Vegetarianism - It’s all about the sauce®

Arti was a real loser. Every job and every idea he ever had turned out wrong. He thought to himself, if I went into business for myself, maybe, just maybe I can do well. He thought and he thought, what could he do. It came to him, he would be a HIT MAN.

The next day he put a classified ad in the newspaper reading, “I am Arti, I will be your HIT MAN.  Give me a call and I will kill anyone you want rubbed out.”

Well that very day Arti receives his first call. The caller asks if it were true that Arti would indeed kill anyone and Arti assured him that was the case.

The man told Arti he wanted his wife killed. Arti said, “Fine, but how much will you pay me?”

The man replied, “$1.00.”

Arti said, “No way, bullets cost more than that.”

The man replied, “Look, take it or leave it. Many people would kill my wife for free, but I don’t want to be obligated.”

Arti thought it over and figured he could use the practice so he said, “OK, tell me about your wife, how can I find her?”

The man said, “In the produce department at Food-Mart, every day at four o’clock she is there. She wears a yellow outfit and is always complaining about something.”

Arti decides that he will go there and strangle her. At least he will save himself the cost of bullets. Sure enough, she is in the produce department of Food-Mart complaining about the fruit being either too hard or too soft.

Arti reaches behind her and chokes her. As she fall to the floor, she makes a gasp. The manager of the produce department turns around and sees what has happened and calls out. Arti lunges at the manager and chokes him.

Just as the manager falls to the floor, a lady sees what has happened and screams out. Arti grabs her chokes her and runs out of the supermarket.

He is captured a block away. What does the headline of the newspaper read?

ARTI CHOKES THREE FOR A DOLLAR AT FOOD-MART!

That’s just bad.

Anyway, tonight I boiled and ate my first flower - a big artichoke!

Background:
My sister used to date a guy, and whenever she’d eat at his house, his parents would make artichokes and serve them with a mayo/balsamic dip. She always complained about how much she hates artichokes. Last week, I went food shopping and saw some artichokes sitting on the veggie shelf. I thought, “what the ===!” and grabbed one. I went to The California Artichoke Advisory Board’s website and found out how to cook and eat them. I boiled it in some water with oil, balsamic vinegar, oregano, and basil. After 30mins of boiling, I began to eat it. It’s sort of like vegetarianism’s answer to crabs — when you eat crabs (ghetto style), you grab a freshly boiled, whole crab, crack open the shell, and suck out the guts. With an artichoke, you peel off each leaf and scrape the yummy pulp off of the inside of the leaf with your teeth. You can opt to dip it in a sauce. I dipped mine in a mayo/balsamic mix. When the leaves are all gone, you eat the “cap” then scoop out the “fuzzies” and eat the bottom stem thingy. By the time I got to the heart, I was sick of mayo. All in all it was interesting, and somewhat tasty, but more of a conversational dish than anything (like crab feasts). So it lead me to an epiphany: Vegetarian foods are all about the sauce. It’s true!

Exhibit A: My artichoke — it was fine, but I got sick of the mayo sauce pretty quick. And the leaves by themselves are OK, but you can only stand so much nutty pulp. It would be nice to have a variety of sauces to dip into, keeping things lively.

Exhibit B: Gyros at the Pita Pita place in Ames — If you get a falafel pita, you can load up on all the veggies you want from the “salad bar”. But it’s all just veggies - kind of bland. But wait, there’s the sauce! Plenty of creamy, zesty sauces that liven up the veggie blandness. A pita without sauce is just wrong!

Exhibit C: I went to Minnesota with my mom last year to see my grandpa in hospital. Afterward, we went with my uncle (a vegan doctor) to a vegetarian indian restaurant, supposedly the best in Minneapolis. It was all pretty decent. They had flat pancake-like bread, plenty of falafel-type things, and wafer-thin chickpea tortilla-thingies. But, it was all really bland - unless, you guessed it, you tried all the sauces they had. For every dish, they brought out 6 different sauces.

So anyway. That’s how exciting my weekend has been. I did see Osama, a movie about Afghanistan during the Taliban rule with the Tom mentioned earlier. We were going to see a mainstream movie, but realized all the movies out now suck, so he suggested an independent theater in Fairfax. I saw that Osama was playing there, and remembered hearing it was good, so we went. It was really interesting seeing how they lived before we liberated them, how barbaric the Taliban are/were. But it ended sadly, and it was just like, “wha?” I thought the movie would end with some American jets bombing all the mean Taliban people and everyone would be happy, but no.

So, apparently I’ve turned into this crazy vegetable-eating, foreign film-watching nut case. Trust me, I still sit on my === and play video games all day! I think tomorrow I better eat a big phat steak, race my car over to the NRA’s HQ, and shoot my rifle while I drink a Nattie Ice. Yeah…