was the former!
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Thu 24 May 2007, 10:12, Reply)

Vegetarians
have no place in a modern world.

Any idea how many awful parasites and ameobic infections unwashed vegetables carry?

Vegetarians are pointless and humourless. Just like politically correct people.

Humans are carnivores - we kill and eat animals - yum! Get over it.
( disasterprone "Pyjamas caused the Holocaust", Thu 24 May 2007, 9:48, Reply)

Last night
Just had a flashback....

I was out in Aberdeen last night and decided, in my infinite wisdom, to have a sausage sandwich.

I gestured towards something square and asked "what's that" - "sausage" came the reply. Despite my scepticism and the fact that there were round sausage things next to them, I decided to give it a go.

I ate the whole crusty, hard, unpleasant square sausage thing and felt really rather ill fairly quickly - I had to pop into the club* and wash it all down with vodka.

Did I learn?

No - I had suspicious chips & cheese on the way home.

All this on top of a spicy beef & anchovy pizza earlier.

I'm not feeling quite right today - it must've been those non-meat chips....

Tangent - Oh the shame - I made at least 3 drunken phonecalls....

*Espionage - for my sins
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Thu 24 May 2007, 9:34, Reply)

Never, ever
return to the Kebab/Burgers/Pizza place that was so great at 3am - when you are stone cold sober at 6pm!

I've now discovered that it wasn't the beer that was giving me dodgy guts :-(
(Biff..., Thu 24 May 2007, 9:13, Reply)

Objection!
Hang on a minute - why am I being singled out here?

I would, however like to observe that I have made and eaten vegetarian creations (stuffed mushrooms) and they have been good.

I would also like to point out that it is possible to get food poisoning from just about anything - I have been ill after having had a non-meat meal....

And I actually finished my Mum's curry after a bit of ridiculous posturing on my part - I just didn't eat the tofu, which after a bit of reflection, was a bit chewy and not that flavoursome.... It still made me ill though as it was a curry that registered pretty high on the "burn my face off" scale.
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Thu 24 May 2007, 9:07, Reply)

Shetland again
Up in Shetland again, actually at the same house where I was served fusty haggis, the man of the house had several basins of mackerel in the garage, steeping in salt to preserve them. But he was doing a job involving an angle grinder and all the little white hot metal sparks were going right into the basins of fish.

Judging by the state of the garage, this was probably not the only thing to have landed in there. Thankfully I've never eaten mackerel there.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Thu 24 May 2007, 8:41, Reply)

James_Tiger_Woods.
I must say, I enjoyed James's contributions. His red-faced rants against the terrible crimes committed by treehugging vegetarians who dare to eat something James decides is unfit were a joy to behold, especially when placed alongside his other stories: the ones where he poisons himself with undercooked meat.

The way he rejected his mother's meal, even after declaring it delicious, because it had fake meat in it...priceless. Of course, an action in no way similar to the vegetarians who happily tuck in and are then horrified to learn there is meat in their meal, right James?

Something for you to keep in mind when you're next sitting on the throne after one of your drunken creations; it's pretty difficult to give yourself food poisoning with undercooked quorn or soya.
(Musuko, Thu 24 May 2007, 8:22, Reply)

this veil of bitter vegetables .....
Many years ago (1989 to be precise) my polytechnic decided that a class trip to Prague was in order. Given that I am a vegetarian and times was hard back then for this struggling country, various souls had forewarned me that it would be as well to include a stash of foody goodness within my luggage, to stave off the otherwise certain starvation that would befall me due to the non-availablity of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Sure enough, I had good cause to thank them for their wisdom. As my carnivorous classmates would happily chow down their greasy chunks of fried pork or somesuch, I would inevitably be presented with a meagre plate of peas and carrot, pickled to shrivellous extinction.

Unfortunately, my imagination had not extended much beyond museli bars and cup-a-soups, so by the end of the trip, I was in a near hallucinatory state of craving for culinary deliciousness. Imagine my delight when we stumbled serendipitously upon a restaurant of such grandeur and magnificence that I was in no doubt that gustatory nirvana could not but lie ahead. Our ravening hoard piled within and one of my more linguistically able classmates explained my omnivourous inclinations to a smiling waiter. He listened attentively and assured her that chef would be delighted to prepare a suitable and delicious repast.

In due course, plate after plate of exquisitely prepared, gourmet meals were presented flourishingly to my delighted classmates, while I waited with increasing impatience and excitement for the feast that would be mine. My fevered imagination went into overdrive as it speculated on the infinite number of possible responses by the chef to the challenge.

Eventually when everyone else had been served, the doors from the kitchen swung open for the final time. The beaming waiter appeared and strode towards me with the collective honour and pride of the restaurant in his bearing and visage and set before me ..... a plate of pickled peas and carrots.


Oh the vinegary sourness. I can still taste it to this day, even over the bitterness of my disappoinment.
(nz_aardvark, Thu 24 May 2007, 5:09, Reply)

Dry Roasted Peanuts, Fried in Butter
On a camping trip, I tried frying a jar of Dry Roasted Peanuts. In Butter.

They just got soggy and hot.
(danalan Pretty good, for an amateur., Thu 24 May 2007, 4:27, Reply)

Fruit Pizza in Portugal
Banana, pineapple, apricot, apple and orange. On a bed of cheese and tomoato.

Fucking horrible
(Creamy Discharge Freeze Motherstickers, this is a fuck up, Thu 24 May 2007, 3:53, Reply)

Philistines!
I just purchased a chicken caesar salad from my university refectory and it contains iceberg lettuce!

Iceberg! I can scarcely believe it.

Truly we are approaching the end times.
(oball needs Satan more than he needs me, Thu 24 May 2007, 3:00, Reply)

Mmmm....cockles
Bought a jar of pickled cockles from a chippy one night and after getting home and devouring them all, I decided I liked them so much I'd drink all the vinegar. Not a wise move. I had stomach cramps for hours, then the shits all the next day.

Also, I knew a guy who worked the late shift for a company called Geo. Adams, a purveyor of pasties, sausage rolls, etc. usually found in petrol stations. He told me how he and his work colleagues would jizz into the chicken and mushroom mixture due to be put in the pies. I've eaten nothing made by them since.
(genghis26, Thu 24 May 2007, 1:38, Reply)

Alchomohol leads to bad taste..
I was living for a short while with a mate of mine; It was cheap rent, and we could get drunk with each other pretty often, fun enough for a couple of lads.

One night, after a couple of *naughty smokey thingies* and the best part of a bottle of Jim Beam each, we were getting real hungry, and my friend offered to make me a sandwich, "fair enough", says I.

My mate comes back half an hour later with two sandwiches.

"What is it?" says I

"Steak" says he

"Awesome!" says I

"..and peanut butter" says he.

after a few moments of quiet repulsion, the hunger and the alcohol told me it was a good idea.

30 minutes later, I was regretting my decision, leaving a hefty amount of vomit on his floor, wall, guitars, computer.. well, floor and guitar at least. Scuzziest thing I ever ate..


Fucking delicious though.
(Lythium deals in lead, my friend., Wed 23 May 2007, 23:57, Reply)

Not me but my housemate
and his girlfriend are always trying to save money by buying the cheap Asda crap, especially their economy sausages. They have sausage sweet & sour, sausage curry, sausage in black bean sauce, sausage stir-fry, sausage chasseur, sausage everything! to top it all neither of them can cook for fuck all.

Anyway, one day last summer they make a huge sausage casserole with 3 cloves of garlic (i kid you not), chillies and brown sauce (!?!).

I passed a comment that perhaps the sausages were not cooked properly to which he replied he had training as a chef and I didn't know what I was talking about.

They both got worms.

We laughed and laughed and laughed and still laugh today at the thought of him and his fat bird dragging their arse along the floor. The meal was gross, the smell of HP sauce frying is enough to strip paint off a wall.
( Bamboo Steamer, Wed 23 May 2007, 22:19, Reply)

Mmmmm tasty
Tequila and mayonnaise on toast when the larder is empty.

And prawn smoothies at 3.00am.

What is there not to like?
(tonyhrx, Wed 23 May 2007, 21:11, Reply)

bloody hands
I have a spare bedroom at my place and also live near the town centre and as such workmates often crash over when they have had a few too many sniffs of the barmaid's apron.

This particular time I also was a few sheets to the wind having spent most of the day wrestling with the barmaid's apron as part of a tag team with a colleague of mine. At kicking out time I managed to get the both of us home and through the front door, but I had to admit defeat and go straight to bed, the lightweight that I am.

The next morning I woke up to carnage. Blood stains all over the kitchen, bloody handprints all up the stairs to the spare bedroom and groaning noises from within.

I sobered up pretty sharpish, let me tell you.

A word of advice to you all:

If you own a jar of Baxters Baby Beetroot

a) keep it away from your pissed workmate

b) if this is not possible due to your own deal with Bacchus, at least make sure implements are available for the consumption of said baby beetroot; a fork, a spoon etc., Bacchus makes them blind to such implements (or at least the drawer containing them).

My workmate consumed a whole 750 g jar of baby beetroot (plus drinking the vinegar) with bare hands only and then decided bed would be a good idea. The blood (now known as beetroot juice) in the kitchen was frustration that beetroot does not tend to jump into your mouth without cutlery; shaking the jar does not make miracles happen, and so blood (beetroot juice) on all the walls.

The blood on the stairs was a result of being too pissed to get to bed without bouncing off all the walls: hands + beetroot juice vs magnolia silk paintwork.

The groaning sounds? What would you expect from a pissed up bastard who had ingested 750g of vinegar soaked bleurgh, including juice, on top of a day in the boozer?

3 days of purple sloppy poo, so they told me
( no longer a user, Wed 23 May 2007, 20:46, Reply)

Uni cooking inspiration
As a university student who is inordinately lazy, my cooking is average at best. I can muster up a half decent spaghetti bolognese, or cook sausages on one of the 11 George Foremans in our kitchen, but it gets a bit samey after a while.

Now it being my first year, I also had something of a marijuana habit, and as a result I often had the munchies. And don't tell me why, but I had a craving for white sauce. You know the stuff you sometimes get on chicken? Basically a white wine and cream sauce, but it hadn't really occurred to me to make my own. So I went round our local Spar-a-like looking for something that would resemble a white wine sauce in both look, texture and taste. The closest I got was a tin of Heinz mushroom soup.

I also had the munchies for sausages, but then sausages and 'white wine sauce' don't really make a meal, so I thought I'd do it with spaghetti. Except I was very bored of spaghetti, having been cooking it with bolognese at least twice a week for a month. I quite like thin spaghetti though, and stumbled upon what I thought was thin spaghetti, in balls, like tagiatelli. It turned out to be vermicelli (rice noodles) but I was happy enough with that.

So I get home, have a spliff, and I'm really looking forward to a nice gooey dinner - gooey food really is the best when you're stoned, no?

I Foreman-ise my sausages, boil my vermicelli, and get ready for the mix. I sieve out the water from the vermicelli and what met my eyes was what looked like a bowl of very wet, colourless, opaque snot. I don't know if I overcooked it or what, but it did not look appetising. Despite this, I was very hungry, so I decided to proceed as normal.

Now, I feel I must make a point about tinned food at this point, which every student must go through - tinned food is, always, a lot worse of the inside than it looks from the outside. So I cracked open this tin of soup and peered inside, looking forward to a metal cannister of creamy, mushroomy goodness. But instead I was greeted by something resembling cornflour jelly, with a lovely ring of fat around the lid. My heart sank somewhat, and my stomach gurgled a bit more, so I just chucked it in the pan. It splatted in with the consistancy of barely set jelly, making a resounding 'thwack' as it hit the edges of the pan. Now in my inebriated state this did nothing to improve my thoughts about this food. But still, I persevered. I was splitting this food with a friend, and I know they wouldn't have been happy about ordering a Dominoes, again. I chopped up my cooked sausages - they were disturbingly cheap as well, something like 49p for 8 - and chucked them in. I brought it all to the boil, though boil is not really the word, it looked like someone had cooked the stuff they use on 'Get Your Own Back', that kiddy show with all the slime. Except it was a disturbingly bright white, and the vermicelli seemed to be helping this illusion, giving it an almost nuclear look.

So it's cooked, and it's ready to go. I spooned it into 2 bowls and placed them on the table. My friend looks at it with a barely concealed grimace and picks up her fork. I realise my situation is quite severe and get a spoon instead. What followed is something that I would rather forget. Remember that I was quite stoned.

Imagine someone has a really runny cold, stores up their snot for a while, and gives it to you in a bowl. That's what the vermicelli was like. Then imagine they drink a load of white gravy, eat a few dried mushroom pieces, and vomit it over the snot. Then imagine they take a nice dump on a bread board, slice it up into lovely mouth-sized morsels, and throw that in the bowl. Simmer for 10 minutes and it might approach what that meal was like. I actually struggled through a fair bit of it, but really it was a case of 'find the sausage', as the only (barely) edible piece of the meal.

I threw 90% of it in the bin, we went downstairs for another spliff, and 3 hours later I was starving and we ordered a Dominoes. So a happy ending, considering.
( Rookie You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel, Wed 23 May 2007, 20:26, Reply)

I made myself a curry.
not realising the mince was off.
Sick as dog.
( Captain Tripps is your taxloss lover from Liverpool, Wed 23 May 2007, 17:28, Reply)

Pork Farm produce ...
... nothing like the real thing. A bit like Bernard Matthews really.

Winged it the other week and wrote to BM seeking sponsorship for a sports competition in his vicinity - the letter back had me is stitches! The excuse - a bit of bird flu means we are so skint we can't even give you a fiver to buy some chocolates!

Well I suppose if you only get £589,000 in compensation from Defra what can you do.

Length? Just imagine a 20ft long Turkey Twizzler!
(Biff..., Wed 23 May 2007, 17:16, Reply)

Bombay mix
Back in the eighties, I was on the dole, sharing a house in Wolverhampton with a bunch of mates. One night, one of these mates liberated two industrial size bags of bombay mix from outside an Indian takeaway.
Since I had drunk my giro the previous weekend, my diet for the following fortnight consisted solely of bombay mix.
Actually, after the first week, I had scoffed all the red and green things, leaving only the gram flour noodles for the second week.
I can't recommend this diet due to the lengthy stints spent on the toilet passing what feels like battery acid.
(druidus, Wed 23 May 2007, 17:14, Reply)

Well i practically had to eat it.....
For those of you who know what the 'Barmens Revenge' is, you'll understand

Take the following and mix:

Double JD
Double Ribena
Double Baileys

Throw all into a glass adding the Baileys last, pass to your victim and tell them to drink it but to hold it in their mouth for 30 seconds first. You can feel all the curdled Baileys in your gob (hence why you practically eat the damn thing) and if that don't make you hurl then swallowing it sure as hell will!

If that don't make you puke then you are wrong....simply wrong
(Xyphious : Sinkin' Gin since '85, Wed 23 May 2007, 17:08, Reply)

Butter bean battle
One of the guys who lived in the student digs from hell I mentioned in a previous post would buy a bag of butter beans pretty much every time he went shopping. I have no idea what he intended to do with them, and apparently neither did he because he'd just put them in the cupboard and forget about them.

Anyway come the end of the year we were cleaning out the cupboards and found lord alone knows how many unopened bags of the things. So we did what any self-respecting group of pissed-up lads would do: we went outside (it was 2am) and had a food fight.

Come the next morning, we emerged from the house to find a rabble of enraged neighbours muttering and staring daggers at us. Little surprise, really, given that the street, their gardens, doorsteps and cars were liberally strewn with little white beans. Surreal.

Anyway we were moving out that day so we didn't give a fuck. I think if we hadn't been, we'd have been lynched.

Off topic? Have you ever eaten a butter bean?

...no, neither have I.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Wed 23 May 2007, 17:05, Reply)

Apt..
Long story but I'm currently zipping between London and Birmingham, doing wizzy things with servers. Well, last night I was in Birmingham and the bastards have some sort of massive convention on that means that pretty much every hotel room in the fucking city is booked up. So my travel people put me in a pub.

Sounds great I can hear you thinking.

But this is a pub in Sparkhill. This is an area where taxi drivers refuse to pick up from. This fucking pub is possibly the worst, dirtiest and most dangerous bar that I've had the misfortune to drink in.

The guys I'm working with are staying in hotels costing £140 a night. They are eating meals that cost about £40 for the meal and £25 for a bottle of wine.

My pub costs £15 a night. And they don't do food so I had to brave the streets and get a kebab. Guess how much a large donner cost?

£1.50

Guess what a £1.50 donner tastes like. Go on - guess.

You're wrong. It's even fucking worse than that.

So tonight, I'm sleeping in the datacenter and ordering a pizza.

Cheers

Legless
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Wed 23 May 2007, 17:02, Reply)

Ironically
One of the worst meals I ever had was in Rome. We found a restaurant via 'Rough Guide' and saved it for a our last night after a romantic week... it was utterly bizarre. Everything came flambed, but possibly using petrol, it was quite violent. There was a table inhabited by what were quite obviously mafiosa with their girlfriends (who were quite fit in a slutty mob-girlfriend kind of way) and whenver I glanced over, i got some serious looks from the men. I stopped looking quite early on. The waiter was quite rude and despite us ordering in semi-decent italian, brought the wrong dishes out then feigned incomprehension when we complained. As well as every meal being on fire, it consisted of the actual main (albeit the wrong item) and covered in a single, but complete layer of sweetcorn relish. Imagine a disc of sweetcorn on a plate with a 'main item' shaped lump in the middle. On fire. A very very odd meal indeed.
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Wed 23 May 2007, 16:44, Reply)

The Orange diet
Not incredibly bad food per se, just not very good for you especially given how long I survived off it. Durning Uni I was allergic to cooking so I tended to live off Bird's Eye waffles, crispy pancakes, fish fingers, beans, oven chips. Everything I ate was either orange or yellow with the red of the ketchup for variety. For years. Horrific. (Sometimes I'd have a real tomato but then I'd have to get roaring drunk to get rid of the taste)

Strange, I love cooking now and am something of a health freak.
(pumpkinbug, Wed 23 May 2007, 16:43, Reply)

cuba
when i ordered a diet coke on cuban airlines it looked like a tin of toxic waste. and the writing was in some sort of cyrillic script.

that was the best thing i ate all 10 days. dear god. how can a tropical island have such bad fruit and fish, acidic soil excuses or not?

everything is fried. the meat. the fish. the fruit? the ICE CREAM?!

if it hadn't been for the hotel shop selling vast slabs of nestle chocolate and the unlimited swim up bar, we'd have lost pounds that holiday.

amazing place though. i had to bribe the police not to arrest me and steal my passport... happy days.
( rachelswipe with a fork, Wed 23 May 2007, 16:25, Reply)

Romanian food
My God I don't know how I forgot - I think my mind has tried to delete it to protect my sanity.
I did some DJing in Romania last year, and was there for a week. For the first few days (until we actually found a superb restaurant) I ate the worst, worst food I've ever seen. One dish that particularly springs to mind was a 2mm thick piece of flabby grey meat purporting to be pork sat in a grey puddle of pseudo mashed potato and about a cupful of liquid grease.

Greasy mash and shoe leather - mmmmmm.....

The year before I was out there for New Years Eve, when my dinner consisted of a stone cold chicken kebab. With chips in it. My God I was miserable!

Great country, lovely people - take a packed lunch.
( Monty Boyce, My cheese game is strong, Wed 23 May 2007, 16:12, Reply)

@ Edenmonster
Sorry to be an uber-geek, but to kill all known everything the magical temperature required is 121 degrees not 80.
botulinum spores can servive anything up to this temperature.
The autoclave at work goes to this temperature and requires a pressure of about 2.5 to 3 atmospheres.

You can't do that in a wok!
(GoldenNinjaWarrior doesn't want to, but the voices made him...., Wed 23 May 2007, 15:04, Reply)

Oh, and
My dad once tried making spaghetti and meatballs with tomato sauce (tinned tomatoes, herbs etc). Seemed harmless, until we ate some and discovered he had also added a bag of sugar or two.

Me being about 8-9 years old, and my brother being 6-7, we sort of played around with it, like kids do, trying to avoid eating it, then eventually we commented on it being too sweet.

Cue my dad yelling, making my brother cry, then (literally) kicking him out of his chair and out the kitchen.
I'd never seen my dad get so violent before.*

Needless to say, he never cooked it again.**

*that was a lie
**that was a lie too.
(Dracia flailed on, Wed 23 May 2007, 14:59, Reply)

Aqualandia
In... I think it was Benidorm in Spain. It's basically a water-themed leisure park. It's all good, apart from the fact the water is salty instead of chlorinated.

At lunch, me, my parents, brother, and grandparents went to the part where they serve food, like burgers and kebabs. My parents wanted to go to the kebab stall, but my grandparents insisted that we must try the burgers, as they were the best for miles around.

We bit into them, and were instantly horrified. We were expecting beef burgers, but were instead presented with something that tasted and looked like boiled spam.

My nan looked to the table next to ours, and commented on how nice the food that those people were eating looked. They were eating fsckin kebabs!
(Dracia flailed on, Wed 23 May 2007, 14:53, Reply)