Anopsology

A couple weeks ago I went out to eat with a friend at a Japanese hot post restaurant in Orem. I wasn't quite sure what I was getting myself into, and the lunch menu wasn't very descriptive. Whatever we were ordering was called shabu-shabu, and it came in Vegetarian, Pork, Chicken, Octopus, or Fish Ball, with no additional description. So I ordered pork.

A few minutes later the server placed a dish with noodles, vegetables, and several thin slabs of raw pork in front of me, and I had a moment of carefully concealed panic. My personal vocabulary for raw meat dishes extends only as far as sushi, sashimi, and ceviche, but my personal vocabulary for raw meat dishes is decidedly limited. A Japanese restaurant specializing in a dish called shabu-shabu with no menu description seemed was not an unlikely place to augment that vocabulary. In retrospect, on the other hand, a strip mall in central Orem was not. And to my relief, shabu-shabu didn't actually mean "meat that you eat raw," but "meat that you dump into a pot of boiling water to make soup." I still don't quite get the conceit of having the restaurant patrons do it themselves, but the soup was good, and the meat was cooked.

Apparently there are entire food movements centered around eating raw meat. And thanks to Google I learned that my raw meat vocabulary also includes carpaccio and steak tartare. (Before my research I didn't know they were raw. I just knew I'd heard the names of the dishes on Top Chef.) There's also muktuk (cubed raw whale meat with blubber), bplaa raa (a condiment made from decayed raw fish), kibbeh nayyeh (minced raw lamb mixed with bulger and spices), and quite a list of other dishes. Also, steak tartare is sometimes made from ground horse meat and usually topped with a raw egg. Yum.

I feel like I should apologize for this blog post. It's just that I had a bit of a raw meat scare right before the new year when I accidentally ate some raw chicken, and so I've got raw meat on the mind. And when I say I ate raw chicken, I don't mean cooked-on-the-outside-but-pink-on-the-inside raw chicken. The chicken had never been cooked. It was chicken cordon bleu from the BYU Creamery, which I bought because it brought back fond memories of freshman year Sunday dinners when my friends and I would make a weekly trek from Helaman Halls to Deseret Towers, because they had better Sunday dinners and better desserts. Chicken cordon bleu was on the menu once every three weeks like clockwork, and I haven't had BYU chicken cordon bleu since.

I wasn't quite sure how to prepare the chicken myself, though. There were no instructions on the package, just a price, an ingredient list, and a warning about making sure you don't undercook raw meat. Which I suppose makes it sound strange that I wasn't sure if the chicken cordon bleu was raw or cooked, but I feel like I had good reason for wondering. The chicken is breaded. The label is the same label used on all meat products, and it may make sense to create separate labels for raw and cooked meats. Also, I used to buy these spinach stuffed chicken breasts from BJ's in Virginia that were frozen, but fully cooked, and so my concept image of prepackaged stuffed chicken breasts tells me that they all come fully cooked. Also, the dorm cafeterias never served raw chicken cordon bleu. I kind of didn't think they could be uncooked.

And yes, I get the faulty logic here, but to be fair, I didn't rely my logic alone. I cut open one of the two pieces of chicken, and then decided it was fully cooked. And once I'd convinced myself, I popped the other piece of chicken into the microwave, and I popped the piece I'd cut off into my mouth. I was hungry.

All the ham and cream sauce and bread crumbs (and, upon reflection, the raw eggs that the chicken was probably drenched in to make the bread crumbs stick) meant that I didn't immediately realize my mistake. But the texture felt funny, and I suddenly had the horrifying thought that I'd been wrong to think the chicken was fully cooked, and I gagged and spit the chicken out in the sink and re-checked the piece it had come from and it was raw and I felt sick.

If you ever accidentally eat raw chicken, my advice to you is to not Google the phrase: "help i accidentally ate raw chicken." All it will do is lead you to a bunch of unofficial and untrustworthy message boards where people say unhelpful things like, "how in the world did you eat raw chicken???" and well-meaning advice like "90% of commercial chicken has salmonella in it, so pretty much all you can do now is sit back and brace yourself for a pretty awful case of food poisoning in a couple days."

Do you remember the last time I wrote about salmonella? I've had experience dealing with psychosomatic symptoms, and so fortunately for my health and sanity I put less focus on bracing myself for an awful case of food poisoning and more on convincing myself that even if there was salmonella, I had barely swallowed any, and I was probably safe, and if I wasn't there was nothing I could do about it until the symptoms appeared. Except I also drank a 32-ounce cup of water and a 20-ounce bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper in the firm and probably misguided belief that it would flush the bacteria out of my system as quickly as possible.

And if you know better, please don't tell me why it won't work because I didn't get salmonella poisoning and I'd like to have an instant remedy on hand, just in case something like this ever happens again.