Silence of the Lambs

My cookbook arrived today and I eagerly ripped open the package and began flipping through it, my hand conveniently stopping on the page that contained the recipe for Julia’s Boeuf A La Bourguignonne, or in America otherwise known as Beef Stew in Red Wine with Bacon, Onions, and Mushrooms, although perhaps it could do without the latter. I’m having a bit of a hard time though. Let’s talk about this, I know, as I’ve stated previously, that it won’t be possible for me to complete all of Mrs. Child’s recipes mainly out of the fact that I don’t eat cute and fuzzy animals, namely lamb, the leg, shoulder or any other of its adorable but unsavory body parts, veal, deer…you get the picture. It hurt kind of, to read about Mrs. Child very nonchalantly tell her readers that if they didn't have the heart to steam a lobster alive then they could viciously murder it (okay, not her exact words) by stabbing a knife directly between their little lobster eyes to severe their little lobster spinal cord (again, not verbatim). Maybe it's just me but who the hell could even eat after that? Personally, I prefer this approach:



Aside from this, I was floored albeit specifically disgusted when I reached an entire section on cooking and eating brains. Yes, brains. Lamb brains. Calf brains. Cooked brains. Sauteed brains. No matter how you slice them, it’s pretty repulsive to even consider having any brains play any role in making a meal from scratch aside from my own brain resting safely behind my skull as it decides where to put the dash of salt or the pinch of pepper in my dish. Thinking about brain consumption reminds me of that stomach-turning scene in “Hannibal” where Anthony Hopkins, otherwise known as the infamous Hannibal Lector, has Ray Liotta (otherwise known as the detective who I cannot remember the name of) for dinner, literally, having sliced open the top portion of his skull and then feeding to him his very own, you guessed it, brains, fried in butter on a skillet under low heat. The French will apparently eat anything making me wonder if road kill might be an orthodox ingredient that Julia was required to omit from her book as solely mandated by her publishers due to sanitary reasons. Who am I to judge though, my own grandmother, a solid German girl with small remainders of her charming accent, has enjoyed cow tongue on several occasions and all I can really think about is the texture of my own tongue and how I couldn’t possibly attempt to eat anything even remotely as slippery or pocked with taste buds. Blech. This reminds me of a character I saw recently in “The Lovely Bones” who kept talking about getting the heebie-jeebies. This is the effect that these strange edible considerations have on me. Perhaps this French cookbook was a bad idea since I will only ever really even attempt a small portion of the recipes in this book. Pondering this, I quickly cast my eyes toward my Betty Crocker cookbook which surely has more humane contents and thought just maybe, I will work my way through that one instead...after I make the Boeuf A La Bourguignonne. Bon Appétit.

Onto a strikingly ironic topic transition from brains, the Grey’s Anatomy season finale delivered like I’ve never seen a finale deliver before. Oh, the previews were all the same, offering the slight taste that someone was going to get shot on the episode, though you never know who it is until you watch and I anticipated this to be like every other cliffhanger finale where you find out that it is a main character who gets the bullet only to reach the last seconds of the show where they are virtually dying right before your eyes and then the screen goes black, you’re left in a state of panic and must muster up the incredible patience to wait to see what happens come the Fall batch of new episodes in September, unless you are like me who will then proceed to run an internet search to decipher whether or not contracts have lapsed or are in limbo between the show and whichever apparent actor may or may not be killed off of the show. Wow, that was an incredibly fantastic run-on sentence. But really, I began the show with high hopes but also the expectation that I would be hanging from the proverbial cliff at the end offering myself no disappointments. The producers had a very different idea. In the first five minutes of the show, a frequent albeit unfavorable character on the show, one of the transfers from Mercy West from the merge episode was shot at point blank range right between the eyes, and Karev, a main character in the show was also shot. The shooter is the husband of a patient who had appeared on a previous show and received surgery leaving her brain dead, all of which both she and her husband were warned about prior to the surgery. She had signed a DNR without her husband knowing and he wasn’t aware that he needed to obtain any kind of power of attorney to make decisions on behalf his wife should she ever find herself in this state which left the decision of her fate legally in the hands of the hospital. Because she was brain dead and being held alive solely via breathing machines, Derek sought to respect her wishes and turn the machines off, to the adamant disagreement of her husband’s wishes. Said husband has returned to seek his revenge on three people, Derek, who made the decision to turn off the machines, Richard, the previous chief who also played a large role in the decision, and Lexi, who physically turned the machines off. Despite the fact that this man was out to kill these three people, he ended up shooting and injuring or killing pretty much anyone who got in his way, primarily surgeons in the hopes of just knocking off anyone who participated in the surgery that resulted in this situation in the first place. I spent this riveting two hours with my hand over my mouth and my heart beating so fast that I was on the verge of an all out panic attack for a full 120 minutes in what I have to say is by far, the best season finale I’ve ever seen. The only finale I’ve seen without a cliff hanger ending, but I don’t think my heart could even have handled it after the two hour roller coaster ride that it was taken on. Two words: simply brilliant.