o/t - boiled goldfish, advice needed

Disappointed to find this is not a culinary thread. Thought you were going to be looking for suggestions for an accompaniment.

 

Get a dogfish everybody’s happy .
Failing that smash the goldfish bowl put a football at its foot and tell her you’ll kill those pesky neighbours kids.

 

Why, have you got any? I'm always up for new food ideas.

 

I got a new one. My missus will be seriously unimpressed if it lives for 14 years as she hates them, and I really can't see Isla wanting to take it to uni with her!

 

Shredded tortoise in a hamster coulis? Eat through the entire menagerie of pets in one sitting.

 

I'm reckon when we were in China we must have seen that on a menu. Maybe not the coulis bit as I'm sure you can only make coulis out of fruit, but shredded tortoise must have been there. Actually, knowing the Chinese, they probably can make coulis out of hamster. If it has legs, they'll swallow it. Every single part of it. This is not some sort of flippant, stereotype-fulfilling, casually racist comment. It really is true. Waste not, want not.

 

Haven't been to China, but I've been to China Town in San Francisco, which I reckon is about as close as you get food wise. They were selling things, lots of things, that I wouldn't put in the kitchen bin. I'd have to wrap it in a plastic bag and put it in the outside bin it smelled so bad. Dry rotting fish. Buckets of it. The supermarkets were like a zombie apocalypse had hit the animal kingdom.

 

I dont think we were much different in the way we prepare and cook food not 150 years ago. We in the west have become so accustomed to processed food in nice packages without heads and dangly bits that we have forgotten what real food looks like. I love butchers and grocers but they are slowly disappearing from our high streets and markets in favour of perfectly formed meat and fruit and veg. I remember my great nan in the eighties often having a pigs head on the kitchen table. My wife is Chinese and ive eaten some strange stuff. And you are definitely right about not wasting. We often cook a chicken then make a soup out if the carcass, but that used to be done in this country and i bet a lot of older people still do it. My wife's family originate from Hong Kong and when we go over there we do eat a lot of different food. A lot more strange stuff is eaten in mainland China though, like dogs, which is abhorrent. HK people are not very fond of mainlanders.

 

Are you sure Bruce was a goldfish and not a shark?

 

The smells in the backstreets of Shanghai were absolutely as you describe. I can still catch a whiff now if I close my eyes, not that I'd wish to. To be fair I did eat some incredible meals in China, but the odours are not for the faint hearted. My missus says she never wants to go there again, primarily due to the food smells, and my mum who used to live with a Cantonese couple when she was a postgrad student in York has never been to a Chinese restaurant in her adult life. We are all for buying real meat from local farms, butchers etc and always make stock from any leftovers so we're not wimps when it comes to real food, but my mum's flatmate used to collect and then consume all the bits of chicken and fish that my mum deemed not even stock-worthy!

 

I was really looking forward to my breakfast until I had another peep at this thread. Now I'm not sure whether I'll ever eat again.