I Eat Fungus So You Don’t Have To, or I Cut in Line So You Don’t Have To
I worry that at some point JD is going to kill me.
(A) I keep pre-emptively stealing titles from her (two in this post alone!)
and
(B) I occasionally refer to her as Zelda.
Actually, on that last point, she gave me exclusive permission. But, she might have been kidding. Who can tell, really? At any rate, if when she goes batpoop crazy, she’ll probably forget that anyway, so it won’t matter if she gave permission or not.
So, you may one day see a headline like this:
Blogger Kills Blogger Over Post Title
And all her neighbors will say, “She was such a quiet woman. Kept to herself.” Except for one neighbor that’ll be on all the TV stations saying, “I knew she was crazy!”
Of course, they’ll probably go with a more scandalous title. Maybe something like:
Nudist Slays Man Over Fungus
That’ll bring in the readers. People will want to know what that’s about. Maybe they’ll even try:
Revenge of Zelda!
Oh, wait. I may be thinking of Yar’s Revenge. I always wanted that game. Never played it. I think it just looked cool in some commercial. I don’t remember the commercial though.
I had a friend that had the game. I told him that if he ever wanted to get rid of it, I’d buy it from him. Guess what? He eventually gave it away. No, not to me! He forgot about me!
I don’t talk to him anymore.
No, silly, not because of the game. You were thinking that, weren’t you? No. It was for other reasons. My fault mostly. Probably. Does it matter? All water under the bridge.
He lived by a canal, by the way. Seriously. No, not really. Close though, but in a completely different kind of way.
Anyway, you can see I’ve lost focus. I should read my article, “3 Exercises to Improve Your Focus.” Or, maybe you should go read it. If I go read it, I’ll just get distracted again, and you’ll never find out why I ate fungus.
So, anyway, last night, which was actually tonight as I’m writing this at what will have been last night when you’re reading this–don’t you love temporal mechanics?–I went to the local Chinese buffet with my father.
I wanted to have the authentic Chinese restaurant experience, so I started out by ordering that Chinese beverage classic: Coca-Cola.
Then, I got some wonton soup. Except that there are no wontons in the soup, as I have always believed should be in wonton soup. Silly me. No, the wontons are in a separate dish, drying out, even though the lid is on. They’re just not as soft as they would be were they actually in the soup broth, which is where you might expect them to be.
Mind you, before I got to the soup, I may have cut in line in front of someone else. Kind of hard to tell, really. People are going in all different directions, so who really knows who cut in front of who. I was at the particular buffet table first, but the other person was nearer the wonton soup first. At any rate, I wound up getting wonton soup first. I felt bad for a bit, then I felt much worse later after I ate too much from the buffet. It could be karma, or it could be that I just lose all sense of self-control at the buffet, since I usually feel overstuffed at the end of the evening.
Anyway, so you put your wontons in your bowl and then pour the broth over them. Then, you put the bowl at your table and leave it there while you go in search of more goodies. That way, the wontons can soak and soften up a bit before you eat them.
So, then I head back to the buffet to sample some more traditional Chinese cuisine. So, I filled my plate with some Caesar salad, seafood salad, a deviled egg and some sushi. I think it was vegetarian sushi. There’s only been one time at this buffet where I could see that the sushi actually had raw fish. I think that was earlier this year. I was so excited. It may have been the highlight of my dining out experiences this year. Unless it was last year. Anyway, so I ate raw fish and I didn’t get sick or die. So, I’m chalking that up as a good time.
Anyway, once I finished my sushi-that-probably-wasn’t, I went back for more. Scratch that. First I finished off my wonton soup, then I went up for more food. This time around, I grabbed more Chinese favorites: chicken wings, chicken fingers, corn nuggets and imitation crab meat wrapped in bacon. Oh, and some vegetable fried rice. I think I had sesame chicken on that go around too.
And, you absolutely must get the imitation crab meat wrapped in bacon. For one thing, it’s bacon. That’s right, bacon. It may be imitation crab meat, but it’s real bacon. At least I know it wasn’t a Beggin’ Strip. No, it was bacon. Dogs may not know that Beggin’ Strips aren’t bacon, but I know they’re not and I also know that this bacon was bacon. And, for the other thing, they come on a stick. Namely, a toothpick. And that toothpick will come in handy after eating all the chicken.
Mind you, lest you think I’m having a real big feast here, I just took a little bit of each. I had learned my lesson–or so I thought–from prior adventures here, so I try to keep portions small while enjoying a wide sampling.
The next trip, I naturally gravitated to some more traditional Chinese fare, such as General Tso’s Chicken, hot and spicy chicken, crab rangoon, a spring roll and, of course, a corn dog. Mind you, the corn dog wasn’t a corn dog. It was wrapped in a roll rather than corn bread. Oh, and they didn’t call it a corn dog either. I also grabbed another deviled egg, because they were good.
And, that would have been the end of my eating, especially after the hot and spicy chicken. On that note, the chicken pieces were small, almost like frog legs. And, since frog legs taste like chicken, it’s possible that it was hot and spicy frog legs even though the sign said hot and spicy chicken. Who would know? At any rate, after my mouth was burning from the hot and spicy frog legs, which I saved for last (why, why, why?), I wasn’t going to eat any more.
I wanted to go back and have one more bit of food, one more slice of classic Chinese cuisine that I could blog about. That, of course, was pizza. But, alas, I had to pass up on pizza. I was too full to have another bite of food.
Actually, I wasn’t too full. I was comfortably full. And, I did not intend to leave overstuffed as I have been prone to do in the past. I was proud of my self-control.
Except that I was tempted by some more wonton soup. So, I got just a little more. One wonton and a little broth. Half a cup of soup. That’s all! And a fried noodle. And, while I was up there, I looked at the hot and sour soup, which listed five ingredients. Hmm, temptation.
So, anyway, the original title of this blog post was going to be “I Cut in Line So You Don’t Have to”, but then as I’m blogging this post in my head, I’m thinking that’s not the most interesting of titles, you know?
Which brings me back to the ingredients.
I knew that I had to go back to get a little bit of hot and sour soup, just so I would have a better title for this blog post. Yes, I suffered so you can benefit by reading a more interesting title. Mind you, the content of this post may have bored you to tears, but the title’s pretty good so, darn it!, you better appreciate the sacrifice I made for you!
The ingredients for the hot and sour soup were as follows: chicken, mushroom, fungus, bamboo and tofu.
You know, if they had just said “fungus” I would naturally have assumed they meant “mushroom”. After all, mushrooms are fungus. But, no, they had to separate the two. Evidently, this soup has mushroom fungus and fungus fungus, I’m guessing.
Which is why I had to eat a half a cup of hot and sour soup (which was, incidentally, hot and sour–not quite as hot as the hot and spicy frog legs chicken but hot), just so that I could blog that I ate fungus so you don’t have to.
Oh, and I had three more fried noodles with the soup.
And then a fortune cookie.



HAHAHAHA!
Oh, man. This post made laugh and made feel very hungry.
“Nudist Slays Man Over Fungus” may be the funniest thing I’v read all week (FACEBOOKED)!
First, I will never kill you. Who else is going to keep stealing my titles before I’ve written them? The way I look at it, you’ve already done two (or is it three? four?) things so I don’t have to, tho I have to confess that I HAVE eaten fungus (a huge plateful of it at the home of a very generous Chinese family my brother knows) and I have cut in line, especially when there are displays of food. I get very excited and nervous at buffets.
I think the “Hong Kong Buffet” restaurant near us is very similar to the Chinese buffet you went to in terms of buffet offerings. Not that I would know, as I always only get the egg foo yong and those sugar donut thingies. My brother’s girlfriend (who is Thai) always stocks up on vanilla ice cream with corn. So . . . there’s that.
But you’ve inspired me to try more food at the Hong Kong Buffet next time. Definitely the “corn dog” and deviled eggs. Maybe the pizza. And for sure the won ton soup. And I’ll try to do it right.
I like egg rolls with fungi sauce