Spring Break

The Old Lady and I went to Seattle and Vancouver B.C. for our spring break. I got some fresh oysters, which were delicious. They were slightly salty, a little meaty, and a good size. The Old Lady said that she wouldn’t eat raw oysters because you can get hepatitis from them. I obviously didn’t buy into that line of thinking. I like to think of myself as being culinarily adventurous. My only failing is I can’t get behind eating mushrooms. Some varieties gross me out to the point I have a hard time smelling them being cooked.
Anyway back to culinary adventures. I’ll eat pretty much anything once, and then again from somewhere else just to make sure it was prepared properly the first time. This means putting things I don’t like into my mouth twice. I’ll eat eel, chicken feet, iguana, cow brains, intestine, and tripe. If you’ve got something else exotic and tasty I’ll eat that too. This comes from growing up in El Paso and being bicultural. Foods Americans think are nasty, unclean, or disgusting are a common part of Mexican cuisine. Things Mexicans wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, creamed chip beef on toast jumps to mind, are staples of American cuisine.
But hepatitis isn’t a matter of cuisine choice. It’s a serious disease, maybe worth laying off the raw oysters for. But I laugh in the face of hepatitis. When I was a kid my old man would take me to Juarez, which is the city on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. My mom would always warn him not to give me any ice cream because it could carry hepatitis, they didn't pasteurize milk then. Some of my fondest memories are of my old man and me hiding behind a corner wolfing down ice cream bars while my mom was bargaining for tortillas or something. After years of eating possibly tainted ice cream, improperly cooked pork, and various spooky things off of handcarts in Juarez I never caught anything. I have a hard time believing that a half dozen fresh oysters from the private beds of some fancy joint would ever be as dangerous as a seafood cocktail (these seafood cocktails were made from octopus, squid, and shrimp that sat in the sun all day with no refrigeration) in Juarez. I’ll continue eating oysters until they take them from my cold jaundiced hands.