Jiggly Meat

Holly found an email I sent earlier this year recounting one of our adventures. I share it with you now as a cautionary tale...

It has been tough.
It has been grueling.
Many friends, and a few enemies, were made along the way.

But today, I am proud to announce, the last tub of chopped ham HAS BEEN EATEN!

When I recall that fateful day 2 weeks ago, I shudder. Shudder, I tell you! There it lay, a 2 foot tube of chopped ham. 10 pounds of meat for 10 dollars! How could I go wrong? But wrong it was. Like so many before me, I flew too close to the budgetary sun only to find my wings were made of inferior meat byproducts.

On that first night, I tried frying it plain...
frying it with garlic...
with honey...
and with pepper...
I tried baking it...
As the days passed and its great pink mass continued to dominate our refrigerator, I even tried blendering it into paste and sneaking it into spaghetti sauce. All to no avail. It mocked me at every turn and with every gelatinous bite.

Here's a bit of wisdom for future generations... When all is said and done, you can flavor a rubbery piece of meat with mystery chunks however you like, and you still end up biting into rubbery meat with mystery chunks.

I would like to claim this accomplishment as my own, but I was greatly aided by two turns of good fortune. Good fortune for me at least. Not so good for the innocents who's lives were forever tainted.

First, our dog has an allergy. Twice a day I was able to hide his pills in chunks of this hellish pink flesh. I hope he can forgive me.

The second bit of luck was being able to smuggle several pounds of it into my in-laws refrigerator when they weren't looking. I left their house with a happy wave, saying "I left you a surprise!" That is the level of despair these unearthly slaughterhouse sweepings brought me to. What they ever did with it, I do not know. They stopped returning my phone calls within 24 hours of my delivery.

Being on the outside, you might wonder why I didn't just throw it away? I might have at the start, but as the days passed it became a test of wills, me vs. the jiggly meat.

I would not give in.

I could not!

In the end how could I hold my head up high, knowing I had been beaten by that wiggly mass?

While some might read this as a heroic tale of the struggle of one man against his gelatinous foe, please, read this as a cautionary tale of how all the good and noble things in life can be taken away, one quivering hunk at a time.