Saturday, December 4, 2010

Pork Chops and a Possible Faux Irish

Asado is a technique for cooking cuts of meat, usually consisting of beef alongside various other meats, which are cooked on a grill (parrilla) or open fire. It is considered the traditional dish of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and southern Brazil. (definition from Wikipedia)

This was my last meal eaten upon the evening of the first Friday of December in the year of two-thousand and ten. I chauffeured myself to my friends Ricky and Tracy’s house for supper, and entertainment via Mystery Science Theater 3000. As I entered Ricky sat at the kitchen table chopping up portions of a hog like a street side butcher in Vienna during the 1900’s. Though he had all of the ingredients necessary to make the meat portion of the meal, we didn’t have any tortillas to go with the meal.

As Ricky was cooking the young lass Tracy and I ventured off to the local grocery store in search of unleven Mexican bread and some cow’s milk to make some hazelnut cocoa with. Being early December, stores are splattered with flashes of red and green in a vain attempt to force people into celebrating Jesus’ birth, but you know, without the Jesus part. Tracy and I spoke of Christmas trees of years past, and how as we grew older our relatives traded in for a more artificial stock, extending the whole plasticly-fakeness that goes with Christmas when you become an adult.

The store had felt the need to have two out of it’s three doors closed, causing a proper fire hazard. We journeyed forth to the baked good section, Tracy used her optic spheres to spot what she believed to be miniature Christmas trees. Yet, as it happened they were simply rosemary bushes, leaving the both of use feeling quite the fool.
We scurried away in embarrassment.

We did eventually find some pine trees, but they were a little on the Charlie Brown side. But, no amount of flailing our arms wildly made it any better. For a reason unknown to us, the pine needles were decorated with a fine layer of sparkly glitter elements. The best I could muster was that a fairy drank too much raspberry vinaigrette and had a liquid laugh in the arboretum.

Following our arboreal observations we each took our one dairy, and one baked product and scuttled off to the registers. Our cashier was a squat young man with a bush of brown hair adoring his head. Overall all he was unremarkable, except for the fact that he spoke with a an Irish accent. Solely based on my aural skills his accent was pretty good, used the soft vowels, and dropped the “h” in any words containing a “th” at the beginning, they were both there.

He almost had the two of us fooled, except that what sprang from his noise hole was not something that sounded like an Irishman, but rather a crappy television stereotype of an Irishman. I revealed him that I was partially Irish, and he started asking things like “you like fighting a lot of people?” and “You like drinking?” This these things that were usually attributed to the Irish by people who made them build the railroads out to California with the Chinese. Following his statements I replied with a “no,” but I said I did suffer from the crippling Irish guilt, like all mean from the Emerald Isle. He seemed to not know of what I was speaking. As a result Tracy and I became rather skeptical of whether or not he was what he made himself out to be. I decided that he wasn’t. An Irishman without Catholic guilt? That’s like a comic by Stan Lee without an excessive amount of exclamation marks.