Cold Blooded Yet Delicious Murder

It seems to me that I've been doing a lot of eating out lately. Easy jokes aside, it's kinda liberating not having a kitchen because it takes a lot of the decision making away from me. Do I want to cook tonight? No! Beccause every time I go into the shared kitchen my landlady is there and she gives me funny looks! Since she's responsible for keeping me in clean underthings I usually leave well enough alone and slide on outta the guesthouse and into the city. Every street (this is probably an exagerration, it's more like every other) has at least one street vendor on it. They'll have a gas ring and then probably soom rice or noodles or bread. The rice is usually fried and a little spicy, so that's a safe bet. The noodles are either chewy and yellow, like they'd go well with some textured soya pieces and chicken and mushroom flavouring. Maybe in some kinda pot? They're good. The other choice is the thin white ones and they're a but more common, especially as a part of pho. Pho is what haoppens when you boil a cow's bones into a broth and then flinging some noodles in to boil. Then some fairly raw meat gets added on the way to your table, so it cooks in the boiling liquid. Oh, and it's the piled high with my arch nemesis: lots of coriander! Serve with beansprouts and something green to taste. That's the national dish, and it's wholly unsuitable for breakfast. Naturally it's at its best before ten am, because they cook it before any sane person should be out of bed. Also naturally I pretty much avoid it. Unlike these uncivilised folks I've been conditioned to think that bone marrow is best given to dogs and since dogs are two rungs below child molesters on my list, then I'm not touching no marrowbone jelly. I don't care how gloddy my coat would be.

Failing a street chappie, I could visit one of the city's fine fast food outlets I suppose. The number one chain is Lotteria, Korea's answer to McDonalds with grey meats and the oddly popular 'shrimp burger'. Not as tasty as it could be, and the 'Happy Meal' doesn't come with a toy. Fail. There's also KFC (and they still call it Kentucky Fried Chicken on the signage, or the Vietnamese for it anyway) and they do mashed potatoes! Crazy! Once was enough there, because they don't do hash browns in the burgers. Pretty sure they're losing out there.

So what this was all building up to is what I did on Saturday night. One of the ladies from work was leaving for Thailand (and then teaching Austrailians to speak correctly in Melbourne) so a few of us went out for a meal. A Vietnamese BBQ meal! Cue the pictures:

Here we see the table, festooned with beers, bowls, dipping salt and two big ol' griddle plate affairs. Heated from beneath by a gas tank (that I kept kicking by mistake, almost dooming us all to a fiery end) they get mighty hot. Probably best not to drink when using them...
So from the menu you pick out your dead animal of choice from a list going from mundane old cow and chicken to frog and eel. All the best weird animals were pricy (Frogs are tiny dammit, they should be cheap) so it was satay squid (pictured on the plate to the left) and dipping shrimp for me.
So the plate covered in squid and peanut ooze was brought to me, along with a lot of nice sticky rice and a couple of things to dip in it. Soy sauce is almost always served with a chilli in it, to give it more kick and this is a good thing. There was also a lime and some salt, but this was less random than I thought. It's pretty good for making the shrimp squirm...


Oh yeah, they squirm. You'd squirm too if you were plucked from your tank and impaled on a wooden stick. You'd squirm too if you were basted with chili and pepper while you were alive, and you'd certainly squirm if your final moments were on a very hot metal plate next to some aubergine and pieces of goat. You'd squirm too if your final legacy wasn't a family, a memorial bench or a three-volume-novel. You'd squirm if your last act on this Earth was being peeled and eaten. Personally, I think the squirming just made them tastier.

I could do without the eyes popping and tiny high pitched pleas for mercy though.

So I gave it my best. I negotiated the pieces o' squid onto the hot plate using my chopsticks. I plucked them off using the same chopsticks and then I shoveled them into my mouth along with plenty of rice using the same chopsticks again. One pair for the whole affair was pretty good going I thought. The rice does break apart when exposed to any stress though, so the more beer I necked the less rice made the trip safely from bowl to mouth. It was carnage.



Indeed, it was the pre-service skewering that made the shrimp the easiest to cook, albeit perhaps not from a moral standpoint. One of the teachers assured me that they didn't feel pain and, while this was wholly unbelievable since I'm sure they increase in twitching and squirming coinciding with the application of heat was less than coincidental, I clunk to it like Leo clang to that raft at the end of Titanic. Not even death would pry my icy hands of the comforting lies and without that bitch Winslet to push me off I kept my head throughout. Pictured above is the carnage I left in my wake.

Between us we ate a lot of goat, beef, chicken, squid, shrimp and rice. An awful lot. The table looked like the somme if the somme had been fought by delicious, tender animals instead of bland, stringy people. Hell, I'll say it now: the world would be a better place if all war was fought by meat. Someone get Cheney on the phone, and find me a chicken that can defuse a roadside bomb...