Too bad the Atkins thing is over.

[substitute]

There are these Chinese places (forget the name of them) where they make vegetarian fake meat out of some kind of gluten. It all sort of tastes the same, and the food is okay but the concept is freaky. I always wondered why, if the idea of eating your friends made you sick, why'd you want to eat something that looked and felt just like your friend but wasn't? Like carefully forming mushrooms into insects and snakes to eat, or sculpting an aspic to almost exactly resemble a dead baby so you could remember all the good times when you used to eat human infants. Why not just eat plants? Anyway. This musing gave me an idea of the anti-vegan restaurant in which this is reversed and everything is made of meat. The entrées wouldn't be a problem, just eat American style and you're done. The other stuff would require some ingenuity and hard work.

Lettuce could be constructed by marinating and pounding out filets very flat and then flash-frying them. Rocky Mountain Oysters might be Brussels Sprouts. Chicken is malleable enough that good slicing and dyeing would simulate a wide range of veggies like peppers, squash, etc. Coarsely ground turkey, fried, is corn.

Beverages are tougher, because you can only drink so much blood really. I think we'd have to work with alcoholic cocktails mostly and substitute shrimp for onions and olives. One could always just pour a big glass of icewater and use super-cold frozen beef cubes for ice, too!

For dessert, candied suet! Meatloaf cheesecake! Filipino "chocolate pudding"! Or just a nice hot cup of beef tea cappuccino.

The variations are only limited by our imagination, and this is America! We're a can-do people.

I've been talking back and forth about this project lately with this gal Michelle I sort of half know. The other day I told her I was making a tomato out of lamb stew meat, and she asked about pickles. My response: "Some people just use sausages and green paint to make pickles but where's the challenge? I like to marinate some finely sliced pastrami in a vinegar mint dressing for a week to get that greenish tinge and then wrap it very tightly and concentrically until a long, wide, firm, bumpy true cucumber of meat is produced. Bon appetit!"

I bet she asks me out now. Women love artists.

Comments

[threepunchstuff.livejournal.com]

Dude, those mock meat places are great. Have you been to Happy Family in Diamond Bar/Rowland Heights?

Your drinks menu.

[flipzagging.livejournal.com]

Jello shots, or anything with cubes of jello. Most gelatin (http://www.ivu.org/faq/gelatine.html) is recovered from the hides and bones of slaughtered animals.

Anything with refined sugar. Some companies (http://www.vegfamily.com/articles/sugar.htm) refine white sugar with charred bone.

Anything with honey (http://www.vegsource.com/jo/qa/qahoney.htm). Some vegans won't eat it since it was produced by animals for their own benefit, and some bees will die as a result of ordinary beekeeping activities.

By the same token

[citizenx.livejournal.com]

Milk.

Milk is not for humans. It is for cows.

Re: By the same token

[hexennacht.livejournal.com]

BRING ON THE WET NURSE, CARIE NEEDS SOME OATMEAL.

Re: By the same token

[flipzagging.livejournal.com]

I'll agree with you about milk, but life without cheese is pointless.

Re: Your drinks menu.

[substitute.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I was trying to make it all actually identifiable MEAT! MEAT! MEAT! and not just, say, bourbon that was filtered through bone charcoal.

But the gelatin is a good one because not only is it meat, it's meat created in a way that's so disgusting that people become vegetarians as soon as they smell it.

[hexennacht.livejournal.com]

Mmm, five pounds of ham and eggs for breakfast.

[bruisedhips.livejournal.com]

SIR! Seitan, tofu, soy, etc doesnt taste or feel anything like meat! I think its just some kind of protein to slap on a sandwich to make us feel like we're full and fulfill nutritonal needs with some variety.
Have ya tried the veggie burgers? Ya, nothing in the world acts, feels or tastes like meat. I have no IDEA why they call it "Chikn', etc cause noooooo one thinks it tastes like it! Aside from maybe someone who hasn't eaten meat in so long they just FORGOT what it tastes like alltogether.
Bodhi tree is the place you're thinking of, I think? For a lot of people I know it would be hard to give up favorite meat dishes even though their conscious is really against eating animals and since they are americans, cannot find the willpower to say no to the shrimp scampi. Giving someone the option of going out to have a meal in an actual restaurant and naming something shrimp scampi that they can actually eat and feel good about (health and moral wise) keeps them to their ethics.
I have heard that question many times "Why do vegetarians eat fake meat". Because it tastes damn good to me, and nothing at all like bambi.

[hexennacht.livejournal.com]

It IS tasty (and satisfying!), regardless of whether or not it tastes meaty. Mmmm, kung pao tofu. Mmmmm.

[substitute.livejournal.com]

I totally get that part. Like, chili and burgers aren't really "meat", they're something made of meat and you can make it out of whatever you want: sawdust, tofu, iron filings. The weird stuff to me is the seitan or whatever that's shaped just like actual body parts of dead animals.

[bruisedhips.livejournal.com]

Holy crap. I had no idea that even existed, How totally gross!

[sp0rk0.livejournal.com]

Kinda reminds me of the grade school cafeteria "mock chicken leg" that was fashioned in something intended to resemble the shape of a drumstick.

[eyeteeth.livejournal.com]

To me it's like playing extremely violent video games or writing extremely violent short stories or etc. I wouldn't do stuff like that in real life because it's wrong, but replicating the experience in a way that doesn't harm anyone can be fun without the actual pain and death.

A baby made of fake meat is the best idea ever. I would totally serve that for Thanksgiving dinner.

[dorothy-parka.livejournal.com]

OMG ME TOO. i thought i was the only one. i totally want one.

each year at easter when i was a teenager, my mother would buy me the chocolate "kewpie doll" from superior chocolates on staten island. only it didn't look like a kewpie at all, it looked like a regular baby, and the cello-wrap kinda looked like an amniotic sac. such fond memories of baby eatin'!

transgressive imitation food

[substitute.livejournal.com]

Amniotic? SIGN ME UP!

I'm also delighted by fake pork for Jews.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Even the menu is made of meat! It's an entire chicken, pounded flat!

[hoyvenmayven.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the Pork Nog! Mmmmmm!!

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Really, the whole nog field is under-explored. We lack a coherent theory of the nogs. What undiscovered nogs lie all around us? Do vast reservoirs of nog lie in frozen hydrous clathrate beds just off our coasts? Is there nog to be found under the poles of Mars? What neo-nogs does our government hoard in Area 51?

Nog!

dead sea latte

[substitute.livejournal.com]

And what secrets are hidden in the demotic scribbles of the Nog Hammadi manuscript?