goose turds and duck sausage — really!

I felt a bit like Anya at the cash register yesterday (a Buffy reference, in case you don’t know) — but I was chortling over my StatCounter rather than over money. One of my busier days yet, visitor-wise, thanks to Une Femme mentioning me in her blogpost yesterday. Didn’t get me more comments, but that’s okay. I know we’re all busy getting ready for fall, and it takes a bit to work your way through my long posts. Glad to see that quite a few of you have been taking part in my September changes poll–there’s still a bit of time left if you haven’t voted.

I’ll keep today’s post short and . . . well, I don’t think it will be sweet, sorry. Inspired by a couple of frickin’ hilarious (can’t help it, just seems like the perfect descriptor) posts by David Lebowitzthis week, I’m going to show you a photo and it’s not pretty. (Lebowitz has since modified his posts a bit because he’s a generous writer who wanted to keep the focus more positively on the book he was reviewing.) Lebowitz’s blog is a favourite of mine ’cause he not only talks about life for an ex-pat in Paris, a continual dream of mine, but because he’s also a passionate yet down-to-earth foodie (he used to be pastry chef at Alice Waters’ restaurant, Chez Panisse, and has written several highly-regarded books) — and he’s just so damn funny! A high point of our trip to Paris this past spring was recognizing him outside a brasserie I’d learned about on his blog (okay, well, it was perhaps not a high point of my husband’s trip, but I was excited and Paul was, well, mortified–in my defense, there really wasn’t too much of the oooh-ing and aaah-ing).

Anyway, his post last week showed the unpalatable-looking contents of a can of Niçoise salad and then, later, a tuna mousse — you can imagine how well a tuna mousse might photograph, right? Maybe as well as this?

This is what I immediately thought of when I read Lebowitz’s post — a plate we were served this summer at a restaurant we visited during our Okanagan wine tour. I can’t remember if this was on the menu as duck terrine or paté, but I think its yummy taste would have been more convincing if it had been served in a bowl-ish container rather than forced into an unfortunately cylindrical shape. I say unfortunate, of course, because although sausages, yes, are cylindrical, and I guess that’s what the chef was aiming at, also cylindrical are those other objects you know about if your kids (or you) have ever played soccer on a field frequented regularly by Canada geese! And given the duck’s texture, as you see above, you want to aim your eaters’ thoughts away from the goose turds, not towards.
To be fair, this is the way the plate looked at first, except that there was a little tent of the bread slices covering it — for damn good reason, I’d say, but whoever plated this didn’t think to the inevitable moment when the patron knocked the little tent down in order to actually eat the bread — and confronted the goose turd yummy sausage. I’m not going to name the restaurant because, otherwise, the food and the service there was wonderful, and it would be unfair (and spectacularly ungenerous) to mention them for a single plating error. However, we did tell the server that someone might want to reconsider. Well, we had to tell her something to explain why we were laughing so hard!