The Road To Flavor Country Is Paved With Chicken Nipples

Most fast food chains volumize their meat with chicken nipples, and why not—they’re inexpensive, abundant, and packed with complex layers of flavor. This spongy, cloud-like tissue creates a receptive environment within the meat for a sauce or marinade to fully penetrate its inner fibers. The road to flavor country is paved with chicken nipples.

Which brings us to a long-neglected aspect of this blog: tips for rich, savory, home-style cooking (the art of which I have learned from producing industrial volumes of soup as a peon in a corporate kitchen). I thought I’d make something featuring the chicken nipple as the star of the dish, as it has been hidden in dark, meaty folds for far too long.

And now, without further ado, the recipe reveal:

Minnesota Wild Rice Chicken Nipple Soup

Ingredients

–Wild Rice

-Chicken nipples (A note on the nipples: fresh is obviously best. As for acquisition, the chicken from whom you are gathering the nipples should be dead. Some countries (cough, Bolivia, cough) still adhere to nipple harvest traditions which are antiquated and, quite frankly, barbarian. We won’t go into that. In my home kitchen, I use humane methods. So, the most simple way is the lop the chicken’s head off (I like to use a machete and pretend I’m a roided-out Barry Bonds). Once its got no head, that pinche pollo is gonna wanna take off runnin’, and you’re gonna wanna stop that from happenin’. Grab it, and hold it close. Now grasp the headless chicken with one hand, and use the other to drive your knife downwards over the fowl’s anterior pectoralis. Do this quickly, before all the blood spurts out of the giant hole on top of the bird, for you want a little, but not too much engorgement.)

-Stock (After the harvest, you’re going to have an entire chicken (sans nipples) left over. Don’t throw it out. Stick it in a large pot with some carrots and onions, a few herbs, cover with water, and simmer for a few hours.)

It doesn’t really matter what else you put in the soup. You’ve already got chicken nipples, which will enhance anything they come in contact with. And the best thing about teats is their versatility—they’re uniquely delicious whether baked, boiled, grilled, or sautéed.

This soup is perfect for an early spring evening such as this.

And also, you’re welcome.

The Philosophunculist Travelogue, Part Three: Nebraska

‘Marooned’ by Howard Pyle

Along I-80 somewhere in Nebraska, you will enter a zone where your car radio picks up only four stations: country, country, religious talk radio, and country. To free your mind from this insanity, you pull into a gas station. In the bathroom you find a half-naked trucker, his back blanketed with a botched snake tattoo, taking a bath in the sink.

All you have left then is the road. It’s cruel, really.

Even pirates were kind enough to leave the marooned with a loaded pistol; Nebraska leaves you with 400 miles of……Nebraska.

Oh yeah, Nebraska has Chimney Rock. We added two hours to the trip to see this monument because hey, it didn’t seem too far out of the way, and it’s in the game Oregon Trail.

This can be said of the stone erection: It’s worth driving by, if you live within sight of it. Cool to see, yes. Worth a detour on an overnight road trip? Nah. But we can say we saw it. Someone, somewhere, at some point will be impressed by that, maybe.

After Chimney Rock, there were some bluffs and semi-interesting geological features, for about ten minutes. And a fox. We saw a fox. Then, back to I-80, and on into southeast Wyoming……..

The Philosophunculist Travelogue, Part Two: Iowa

It was dark both times we drove through Iowa, therefore we did not see much. We smelled a lot, though. Cow dung is the name of the game in Iowa.

However, the return trip up Interstate 35 is fun. Every exit sign names two towns, and each combination sounds like the name of some old-money kid at a Massachusetts private school:

-Roland McCallsburg

-Clarion Hampton

-Sheffield Belmond

-Rockwell Swaledale

-Jewell Eldora

-Stanhope Randall

-Huxley Maxwell

-Norwalk Cumming

And there was one that said Manly Forest City, a place I reckon is not for out-of-towners.

Somebody documented all these on okroads.com, which is where I stole the pictures from.

Exciting, exciting stuff.

Cleaning Out The Spam Queue

As a blogger, one of your responsibilities is to occasionally comb through the comment spam queue to be sure that no insightful contributions landed there by mistake. Today, I caught this important message from someone called Aksesoris Kalung Menara Eiffel:

“Nowadays there are many crops available in the market and you should go with
high quality products. On the other hand, the hair loss could be connected to the anti-depressants you are taking.
Everybody has to massage the hair because with the help of massage the blood
in our veins of the head circulate more fast and we have good growth of the hair.”

So, Aksesoris Kalung Menara Eiffel, if you are reading this, please know that you have been removed from the spam list, and we here at The Philosophunculist are massaging our hair, feeling the blood in our veins of the head circulating more fast.

The Summer of Catfish Jackson

Here is my summer plan.

It goes like this: leave a series of small circular patches on my face unshaved. These flocculent circles will grow into long, resplendent whiskers, like those of a catfish. That’s my plan. Look like a catfish. I drafted this list of names to adopt once I look more like a catfish:

Catfish Jackson

Whiskers McNulty

Bottom-Feeding Man Fish

Land-Walking Fish Man

Tuscaloosa Timothy

Of course, the plan ran into some resistance from Cassandra Morningfart, which is the real name of the real girl I’m dating.

Here is how that was resolved.

Cassandra Morningfart: “That would look stupid. And I will not call you Catfish Jackson.”

I then grabbed her mouth and moved it around so she appeared to be talking, and said in a replica of her voice, “Yeah! Try to look like a catfish! I’m on board!”

So after that speed bump, if it can even be called that after the speed and efficiency with which it was overcome, everything is in motion. I will soon look like a catfish. I will think like a catfish. I will eat like a catfish. I will worship catfish deities. I will ‘like’ statuses that my catfish friends post on Facebook. I will attend funerals and weddings for catfish. I will read catfish literature. This blog may start to lean towards the sympathies of catfish politics and catfish-lifestyle issues (can you believe catfish have a similar Bruce Jenner type controversy going on ‘down here?’ (‘down here’ is what we in the catfish world refer to what humans know as ‘underwater’)). I have already begun lining my apartment floors with mud and decomposed plant matter. I can now hold my breath for almost 20 seconds.

The transition is in full effect, as it were.

Catfish Jackson, signing off.

P.S. I’m not officially ‘signing off,’ for I cannot officially live ‘down here,’ (underwater) because that would kill me, so I will still have full access to human internet and many other amenities while I’m ‘up there,’ until the government (rightly) begins funding human-gill growing research programs.

Another Successful Earth Day

I didn’t use a bathroom today. Just held it all in. That’s a lot of unflushed water and unused toilet paper. At midnight, I will rush down to the creek behind my apartment and blast the built-up toxins from my body into the water. The fish will filter my waste through their gills, converting it into drinkable water, and I will clean my buttocks with a local rabbit. That rabbit will hop through the forest, pollinating flowers and trees as he or she goes along.

Soon, a small child will smell a flower that bloomed because of me, and deer miles downstream will drink from the creek and be refreshed by my body’s recycled garbage.

That’s how I contributed to The Solution.

What did you do for Mother Earth today?

Ten Things Only People Who Had A Wart On The Side Of Their Left Foot In The Early ’00s Will Understand

1. Mac’n’cheese is the best. Because of what you have lived through, no one will ever understand this quite the way you do!

2. Bacon. Right? LOL!

3. You like the word ‘awesomesauce,’ you call anything without gluten ‘G-free,’ and you greet people by saying ‘Wasabi, kemosabe?’ If you agree with any of the previous sentence, you did not really have a wart on the side of your left foot in the early ’00s. You fell into a trap laid by the superior intellect only a person that had a wart on the left side of their foot in the early ’00s could possess.

4. You have a friend that tried to get a wart just like yours, but during his quest, he ended up getting his foot chomped off by an alligator. And then his entire leg. Followed by his midsection, heart, and head. You watched the entire thing happen, but didn’t do anything, because, well, wart.

5. You enjoy reading lists about warts and wart-related issues.

6. You have taken an online quiz about what city you should really live in, but still live in the city you’ve always lived in.

7. You become irritated when people post lists about having a wart on the bottom of their right foot in the ’90s. Or worse yet, the army of aged husks from the ’60s that yap on and on about how great sac warts were back then. You won’t hear it. These people all suck, because they have not experienced what you have. Having a wart on the side of your left foot in the early ’00s was the quintessential wart-having experience, and anyone that says otherwise has warts that are dumb, and also very, very stupid.

8. You have purchased anti-wart cream.

9. You have shamed, belittled, and badgered anyone who doesn’t believe warts are beautiful, because, after having a wart on your left foot, YOUR opinion is the correct one, and if someone doesn’t share your perception of beauty, they are a body-shaming bully.

10. Overweight people with warts are disgusting.

How To Make Jelly Beans

Sometimes, when you haven’t bought groceries for a long period of time, you are forced to make do with what you have on hand in your pantry. I’ve created many exotic dishes this way—there was one time I only had four pounds of fresh mangoes, a cup of brown sugar, two sticks of celery, a pile of cranberries, a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil, two yellow onions, a few ounces of apple cider vinegar, a half cup of minced ginger, three garlic cloves, a pinch of salt, and some love. From this, I was somehow able to craft a batch of what I named Third World Cranberry Mango Chutney, for that is how I imagine suffering people cook. They make what they can, and then create folk music on garbage can lids. After that I pan-seared a twelve ounce steak in some butter and poured the chutney over it. I took one bite and threw everything away, because I realized that I do not like chutney, and the taste had ruined the steak.

So, the other day, I found myself with literally nothing but some very old grape jelly, and half a can of black beans. I put those beans in a pan, then added the jelly and let it simmer for five minutes.

I named the dish Jelly Beans. They did not taste good.

How To Make Honey Peanut Butter Oat Food Meal

Here’s something I concocted. It’s got honey. It’s got oats. It’s got peanut butter. You can call it honey peanut butter oat food meal, oats with honey and peanut butter snack, or H.O.P.B. (pronounced ‘hop’—the ‘B’ is silent, like in womb, or plumber).

Now, the ingredient list goes like this: oats, honey, and peanut butter. Also, love, care, friendship. And last, but not least, dead skin cells. This last is easiest, as it’s nearly impossible not to get them in there.

Grab a bowl. Insert the oats, honey, and peanut butter into it. The dead skin cells won’t be far behind. As to the love, care, and friendship, you go about getting those into the mix however you see fit.

Microwave for around 20 seconds. The chemical reaction betwixt the peanut butter and friendship and heat will form a sort of soft, paste-like substance that will make everything else mix together.

It’s ready to eat now. You earned it, champ.

 

358th Post Blowout!!!!

This is the 358th post of this blog. A great deal of labour, devotion, and inspiration has gone into all that writing. Let’s celebrate with a quote from a British chap:

“All the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.” —Bertrand Russell

Dammit.