My Lunch Can Beat Up Your Lunch!

Lunch Box 177: My July 4th

 
   
 

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British fish, Korean cake, French fries... what nationality is broccoli? This lunch is made from some of the extra from my July 4th feast. Being that I'm an American, and July 4th is USA's birthday, more or less, I cooked my traditional celebratory repast: Fish and chips, just as I'd eaten them in England. Ahhh, deep-fried, greasy food, mmmm! I did cheat on the fries, however - they're baked instead of fried because by that point I'd had enough of hot oil. That turned out to be a good move, as I no longer have the tolerance for fried food that I used to. A little goes a long way.

With this is some steamed broccoli, because I had to stick something healthy in this box, and a piece of Bánh in sâu* riêng, which is Vietnamese durian cake. Durian is an interesting fruit. They are huge, basketball-sized, weirdly-shaped, spiky, unfriendly-looking things, and when ripe they smell... bad. Really bad. 99 Ranch Market sells them in the frozen foods department so they can't ripen and chase everyone out of the store with their stench. I've been curious about them, and as an anosmic** I could deal with it, but I don't want my neighbors calling 911. The cake seemed like a good way to sample the fruit without the stinkiness. And... well, it's distinctive. It's hard and crumbly, not at all spongelike or cakey. And it tastes as if the baker had previously been mixing garlic, and hadn't cleaned the bowl before starting this. Which is, I understood, how the actual fruit tastes. Hmm... I'll go out on a limb and say that durian is probably an acquired taste.

* Sorry, can't find a way to get both the ^ and ` accents above the A.
** Person with (almost) no sense of smell

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