I’m Eating What?! Part 2

6-26-10

Life is like a bowl of soup…you never know what you’re gonna get. Well, you don’t with Angelita’s soup, at least.

She served me fish soup the other day, which I’m not crazy about simply because of how much effort it takes to eat the soup. Angelita puts several whole fish that have been chopped into two or three pieces in every pot. The fish heads go in for “flavor”, although they’re not usually served to people. The problem with the fish pieces is that there’s always a ton of small spines and bones that have to be picked out, not to mention fins and scales that were never meant to make it into the pot but somehow did. All said, it takes time and a certain amount of skill to eat fish soup here without choking on a bone.

On the up side, it has a good flavor.

So I was eating my fish soup, picking out the espinas and occasional scales. Suddenly, I felt something in my mouth that was distinctly small and round. I knew pretty immediately that it was something that I didn’t really want to swallow. I spit it out, and discovered a small, white ball with a black spot on it. Given prior experience with Angelita’s soup, my first thought was,

“Do fish have testicles?”

My second thought was to discard my first thought. I may not know much about amphibious anatomy, but I was pretty sure they didn’t. (After all, if they did, where are they hiding them?) I still wasn’t sure what the mystery part was, but I kept eating. Lunch is lunch. You don’t stop eating perfectly good soup just because you find unidentifiable animal parts floating in it. That’s always been my philosophy (see my prior post, “I’m eating what!?”, part one, for further proof of this credo).

In any case, throughout the course of my lunch, I found three more of the little balls, one of which I discovered by crunching into it with my teeth. I tried to spit most of it out, but I’m pretty sure I ingested a little. When my host mother asked me how my soup was, I said, “Good…what is this?” I pointed to the white ball. My host mother laughed a little shamefacedly and said a word I didn’t recognize. I asked, “¿Que?” She pointed to her eye.

“It’s an eyeball? A fish eyeball?” She nodded, still laughing. Angelita and my host sister laughed too. My host mother still looked a little embarrassed, so I said (much to the hilarity of all present), “Don’t worry. I love eyeball soup.” That made them laugh even harder. The gringa made a funny!

Despite the fact that I often put horror stories of weird things that I’ve eaten on this blog, I should add that most or meals are, if not five-star, at least pretty normal. Notwithstanding the large amounts of oil used to cook everything, the ingredients are usually pretty wholesome and standard: beans, rice, potatoes, tortillas, eggs, cheese, squash, tomatoes, peppers, and a large variety of fresh fruit. I’ve even had some pretty stellar eats here, too. For example, yesterday I went to a birthday party for Rodrigo, who just turned four. For lunch, they served one of the most delicious chicken sandwiches I’ve ever had in my life. And they fed me first. Being the gringa has its privileges.

The party itself was pretty hilarious. It was given by Rodrigo’s uncle, the one really wealthy person in town, so they had a clown, piñatas, the whole nine yards. The clown was funny, even if he spent too much time hitting on the seventeen-year-old girls that were acting as his “assistants”. And piñatas are always a good time – who doesn’t love to watch a group of children mercilessly whack the crap out of Hello Kitty with a beribboned stick until her head splits open and candy and confetti rain down like manna from heaven? Whoever came up with this is a genius to rival the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, and that guy who invented silly putty.

Of course, the inevitable result of a piñata (aside from a dulce shower) is crying children. It’s absolutely unavoidable that one of the little kids gets shoved out or stepped on and doesn’t get enough candy. Seriously, these kids are savage when it comes to their piñata – it’s a no-holds-barred, every-man-for-himself free-for-all that would do the creators of Survivor proud. Even if, by some miracle, no one gets stepped on and the distribution of candy is impressively even-handed, you know some overeager kid (usually the birthday boy or girl) is gonna get clipped in the head with the whacking stick. Hello Kitty’s not the only one that need fear it.

Result? Crying kids. But it wouldn’t really be a birthday party without some blubbering children, would it?