We watched the Iron Chef episode that we taped over the weekend. That is such a funny and gross show. For those of you who may not have seen it before, each week they have a theme ingredient, and a challenger competes with an ‘Iron Chef’ to make the best meal, as judged by a panel of tasters. Just after they announce the theme ingredient, they have a little segment about it, with a guy (although not the same guy that used to do it, unfortunately) saying a bit about how it’s used, and they always have a little ’saying’ to go along with the ingredient.

Usually these sayings are pretty weird. In this episode, the theme ingredient was quail, and the ’saying’ was, “Quail is the virgin; duck is the mature woman.” What the…? It was in reference to chefs needing experience to prepare duck meat properly, and that a lot of them start out with quail first, and then move on to duck. But really - how do they come up with this stuff?

So they were making their dishes, and they showed the Iron Chef cutting off the quail heads and putting them aside. I jokingly said to M that he could stew them later… and later on, the IC deep fries them! Eeewww. They looked like little Freddy Kruegger heads when they came out of the frier. The delightful presentation of the quail heads involved cutting them lengthways in half so that the tasters could eat the brains. Now that may sound normal to some of you, but I don’t think that there is ANY way in which the presentation of halved, deep-fried quail heads can be made attractive. It just looked awful. I know that Japanese food is all about the presentation, but I really could not get into this one! Give me the pagoda carved out of a carrot any day.