Oh Bloody Hell!

I wish it had remained a mystery. I could just chalk the incident up as another “don’t ask”, and forget all about it. But no, we just had to go to that restaurant and order that dish.

About a week ago, my Chinese roommate brought home three bags of food. She distributed one to me and my roommate, and we all sat down to eat. The food was good; some kind of vegetable soup with duck meat. It was all very tasty except for one of the ingredients: large, glutinous, brown chunks of something. I tried one of the chunks and thinking it innards, pushed it to the bottom of my bowl.

Anyway, today I was again invited to go have dinner with a couple of the Chinese students. One of the students helped me buy a bike earlier in the day, and I wanted to thank her by not letting her pay for the meal. She rattled off half a dozen dishes to the waitress, and we settled in for the wait.

Our dishes arrived one by one. First the corn with red pepper, then the eggplant in a spicy sauce, then the soup, followed by several other dishes too delicious for words. Lastly the waitress placed a large, steaming pot of chili oil, underneath which lurked those glutinous brown chunks.

I asked the Chinese student to tell me what the mystery ingredient was.

“Blood.”

“What?”

“It’s blood. B-L-Double ‘O’-D. Blood.” All the Americans paused. In unison, we plastered on our fake smiles and commented on how good the food was.

My classmate leaned over and asked me, “What’d she say? Blood?”

“Yep.” One of the other students clarified matters for us. The broth itself wasn’t blood, it was the brown glutinous chunks.

I don’t know. Blood was just never meant to be an ingredient. It was pretty gross. I posted a picture of the chunks I found online. This isn’t the dish we ate, but it gives you a pretty clear picture of what they look like.