Twisted Spinster

My stomach has been growling for a couple of days now. I’ll be sitting there and suddenly what sounds like a creaking door or a particularly irritated Jack Russell terrier will start sounding off from the direction of my bowels. I don’t know why — I’ve cut down on the greasy crap, and have been eating lots of fiber (fresh vegetables, salad, oatmeal). Then again, maybe that’s why. Apparently when you get older your stomach doesn’t digest as efficiently as it used to. But still they tell us old folks to start downing hard-to-digest fiber. Which is why old people fart. Or at least, why I do. That’s probably more information than you wanted about me.

Anyway, over at Rachel’s there’s been a long conversation about how there is no Mexican food in the UK and what is she going to do when she moves there. (Her guy got a job over there and they’ll be moving to Blighty real soon. That’s hysterical to me because of all the people on my blogroll Rachel is one of the last people I would think would end up in Britain. She just seemed so perfectly of her current location, Texas USA. Also she hates the cold, and Britain is apparently over its heat wave and has gone back to being cold and damp. And no, I am not totally seething with jealousy so much so that the green glow from my skin is scaring my cats. So not.)

To continue: her commenters are trying to help out with suggestions and stories or just joining in on the mutual moaning. As for me, I did what I always do these days when I read that someone has made a declaration that I find questionable (here, that there are no Mexican restaurants in England): I go to Google and look it up. I know that Google is a pack of America-hating communist rich jerks from some university, but they’re still a good source of links. Of course I found plenty of Mexican places listed in the UK. I don’t know about the quality of the food — It’s been almost thirty years since my one and only trip overseas, and while I experienced fine Indian and Chinese and Indonesian and Middle Eastern food, we didn’t look for any Mexican places. And of course most people aren’t even reading my link, and are going on and on about how they’ll mail Rachel care packages of tacos and hot sauce, and how there aren’t any Taco Bells over there.

Oh stop right there. Yes, there is a notion in the comments that Taco Smell, as it is known in these parts, is somehow “Mexican” food. As if. I’ve eaten Mexican food, both Tex-Mex and California Mex and “real” Mex prepared by real Mexicans (though not in Mexico), and I can tell you right now that Taco Bell’s “cuisine” is about as Mexican as apple pie. Maybe less so. It’s imitation Mexican, at best. But if you’re at all blocked up in the downstairs region I can recommend a couple of their tacos to break the dam, so to speak. Just be prepared to set a couple of days aside to spend on the commode. Lay up a nice pile of magazines.

As an aside, I don’t see what the big deal is about Mexican food. Just about everyone I know is obsessed with the stuff. “What’ll we eat tonight?” “Let’s go out for Mexican!” Said with the gleaming eyes of fanatics. And then we end up and some Fake-Mex place like Chili’s. But like I said, I’ve eaten the more authentic cuisine (when I lived in Miami there was the little place in Little Havana, of all neighborhoods, which was owned and run by Mexicans from Mexico, stocked with Mexican sodas and all kinds of things, where the food was the real stuff; and it was good too — all at a little hole-in-the-wall place). But I don’t see what’s so special about it. It’s basically the same heavy peasant fare that people eat the world over — meat, rice, beans — tarted up with hot chilis. I think that’s the draw, the hot chilis: apparently capsaicin is addictive, you build up a resistance to it like to any drug and you need more and more to fulfill your cravings. Also it increases endorphins, just like heroin. But it tastes better than sprinkling heroin on your food.

The thing I don’t understand is am I the only person in the universe who looks stuff up? Eighty percent of the people on Rachel’s comment listing simply accepts the sweeping declaration that “there is no Mexican food in England,” with the secondary notion that there is only the horrible English cuisine (which isn’t always that horrible, but I’ll get to it later), and they join in on the moaning. If it were me and my boyfriend told me there wasn’t Mexican food in England — well first, I’d never ask him, because men don’t know things like that. They don’t know any of the gatherer stuff women know — they’re the hunters, remember, programmed to go out and kill animals for dinner, not to look for seeds and nuts and shoe sales. Restaurants, being sophisticated places, come under the heading of “shops” in a male mind, and they don’t know where those places are, even in their own neighborhood. (But for some reason, they know where the bars and pubs are. I guess in prehistoric days herds of beer and whiskey roamed the land.) Anyway, the first thing I’d do is hit the internet — that’s why we have this thing. Or so I thought.

Even Steve is getting into the act. Well, he is a man — I guess it’s not manly to Google. That’ll be the new “asking for directions” — “I don’t need to Google it, I can find it on my own. I’ve got my spear! And I’m a man!” Two hours later you’re lost in a strange neighborhood of porn sites.

There’s also the predictable slams on English cuisine. Don’t misunderstand me, I’ve slammed it too — when I came back home from England I never wanted to see a potato again. (I’ve since recovered.)  But it’s basically what I call Your Grandma’s Cooking — if your grandma was a WASP like mine was. We’re talking anything made in the kitchen on the stove or in the oven. Roasts, boiled food, fried food. Vegetables are usually rendered into mush, for the comfort of people with bad teeth. The second starch is bread. Bread is white. Salad is a small pile of iceberg lettuce (in Europe, usually served at room temperature), with maybe a few cautious shavings of carrot or purple cabbage, and some bland mayonnaise-y dressing like Thousand Island. The desserts are good, though — mostly custard based, with piles of whip cream.

Someone made fun of the awful sandwiches they serve at British railway stations. I had some of those — mine was the same type of hard-boiled egg sandwich I used to make when I was a kid: slices of thin white bread, butter, one layer of sliced egg. And I had a ham sandwich in a restaurant that was one thin slice of ham, one leaf of lettuce, on a very thin, flat baguette. But the food here at such places isn’t much better. When I took the Amtrak up to North Carolina to get my car, I got a sandwich in the dining car that came in a plastic bag. It was on a white bun, and was turkey, I think — a few layers of thin-sliced meat and one slice of cheese. They did have a full bar, though.

That’s all for now. I’m off to see if I can’t persuade my electric company to give me a couple more days to pay my bill. They refused to give me an extension this time, I don’t know why — unless they’ve changed all their policies for some reason. (The girl told me her computer didn’t give a reason why.) It’s just been one of those months. I am collecting funds, as usual — and no, I won’t be buying booze, that’s just a joke. (I don’t know how winos do it — but then that’s why they’re living on the street.) Changed — booze is fattening anyway. I am thinking of running a campaign like Wikipedia’s — their goal is six million dollars. Mine is a bit more modest, though if you have a couple of million just lying around…

Hey, at least, unlike Wikipedia, I don’t pretend everything on here is trufax. 😉