What is Quorn, you ask?

This post will serve to lend credence to Kiwi's comment that this blog is slowly turning into a food blog. So my love life has become stable and secure and happy and healthy and I have absolutely nothing to talk about except what I shove in my mouth (get your mind out of the gutter, you dirty, dirty person you). Its only a matter of time before Prof and I fight, or break up, or have babies (that one is for you Elena) and then, this blog will become interesting again. Until then...

I apparently mystified some of you with my constant reference to this thing called Quorn over the past week or so. And I can't let you go one more day wondering what you are missing out on.

Quorn is a meat-substitute that is deeeeelicious. Its a chicken-like substance, without any of the chicken guilt. It comes in breaded nugget form, breaded cutlet form, unbreaded cutlet form, chunk form for stir frying, and a petite little roast. I think I recently saw some kind of fancy cheese stuffed form in the freezer section too. Its low fat, low calorie, no cholesterol and high in fiber. What could be better than that?

Well, it has a couple problems: One, its more expensive than your typical garden burger variety meat substitutes. Two, its made from fermented fungus.

That's right folks. I had an orgasmic thanksgiving experience eating fermented fungus.

The company prefers to call it "mycoprotein", for obvious reasons.

Rumor has it that in the 1970's crazy survivalists started messing with alternative protein development (think soylent green) and stumbled onto some strange soil fungus that they cultivated and grew and put barbeque sauce on. It was sold overseas for decades, but only made its way to the U.S. about eight years ago. Apparently there were rumors of severe allergic reactions (started by Garden Burger, maybe?) and that kept them out of the U.S. market for quite a while.

Tofurkey used to have the corner on Thanksgiving meat replacement, but it never really did anything for me. The fake meat was gelatinous, the stuffing it came with had a texture I could never quite place, and it sometimes tasted like licking a salt cube. But Quorn is good, despite being made out of fermented soil fungus. It has texture. And taste. And its not too salty. And it makes a damn fine leftover sandwich.

And I ate the last of mine for dinner tonite. I guess Thanksgiving is finally over.