Fish Eyes & Dough Blobs

You now know that I detest tripe. Here's something else that totally disgusts me... Cookie Dough Ice Cream.

Shame on those nasty, gooey blobs of raw doughy stuff taking up valuable ice cream space. The color of those blobs is in itself totally unappetizing. I will not ever eat the stuff. Never. I won't even eat the ice cream that touches the dough blobs. If you want to see what's in cookie dough ice cream, this dude has a whole series of great pictures on the subject.

And that brings me to people who dunk their cookies in milk and their do-nuts in coffee. What happened to manners? There is an ad currently on TV with a grandpa and grandson eating and dunking cookies in a proud family tradition of poor manners. How totally tacky. Sloughing your food into your beverage and then sucking down dripping sweets is gross. Puh-Leeze, do not do this, gentle people.

As a kid, I was always totally freaked out by tapioca. I called it "fish eyes" and I refused to eat it. Okay, I've grown up, out and old, and I've eaten tapioca but I still do not care for the texture. Tapioca is made from the cassava root. Cassava roots contain traces of cyanide. For me, that is reason enough to avoid tapioca even without thinking of those various sized of fish-eyed, gelatinous balls that make up the stuff. Euuu.

It is apparently fashionable to float large black tapioca balls in hot or cold tea. It's called Bubble Tea. It's tea with crunch. Rest assured that if I find a large black gummy ball that looks like a fish eye in my tea, I will bolt. While I can finally eat a few spoonfuls of tapioca, I cannot and will not ever allow large, black, fish eyeballs of cassava in my sweet tea.

"Sweet tea" is what we call iced tea in the South. You may order ice tea (we don't say "iced" tea, we say ICE tea") without sugar but in the South, we mostly drink sweet tea and it comes in a 16 - 24 ounce glass, with a special ice tea spoon that is slender has a very long handle so that in case the tea is not sweet enough to immediately send you into diabetic shock, you can add a few more spoonfuls of sugar. The tall glass is filled to the brim with ice and then strong tea, into which as much sugar as possible was added when the tea was just brewed and hot. One always adds the sugar immediately after the tea is steeped and still piping hot since the hot solution can hold much more suspended sugar than when sugar is added to cold tea. Sweet tea in the South is strong and syrupy sweet and full of caffeine. We don't dunk anything in it and we don't add fish eyes.