June 17, 2007

We just need new dishes on the menu.... Current Plagues: Jellyfish (Japan/Pacific Ocean), locusts (Kansai) & hares (Milan).
  • - What do you want with your jugged hare? - Rabbit. - The jugged hare is rabbit. - What hare have you got that isn't jugged then? - Halibut. - What? Halibut hare? - Yes. It's got long pointy ears. - Is it dead?
  • Actually I recall there's a distinguished scientist who believes it will get increasingly harder in the coming decades for higher species to survive, due to depletion of species lower on the food chain. As a result, our grandchildren may thrive increasingly on jellyfish, bacteria-based products, and so forth rather than beef, chicken, and fish.
  • I'll have a peanut-butter and jellyfish, please.
  • Uhmmm,...the crisp, fresh saltyness of a Japanese jellyfish salad, the crunchy tangyness of charcoal roasted Egyptian locusts on the straw and the tender succulence of a danish X-mas hare! I have tried thenm all, and I like them! Actually, I do believe that it is only one or two specific species of jellyfish that are eaten in Japan - the ones I have tried were almost transperant with a bluish tinge and - strangely enough - they were not jellylike at all, but crisp in the same manner an apple is crisp. I do not think that the jellyfish have any nutritional value, whereas the locust are supposed to be rich in both carbohydrates and protein. Once you have discarded the legs, the head and the wings they make great snacks with cold Egyptian Stella beer.
  • I've eaten jellyfish several times - usually in a salad or cold dish. They aren't the ones in the story - although one prefecture is trying to promote eating these monsters. Nutritionally - mainly protein and salt - and the tactic here is to focus on the collagen aspect - eat jellyfish and you'll look years younger! The other point about jellyfish is that it can be quite filling...
  • I'd like to see someone try to make a dish out of irukandji.[wp]
  • Fuck! I meant to link to here.
  • Jellyfish The dark sea dreams them. They are the inexchangeable currency of dreams, the interest the other world pays and pays into this one. In the blueing pre-dawn they seem hewn out from the littoral like great, waterlogged diamonds, an interior gleam. Who speaks for them speaks for the secret side of the womb for they are the long-tasseled death-bonnets of children we conceive but never bring to term. And so we love and jointly curse them. It is impossible to tell if they reach for us or we for them, so strange is their delicate gravity: They are sisters to the moon then, and pulse in her wake, a curdled blooming of echoes as she too is an echo. But in the fluorescent pink and green pockets of their bodies, softer than night, they're smuggling rumors of those suns we fail to imagine. They hold whole oceans beneath their umbrellas. Tell me, friend, is there an end to revelation? The poison flowers blossom inside me like colored Rorschachs I might come to believe in. Evening and thunderheads in the austral sky, the jellyfish tides, an exhibition of lightnings. Scaled-down Hiroshimas of the deep, they flare in the mind, their cold medusa-bells resounding, calling us back to the black sands of sleep. --George David Clark