the sauce-wich horror

last night i resigned myself to a dinner of boiled canned vegetables and pan-fried sausages. i had obtained the sausages the evening before from my local gourmet supermarket. they were prepackaged and of a variety that i had recently previously enjoyed.

the "eat by" date on the package was within 2006, but the month was smeared. that was a warning but i've eaten things before which were "expired" to no ill effect.

so i cut open the package and grabbed the first sausage. it was a little slick and slimy. no problem, that's normal to have a little bacteria on a meat product. i've cooked and eaten slimier chicken breasts, i figured the cooking process would do what it was designed to do and kill the thin layer of bacteria.

then i tried to pull the sausage out of the package.

i've never seen anything like what i saw when i tried to pull the sausage from the package. i've never felt anything like that. it was attached to the other sausages by a thick mucous slime. it was horrific. it was a sci-fi special effect. it was thick, sticky, stretchy. it would not break it would just attenuate. it was like mostly-dried rubber cement. it was no bacterial infection. i don't know what the hell it was. it presented serious opposition to the removal of the sausage. it had surprising tensile strength.

it was gross.

but i was hungry and fearless. i rinsed it off under cold water. it took more than a minute of serious scrubbing and rinsing to remove the unknown goo from a single sausage. i tossed the sausage into hot butter and went to work on another sausage. my plan was to scrub all the sasauges, transfer them to a new package, and save the other three for later.

by the third scrubbing i came to my senses. the goo was simply too repulsive. the fact that it had come in contact with my sausages -- at any time in the past -- precluded me from eating the scrubbed sausages, no matter how thoroughly i had removed the slime. no matter how effective the sizzling butter would be at denaturing any germs living on the surface of the sausage, i'd still be eating something that had been in contact with an unknown substance of a disgusting nature. my inner seinfeld overpowered my inner costanza and i threw the lot of the sausages into the trash.

the goo itself had had no odor. i could smell the sausage through the goo. it was not a fungus or a bacterial infection, as far as i could tell, since these things would tend to have an odor. the identity of the substance remains a mystery.

but i was still hungry. by this time the pot full of canned vegetables was ready to eat but i needed protein. so i made myself a hobo casserole: heated canned veges + can of tuna + "laughing cow" cheese round. heat on medium for 5 minutes.

the hobo casserole smelled awful. really bad. so, emerilly, i added a crapload of dried flaked garlic. now the hobo casserole smelled like garlic, which was still bad, but better than before.

the HC turned out to be delicious and i didn't get food poisoning and i didn't have an alien burst out of my chest.

another successful home-cooked meal.