In light of the Duggar scandal, I was going to make some poor tasting jokes about sexual deviance in repressed cultures. I even had a note pad full of my scribblings on essays from Freud to Kinsey, the histories of the Babylonians to Fundamentalist Muslims, and I even found this wonderful post from the Center for Morality in Public Life making the case that society crumbles when people concern themselves with sex for pleasure instead of procreation.
Lot of Roman references.
Love them Romans.
Anyway it was all going to boil down to the fact that it's getting time to have "The Talk" with my own son. The Victorian in you is probably thinking he's way too young for "The Talk", but I'm sorry to tell you my friends, it's the internet age, and he's already being exposed to dirty words and naked girls by the kid down the street.
I can't tell you how much bad information comes from the kid down the street. He's the kind of kid that will be the first on the block to tell everyone the truth about Santa Clause, that there are worms in Big Macs, that you can catch Ebola from climbing trees, and that cops can shoot you whenever they want. He also knows all the bad words.
Thankfully, and I have no idea how I did this, but I raised a kid who is not only suspicious of the kid down the street, but he's also pretty fearless when it comes to asking me to clarify things.
He's already heard me utter most of the bad words anyway.
The Talk is going to go pretty easy.
I'm actually more worried about his mom.
(That's a joke. Her and I have The Talk all the time.)
Actually . . . not ALL the time . . . wait . . . why am I telling you this?
Anyway, it was going to be a good post. Funny, a little ruthless, some cringe worthy comments, and a few of those dirty quips that make you fell embarrassed because you laughed out loud in a public space and can't explain to the person sitting next to you.
But I was having a hard time getting going. Part of it was anger. Part of it was disgust. Part of it (and this is going to sound weird) but part of it was sheer disappointment.
Why do religious people have to be such a f$#@ing nightmare?
Seriously, can't we have one god fearing person, claiming to be a good role model, who isn't a total shit storm?
You got the Dali Lama and some might say the current Pope, but his pre-Pope stance on homosexuality keeps him out of the running.
Martin Luther King maybe. Unless you were married to him and weren't immune to the clap.
A case could be made for Jesus himself, but just imagine the scandal if Josh Duggar ran into a jewish temple screaming at everyone and overturning furniture.
No lie . . . it's in the bible.
The problem is what a psychologist would call "Cognitive Dissonance"
Holding two competing thoughts in your head at the same time.
"How to claim moral superiority when the Supreme Being is clearly a sociopath."
I may have just written the title of my next book.
It's that dissonance that leads to repression that leads to an explosion of deviance. Unless you're a writer for the Center for Morality in Public Life, to which my response would be: "Pick up a f@#$ing newspaper!"
Endquote.
Anyway, pissed and frustrated I did the only thing one can do when one is pissed and frustrated, I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge door and stood there for a while.
I wasn't hungry, I just needed some 'me' time and I'd already used the commode.
Inside the fridge is a bag of basil and cilantro that I got from my mom's herb garden.
Thanks Mom.
The basil, both green a purple varieties, I turned into the most amazing pesto sauce a few days ago.
Pesto is pretty easy. Basil, Garlic, Parmesan Cheese, Pine Nuts, Salt, Olive oil . . . puree. Although I adjust that recipe based on whim and the availability of Pine nuts.
This one, I substituted pine nuts with sesame seeds (you get the salt without that piney aftertaste) and I also used my handy dandy Garlic salt grinder from Trader Joes instead of the fresh garlic cloves.
When you use fresh garlic there's a spicy acidity that I personally love, but it can overpower the simple dish. I went with the dry stuff, which made my wife roll her eyes at me, but was later forgiven because the subtlety of the dish was off the hook.
She's not as enthusiastic about experimentation as I am . . . but she's just as hungry.
So now I've got this cilantro.
Cilantro is a whacky herb.
It's pretty easy to grow, although, speaking of sexual deviance, it doesn't live very long, and unlike Onan of the old testament, it has to drop it's seed on the ground quickly if it wants to survive.
Onan dropped his seed on the ground because he didn't want to impregnate his dead brother's widow.
Poor Onan.
And that is why you can't masterbate.
Poor you.
But the wackiness of cilantro doesn't end there.
In order to get all it's herbalicious goodness, you gotta clip it while it's still very young, which Freud says could be dangerous.
But once you've got it . . . what do you do with it?
Salsa.
Guacamole.
That's pretty much it.
And you can't really serve it up for parties because it turns out that a good portion of the population has certain receptors that make the fresh herb taste like soapy bitterness. It's actually genetic. The gene that inhibits the enjoyment of cilantro is OR6A2.
You could turn a homosexual straight easier than getting an OR6A2 carrier to go to Chipotle.
It's as if god intended some people to like it and some people to not.
But there's hope.
Because . . . internet.
All I had to do was to type in Cilantro and Recipes and I was flooded with hundreds of different options. All shapes. All sizes. Different types of meats. Different types of non-meats.
If you know what I'm saying.
Most of the recipes were for salsa or guacamole, and salsa-guacamole, and guacamole-salsa, and one might think that the definition of a cilantro dish is between one salsa and one guacamole, but there were lots of other ideas too.
Some of which didn't sound all that good to me, and some were just variations of mixing cilantro and butter, and some were . . . well . . . deviations I didn't necessarily want to participate in, but I don't think anyone was harmed. As long as it was consensual, everyone can have a good time.
There's no cognitive dissonance there. Especially if no one can see you click.
The internet can be a wacky place for choice and taste, but it's a godsend for the curious, and a much better place for information than the kid down the street.
Now the recipes I will be trying out this week include a Cilantro Pesto, a Cilantro Lemon Sauce, and for myself alone, a Cilantro Ginger Hummus.
Love my hummus like I love them Romans.
I will report back next week.
I'm not sure if my son is going to like any of these dishes. He may or may not be an OR6A2 carrier, which is fine by me.
And since it's food we're talking about and not repressed sexual urges, I would feel perfectly comfortable experimenting on my sister.
But I'll probably be experimenting on my wife first.
Not because I'm the moral majority.
I'm just a damn good role model. Even if I don't know how that happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment