Caterpillar caviar

Not to be melodramatic, but there was very nearly a tragedy in my mouth tonight. I wasn’t even going to share this story (although I kind of mentioned it on Wendy and my blog), because in the retelling I’ll likely feel my whole body spasm in a kind of pre-upchuck reflex, however I feel you deserve to know. Warning: it’s gross.

So there I was cutting into a head of cauliflower in the way I often do which is to cut the thing in half and then flip the halves over and cut off the green leaves from the bottom. I’m sure this isn’t the fancy chef way but then I’m not a fancy chef, I’m just a gal trying not to eat caterpillars and their eggs. So I flip the thing over and I notice some weird amber-hued clusters of what looks like caviar. That’s the thing that gets me about this whole story is just how much I’m an architect in my own near misfortune. I mean, I actually thought to myself that it looks like caviar which is to say it looks like eggs AND THEN I scooped up a blob on my finger and smeared it and it smeared in a way which made me think it wasn’t eggs but was instead some kind of resin—like a plant’s ear wax—or a mold or something and so I kept cutting and looking at it and thinking that the tiny little orbs were certainly rounder than anything that isn’t living matter, so I was beginning to worry that really I was fooling myself because clearly I’m dealing with some kind of larvae so I was going to try to cut off the gross parts and I was cutting and throwing out lots of the cauliflower and then I saw this bright green thing in the heart of the cauliflower. At first I actually wondered if it wasn’t part of the stalk but then I kept looking at it and it was clearly an insect—I was thinking a worm or centipede because apparently under stress I forget the word caterpillar—and so while I was freaking out and bagging up the cauliflower trash and taking it to the basement far far away from my apartment so no caterpillars can lay eggs in my eye sockets while I sleep I began thinking about jokes like “what’s worse than finding half a worm in your apple”? Except I couldn’t really think of a good punch line because I was too busy disassociating from my caterpillar egg compromised hand which I washed so many times I’m surprised it still has skin on it. But this hand is dead to me now—may I never touch my eyes, nose or mouth with it.

Except I think I already did.

Anyway, yeah. So that was my night.