Saturday, April 1, 2017

Dinosaur Chow

Several years ago, I stumbled upon the blog Cockpit Conversation.  Cockpit Conversation is written by a woman who refers to herself as Aviatrix.  Aviatrix is a commercial pilot, and usually she writes about oddities she happens upon in the course of her job.  However, sometimes she posts about things that are simply humorous, such as Dinosaur Chow.

It appears that Aviatrix's friend writes a web comic called Dinosaur Comics, and one of his comics involved a dinosaur who invents a recipe.  In a burst of whimsy, Aviatrix decides to make the recipe herself and describe both the process and the final result.  

This would justify a loud "meh", except that the dinosaur's idea of nouvelle cuisine was to combine ice cream and meat.  You read that correctly the first time:  ice cream and meat.  To quote the dinosaur in the comic:
First, get five pounds of ground beef.
Then, get five pounds of ice cream.
Fold the raw meat into the ice cream, and brown in a giant frying pan.

Throw some eggs into this!
Then add some salt to taste, and more eggs to taste too.
Serve in a bathtub, and garnish with fifty dollar bills.
In redacting this fictional dinosaur's recipe for a (live) human audience, Aviatrix began by making only a fifth of the quantity (i.e.,  using only a pound of meat and a pound of ice cream, and garnishing with 10-dollar bills).  Second, she chose to put the meat into the pan first, and fold in the ice cream, because (in her words) "The difference is that had I followed the instructions exactly, no part of the beef would have browned in the pan the way some did before the ice-cream was folded in."  In other words, as she carefully explains, "What I was essentially doing was slow-poaching ground beef in sweetened milk, in the presence of guar gum, cellulose gum, locust bean gum, polysorbate 80, mono- and diglycerides and carrageenan [i.e., the ice cream]."

To her surprise, the end result was fairly tasty, if you enjoy Really Sweet Foods:
"The dish was astonishingly edible, considering it was invented by a fictional dinosaur and deliberately concocted to be as ludicrous as possible. It's pretty sweet, and this is coming from someone who ate Nutella out of the jar with a spoon for lunch. I would recommend decreasing the ice cream-to-beef ratio to perhaps 1:2, add more chili powder and other spices at an earlier stage of cooking and, as I mentioned earlier, play with the ice cream flavour."
I suppose the moral of this is that it's hard to go wrong in combining eggs, sweets, and meat, but overall I'm not inclined to test the recipe myself.  It does make a splendid subject for a blog post on a day, such as today, dedicated to the ludicrous.

EDIT:  (5/9/2017)  It just occurred to me that a recipe like this would be a *perfect* use for garlic ice cream.

4 comments:


  1. Remember, dinosaurs were around longer than they've been gone! :-^)

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    1. True. And they didn't have fifty-dollar bills, or frying pans. ;-)

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  2. it at least sounds better than mary randolphs oyster ice cream!

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  3. Oyster ice cream. Ugh.

    The only time I ever tasted oysters was on a date with a former boyfriend who loved seafood. He enticed me to try them with the graceful, enigmatic remark, "They taste of the sea." Well, they do. They taste of iodine and grit, and I'd hate to see those flavors transmitted to ice cream!

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