I Try It So You Don’t Have To: The Last Food On The Shelf, Part 1

As the East Coast furiously prepared for the impending Frankenstorm,  emergency preparedness lists began to pop up all over the place.  While all these items fit the criteria, I hope for your sake you are not the poor soul grabbing them from the shelf as the only food left in the place. Zombies might be the better option.

So what do we have here? Pickled pigs feet, yum. As I have said before, I like pork and pickles so they could be OK.  Hot vienna sausage, because regular vienna sausage was too appetizing to be left on on the shelf. Canned snails, I love escargot, that should be all right. And last but not least, canned jack fruit, to ward off scurvy.

Trying to decided which order to taste these in was challenging. Not knowing what the strongest tastes were going to be left me running the risk of wrecking my taste buds up front and not giving the others a fair shot. In the end, I decided to open them all up and see what happened.

I opened the vienna sausage first,  the dust on the lid was not an an encouraging sight.

Not surprisingly it smelled like cat food and it looked like it too. The big clumps of jelly did not help its visual appeal at all. I was trying to get a single sausage out and the can was too tightly packed with mushy meat to make that work. I attempted to sweep my fork around the outside the ooze of jelly was oh so appealing.

Next up was the pickled pigs feet, the smell as I opened the jar was exactly what I expected, strong vinegar smell with a hint of porkiness. I fished one out with a fork and it was just not a good look. The floating remnants of pork and globules of fat  in the jar were an excellent appetite suppressant.

And now it’s time for the snails. As much as I love to eat them in a restaurant I have always been of the opinion that they are a great texture and a great vehicle for butter, parsley and garlic. They don’t offer a lot themselves. This should be fun. The smell from the can was not particularly unpleasant but not good either. I couldn’t quite place it but it had a sulfurous odor kind of like hard boiled eggs. The grey broth was just nasty looking.

They reminded me of the the silkworms which was not something I needed to remember. Last up for my olfactory palate cleanser was the jack fruit  I expected it to be pretty much like any other canned fruit and I was rewarded appropriately. It smelled like canned peaches which is what all canned fruit smells like to me. The only thing of note was the stringiness of it as it fell apart onto the plate.

That didn’t give me high hopes for the texture.

When all was said and done I wound up with a plateful of anxiety.

 Next week: see which item made me look like this