The Inner Mollusc

Last night our house was attacked by ferocious space aliens, who shot a ray-gun through the walls and into our brains and turned us into lethargic, pudding-like creatures so primitive we were incapable of getting off the couch except to get more food. It was astonishing.

We ate ourselves into a bit of a stupor because my Smaller Half had impulsively bought an enormous bag of mussels at the markets that morning. Of course, they had to be cooked and eaten that night otherwise they might have gone funny. She poached them in a chilli, tomato and chorizo sauce, then dumped the whole lot over the top of an equally enormous pot of pasta. Delicious.

The funny thing about mussels is that they taste great but they are really really ugly and they make me feel a bit nauseous if I think about them at all. So I have to extract them from their shells and hide them inside a twirl of pasta and act as if nothing at all unusual is going into my mouth. Then it's fine. But if I start thinking about them, if I start wondering what all the funny bits are inside them that seem to be all different colours and shapes, then all bets are off. I will soon be trapped at the table chewing each mouthful 412 times because the idea of swallowing makes me want to vomit. Which is annoying for something so yummy. For this reason I actually prefer scallops - the Chicken McNugget of the sea.

Scallops: am I the only person in the world who thought that they were made out of potatoes until they were surprisingly old? (Man, since I wrote that post about parsing sentences wrongly I keep looking at my writing and seeing all the ambiguity. Like that sentence above - I meant that the scallops were made of potatoes, not me. And it's me who was surprisingly old, not the scallops. Or the potatoes.)