No tomatoes, please

So, by popular demand, I have finally gotten around to eating the friggin blueberry sausage. Every week in the newsroom, while I was busy eating other gross things, my editor, Bryan, was always badgering me about eating the damn blueberry sausage. I had never seen, nor hear of this before, and, honestly, I doubted its very existence.    But lo and behold, a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the curious sausage while shopping at the local Teet. I was excited. Probably too excited. My shopping partner was confused. So after bringing it home and throwing it in the freezer, I finally extracted it the other day so I could see if it was, in fact, nearly as disgusting as it looked.  So, there were many things this sausage had going against it. First of all, I don’t like sausage. Plus this is chicken sausage, which I don’t even care to think about. I mean, I can’t even stand sausage that is made of delicious and perfect pork, why would I want to eat sausage made of a lesser protein? Because it’s healthy? First of all, ew, and second of all, when you’re gonna ruin some sausage with dang blueberries and maple syrup, why not just make it out of pork to make it palatable?  Since I didn’t have any of the ingredients to make any of the lovely dishes suggested on the back (strawberries in an omelette? fuck you Al Fresco All Naturals), I decided to do a simple fry-up.  So, when I took it out of the package, it kind of looked like tiny diseased hot dogs. Or diseased penises of small mammals. Either way, it really doesn’t look appetizing in the least. Seriously, Al Fresco All Naturals, what was the thought process in your product meetings?! I can just imagine the pitch meeting. Blueberries have protein, I guess, and so does meat, so mix them two and make them sausage-shaped? I can just imagine the dude pitching it saying it with the question mark. This must have come at the end of a very long, very desperate brainstorming session. I can’t even imagine the shit they must have turned down.  Honestly, it didn’t taste that bad. It just kind of had a weird, mealy texture and tasted mostly overwhelmingly of maple syrup. But not even in a good way. It kind of just tasted like fake pancakes. Shaped like tiny, diseased penises. Ew.   

So, I went to The Shop yesterday to visit and troll the aisles of fine Italian goods for something truly utterly disgusting. And I might have found it. You’ll notice that this week’s abomination is a lovely canned wonder from the far reaches of…New Jersey, I guess? Probably Italy by way of New Jersey. It is bright yellow, with some sort tomato/fish-headed chef, which I guess is supposed to make me feel better about eating this? I dunno. What is this mystery canned item, you ask? Umm, the can says it is called Cuoco, and also that it is a “seasoning” for macaroni. With sardines! Huzzah!

According to the ingredient list, it has young fennel, sardines, raisins and salted sardine puree. So, two things I definitely hate (raisins and fennel), and one thing that I have not yet tried but know I will hate (sardines). I think my boss Josh made this for lunch one time in the shop. All I recall is that I came in for work one day (too late for lunch, thank god), and the entire store smelled like rotting ocean carcass. It must have been lent or something and he could only eat fish. “Fish.” And I remember gagging and going over to the stove, and seeing this, a gray paste, all dried out from sitting around for a while with some matted buccatini. And I thought I’d try it and see how disgusting it is for myself.

On top there seem to be some vague instructions to heat it in a pan with olive oil and mix it with buccatini, which is like really super thick spaghetti with a little hole in the middle. It’s entirely too cumbersome a pasta to actually eat, but that is what’s recommended, so I’ll go with it.

Even while opening the can, the grey oil seeps up through the newly cut opening between can and lid, and the fishy smell hits you right away. Then when you dump it out into the hot pan, it’s even fishier and greyer, dotted with gross plump raisins and huge chunks of sardine sprinkled throughout.

For the first time ever in my life, I was hoping the flavors of fennel and raisin would stand out, saving me from the oily hell that is the sardine flavor. I salted it generously, somehow hoping that it would be too salty to really taste the sardine, and as it cooked it started to smell slightly sweet and (almost) deliciously complex from the raisins and probably the fennel. This might not be too bad. But god of evil gods was I wrong.

As I put the pasta in the pan, it seemed to suck all moisture from the Cuoco, and I was just left with the horrible image that had been stuck in my brain from before: dry, matted pasta with grey chunks of dry nastiness spread throughout. I threw some of the cooking water in there, hoping it would become slightly unstuck, but, alas, it did not help.

I put some in a bowl and sprinkled some more olive oil on top and some cheese, hoping that the saltiness of the cheese would blot out some of the sardine flavor that I knew was coming. My dad helpfully joined in, I guess so we could have the shared painful experience, but he’ll eat anything and never say it’s bad, so, of course, he was nonplussed by it. I took that as a sort-of good sign, manned up and shoved some of the pasta in my mouth.

The first sensation was one of slight sweetness, and mostly just of the pasta that was in my mouth, and all I could think was, “Damnit, this is not that bad. Again.” Then the horrible, overwhelming flavor of fish fish fish hit me in the back of the throat like a ton of, I dunno, fishes. I couldn’t swallow, and my panicking mouth just kept sending messages to my brain to spit the crap out before it was forced to hit my stomach. Which I did, onto the floor. I was in such a panic that I completely missed my bowl and all of it plopped onto the floor, generally in the same state as it was before I ate it since I only got a few chews in before I freaked out.

My dog wouldn’t even eat it, and I’m pretty sure she eats her own poo. Or she would if she could. Eww.

So now my house smells like fish ass, and I just found out that there are buyers coming to look at our house in an hour and a half. Oops.