A Complete Culinary Catastrophe
Monday, November 13, 2006 at 8:31PM While on vacation, I was lucky enough to find an establishment that served me two grotesque abominations on clean plates. Indeed, it was a close question of whether the heaps of organic material fit the within the definitional scope of the word “food”. After conducting my taste test, ocular examination, and olfactory survey, I was displeased to announce that I had found a new winner for the worst meal that I had ever consumed.
The previous winner had been an establishment in Peru, who had served me a whole fish – scales, eyes, bones, and all – in a dish of lukewarm butter. The fish hadn’t been cooked; but in all fairness, it wasn’t cold either. It was room temperature warm. It wasn’t sushi; but it wasn’t an entrée either. The only thing that had been complete about that meal was the butter, it’s fresh churned yellowness seeping in and out of the not fresh not a meal fish.
Any challengers, therefore, had a high standard to live up to. The new clear victor though, managed to surpass that ghastly meal in a new and equally puzzling manner. My wife and I were at the Auckland airport, in the domestic terminal. Both of us were ravenously hungry, which is why we even bothered to eat at the airport, as both of us were and are aware of the general obvious rule that airport food is beyond bad. The rule is actually somewhat comforting, because I know that no matter where I am in the world, airport food will be bad.
Since our stomachs sounded like a pride of angry lions, we had to take a risk. We stopped at a little café and began to eye the menu. Since we were at the airport, we automatically avoided anything pre-wrapped and packaged, because it was probably already being eaten by the trapped bacteria. However, we made our second mistake when ordering. We ordered two dishes: a plate of crispy “spicy” chips (Americans, read this last word as “fries”), and a plate of nachos.
This was a clear mistake because New Zealand is thousands upon thousands of miles away from Mexico, America, Spain, and any other country that could remotely produce quality nachos. Moreover, it is very likely that many people in New Zealand have no idea what nachos or a nacho even is. But what can I say. We were living life on the edge. So, we waited. At the airport café table, sipping our water, we waited. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught glimpses of people eating things that looked like boiled cardboard. Despite all of this, my stomach continued to grumble and rumble. In the midst of a particularly loud yowl, the food arrived.
My first vision of the nachos was a color. Red. Well, two colors. Red and white. It wasn’t that the chips were red. Actually, they were red. Red was not the original color of the yellow corn chips. The chips were red because they were dripping, no, not just dripping, but seemingly oozing some sort of thin red liquid everywhere. The white; well the top of the chips was covered with a hard baked layer of white cheese topped with snow cap – no, permanent glacier of sour cream. Gingerly, I extracted a chip and sniffed it. The smell was familiar, yet different. I popped it in my mouth and began to chew. It wasn’t salsa. It wasn’t tomato sauce. It wasn’t even ketchup. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t enjoyable either. It didn’t mesh well with corn. Midway through my second chip, I had an epiphany about what the red glutinous omnipresent fluid was. IT was chutney. It was Indian chutney that covered all the chips completely.
This was an odd mixture. Admittedly, I like chutney. And I like chips. So the combination could have been a success. Instead, it was a sticky, gooey, taste disaster after three or so chips. Compounding the problem was the lack of any other nacho filler. No beans. No tomatoes or vegetables of any sort. No chicken or meat. And no guacamole or avocado. Bravely, I tried to salvage some of the dish. I tried the cheese. I couldn’t quite make out which cheese it was, but it wasn’t cheddar. It was some sort of soft cheese or cheeses. It was like gruyere, or havarti, or both, or some variation of the two melted together. Combine that with corn, chutney, and sour cream, and you had a taste that was unique. It was unique in the sense that it tasted well, bad at best– or just plain revolting.
I glanced over at my wife to see how she was doing with her dish of potatoes. After all, there was no real way to ruin a potato. One could boil them to eyeball consistency, serve them raw, or mash them to mush, and they would still probably be edible. Her plate had a thick, two inch layer of stuff clinging and seeping down into the recesses of the fried brown wedges underneath. I asked her what the mystery substance on her plate was, and received a litany of complaints as the plate was unceremoniously shoved in my direction.
I casually stopped it carefully with one hand, and watched the mystery substance sway and gyrate of its own accord. Gingerly, I extricated one of the least covered fries and slowly tasted it. Again, I was absolutely stumped. At first I thought it was sour cream, because it definitely had a clear dairy – or bird poop consistency. Since I had a sample of actual, New Zealand, “sour cream” on my “nachos”, I conducted a taste test. The two white substances tasted nothing alike. My examination of the lumps and humps of the mass lead me to conclude one thing: the substance was either yogurt or cottage cheese, or perhaps guano after all. Whatever it was, it made absolutely no sense whatsoever that the substance should be placed in bulk artery clogging, gag reflex stimulating mass on simple potatoes. Unfortunately, there was nothing to do but sadly leave two full plates of “food” on the table, and wander off hungry and cranky in search of sustenance from the nearest trash bin or floor.
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