I made some chorizo. If you don't know what chorizo is, shame on you. It's the pimpin'est sausage this side of the rio grande (probably becasue it's mexican). For some reason chorizo goes perfectly with eggs, beans and such to make truly kickass breakfast burritos. So me and my roomie decided to have some for dinner. I went and got the chorizo and started cooking. Now, as someone willing to eat meat, i hold no illusions as to what it is I'm eating, especially where sausage is concerned. So i was okay with the whole sausage casing and goopy meat bit. I mean, i was prepared to be grossed out, i'd run over all the possibilites of cowcow parts that might find their way into my breakfast/dinner, especially since this is a mexican sausage, y'know. I was ready for heart, tounge, liver, intestine, even cartileage, that sort of goop.
Here's what's in chorizo: Salivary glands, Lymph nodes and cheek/tounge fat.
WTF? i say agan, W? T? F?
LYMPH NODES? I didn't even know they could get those out of a cow! Much less harvest them and set them aside especially for chorizo! AND WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH SALIVARY GLANDS? How many salivary glands does it take to make chorizo, and why the hell does it have to be in MY FREAKING SAUSAGE!
Even worse, when you cook the stuff it turns out like 2/3 of the tube was this fatty, blood red mixture. So i have to drain away most of what i paid for, and make sure that the teensy little bits of meat (for all the care they must take to get those bits out of the cow, they sure don't try to keep them in very big pieces, maybe that's a good thing) don't drain away with it. I eventually took like 7 paper towels and pressed most of the fat out of my chorizo, yielding a small mass of tiny chunks of lymph node (aka cancer highways; tumors spread like wildfires through lymph nodes, and most cancer patients have a good deal of theirs removed when they have surgery, i wonder how many cows get cncer before they turn into meat?). It looked kind of like Taco bell meat, only redder; this is an indication of how little i like taco bell meat. The rest of the preparation was pretty normal: nuke the potatoes, scramble the eggs make the beans and mix. The probelm was, now that i was through this ordeal, i didn't really want to eat the chorizo anymore. I do like chorizo, and hope it'll still be tasty in the morning, but i just wasnt in the mood for it anymore after cooking it.
So here's a tip to anyone with a hankering for chorizo: have someone else cook it for you. Preferably a vegan, who wouldn't be eating it later anyhow (good luck on convincing them to touch the stuff, though)
