| Chicken balls |
Dec 28, 2008 7:52 pm
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Well, helloooo, stars o' ta blogs! How's your helliday season? Mine has been quietly hellish, a nice change from the white hot flames of the ninth circle. No meltdown poutyfests with CMAT and The Big Pussy, no spittly shouting by the Shrillster, shopping that was relatively successful and low in stress, if unpleasant. So I guess I have this absence of tears and dysfunction to be grateful for. There was still the burdensome barometric pressure of expectation that accompanies every visit home (the Dawg suggested a holiday advent calendar that ended on the 26th after I kept taking stock every morning of how many more days before we got to go home), but I've had worse Christmas visits.
Still, it was a huge relief to return to Toronto on Saturday. We had about a day to decompress and then we flew out to San Francisco to spend New Years in glorious Qatifornia. It smells so good here. Everything is still alive and green and earthy. Speaking of which, uh, sort of, we had the pleasure of our girl 's company last night and this morning and plan to hang some more during our stay here, including our flipping the bird to New Years together and greeting Aught Neuf with her diverse posse of friends and family.
So, chicken balls. You may be wondering. Well, a couple weeks ago when the Dawg first arrived in Toronto for the happydays, he spotted a Chinese food take out menu in my apartment and started snorting like the twelve year old he is when he read that there is a dish called "Sweet and Sour Chicken Balls". I'm like, "What? Chicken balls." He can't believe anybody would put a dish on their menu called chicken balls. I couldn't believe he'd never heard of them. This led to a whole back and forth (hilarious or tedious, depending on your tolerance of such things) and the Dawg insisted that, from a marketing perspective, this would never fly in the US.
I thought he must be mistaken, that just because he'd never heard of them didn't mean the entire U S of A hadn't. So when I spoke with the beautiful and normally reliable a few days before Christmas to wish her happiness and health and to bitch and moan about my crazy mother and stepfather, she was mystified by the notion of chicken balls, and claimed it was "insane" to serve such a dish.
I took the question to my family at Christmas dinner, because that's how I roll, and everyone agreed that chicken balls were just that. Chicken balls. No big whup. Balls of chicken, battered and deep fried, smothered in sugary sweet and sour sauce. We promptly concluded Americans are weird and must be incredibly perverse and disgusting if they cannot order chicken balls off a menu without freaking out that they are participating in some sort of Survivor gross-food challenge.
So what do you think? Are chicken balls a Canadian perversity? Are Americans too sex-obsessed / repressed / immature to process an alternative usage for the word "balls" when referring to foodstuffs?
Please weigh in on this crucially important matter.
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