unsung

You'll never see my name in the credits, but in some small way I associated with the Iron Chef America. My friend J works at the Food Network as a researcher for the show and every so often he asks me to help with an obscure ingredient that one of the Iron Chefs requests.

Not that I'm even a big fan of ICA, it lacks that certain passion that the Japanese Iron Chef show had, but I like the challenge of trying to figure out what these foods are.

The first challenge is trying to figure out what they hell the IC is asking for. Apparently his English writing skills are pretty bad, because the ingredients are invariably misspelled.

One of the latest ingredients was called "shutou," (originally spelled "syutou" when given to my friend) which after some searching I discovered to be the "salted offal of bonito."

uh.

From dictionary.com:
"offal:
n : viscera and trimmings of a butchered animal often considered inedible by humans"

Often considered inedible. But apparently not always, because someone had the brilliant idea of salting it and eating it. Supposedly this is something that is often consumed with copious amounts of alcohol. I know I would need to be very, VERY drunk to even consider eating this. I would need to be so blitzed that when someone told me I was about to eat offal I would need to hear "Waffles" and my brain would need to be so far gone that I could not recognize salted fish guts sitting in front of me. And hopefully if I was drunk enough to eat this, I would have already passed out.

-tmo