That’s evil!
Would it bug anyone to hear that I went into McD’s the other day for one of my rare visits and the manager glanced up and had told the kitchen to prepare my order before I even got up to the counter? Admittedly he guessed my drink wrong but what the heck, I’m hardly ever in there. 
I married Indian and eat Indian* at home every day, so to me pickles means ācār (or aachaar), made most often of green mango, very very very heavily spiced. And oiled. They are packed not in brine but in a thick oily masala paste. They’re the only pickles in the world I savor, especially with khicari (a lightly spiced blend of lentils and fragrant basmati rice) and pāpar (light crispy fried wafer made of lentil flour). Once in a while, not all the time. But I think of ācār as the ultimate in strong flavor bombs. In India the stuff is traditionally regarded with a certain supernatural awe: menstruating women are not supposed to go in the pantry where the ācār jars are stored, lest her menstrual aura cause it to go off. Hey, I didn’t make this up. It sounds misogynist to me. One thing I can tell you about protecting ācār from going off is to always make sure the spoon you stick into it is very clean, very dry.
*Take that phrase however you like
This morning as I ate breakfast I was browsing through On Food and Cooking, a fascinating book. And I ran across a description of surstrømming:
Now, I’ve never tried surstrømming or ācār, so I’m no judge; but if the latter is the ultimate in strong flavor bombs, does that mean the former is the mother of all flavor chemical warfare?
Daniel
Eeewww. We have had other threads on The Grossest Foods in the World. For now I’d rather not go there…
Fair enough–it was just on my mind, having read it over breakfast :).
Daniel
On the contrary, I think they should be levied with a huge brine.
I’ve had surstromming. Do a search for it and you’ll find my post on it. It’s easily the most potent thing I’ve ever tasted, and I’m an adventurous eater. If you want to try some for yourself, you can mail order it from here for a reasonable price, like I did. For the love of all that is holy, open the shit outside.
Hm… I don’t like eating a burger with a pickle on it (a texture thing) but I enjoy the slight taste of the pickle juice on the burger.
Mail me your burger.
I have the opposite problem. Most burgers don’t taste enough like pickles. I always ask burger jockeys (I use the term affectionately; I’m a minimum-wage worker myself) to remove the onions–maybe I should ask for extra pickles too. I don’t know why I never thought of it.
Anyway, WTF is so hard about making a Big Mac without pickles? As I said above, I work for minimum wage too, and you’d better believe if someone asks for a change to their order–extra-hot, lots of foam, light on the chocolate sauce, sugar-free flavoring syrup, whatever–I’m going to take heed, and write it on my copy of the receipt so I’m extra-sure that I or whoever makes the drink doesn’t forget the requested options. Holding the pickles (heh) is probably the easiest part of that dude’s job.
I can top that – as a kid, I used to eat rock salt. Just nosh on a few pieces at a time from the bag my dad used to keep in the garage for icy days. And even now, I still have fantastic blood pressure, although that’s gonna change when I hit middle age, judging by my family history…
Sounds like quite the burger. 
A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys;
Painted wings and giant strings make way for other toys;
One grey night it happened Jackie Paper came no more…
sniffle
Reminds me that everywhere I go and explicitly state that “I want a water and NO LEMON”, the server without fail brings me the water with that goddamn lemon staring at me.
Not just his boloney sammiches, but all those served at the meal in question? :rolleyes:
On Thursday I went to a hotel restaurant, ordered a hot roast beef sandwich, with no pickles. As you can guess, I received a hot roast beef sandwich with a large pile of pickle slices. Sigh…
Say, quickly, “Water an’ no lemon.” Then say, quickly, “water an’ a lemon.”
What you should say is, “Water–and does that normally come with lemon?” When the waiter says “Yeah” or “not normally, do you want lemon?” shake your head and say, “I hate lemons, can I get mine plain?”
Daniel
I’ve tried stuff like that before and even told the servers how other servers always forget, and then still the lemon. Maybe they do it on purpose 