scotch egg

in portland this weekend with laura for a long lost college buddy's birthday. we arrived on friday and went to The Farm, a semi-vegetarian (i.e. pescetarian) restaurant, where i felt compelled to loudly launch into the Free Beef story while crowded in at the bar, surrounded, presumably by sensitive vegetarian and semi-vegetarian types. laura, jess and i split the baked brie plate, a beet salad and some sort of fried tofu dish. the brie was kind of boring, but the other two dishes were fantastic. i'm always impressed by tofu that not only has taste, but has interesting complex taste and textures. i also had an intolerably sweet drink called the tequilarini or something like that. actually, i just made that up. it sounded nothing like that at all. but it included vodka, pomegranite juice (that nasty Pom stuff that a. likes), orange juice and a slew of other sweet flavors. i had to ask them to water it down with club soda. but, hey, last time i was at the Farm, i had a mint julep, which was honestly one of the best things ever. you win some, you lose some.

saturday day i'm sure we ate something, but i can only remember the endless, daunting, soul-sucking costume shopping to which we submitted for most of the day. i also remember happily hearing "Only You" by Yazz (that's Yazzoo to all you British readers) in one of the thrift stores and, more happily (happilier?) discovering that laura has the erasure love. we did have an almost 100% shopping success rate (i failed to find a cream-colored blazer). saturday evening was the party. alcohol was consumed and promptly danced off.

sunday morning, we ate at the Horse Brass, after the anti-Horse Brass member of the party decided to skip breakfast (we had been very accomodating...i don't know what we did). the Horse Brass is a pub. we arrived at 11am-ish to people drinking pints. one of my arteries clogged when i looked at the menu. we ordered two scotch eggs for the table, three english breakfasts (laura, ann, me), some wussy two egg and sausage business for the squid, a boddington for me, a boddington for laura and coffee all around. honestly, i'm amazed i survived the whole ordeal. i have never in my life consumed such a massive quantity of fatty, fried, meaty food in one sitting...with beer.
the scotch egg (pictured) is a hardboiled egg, wrapped in sausage and deepfried. english breakfast included: fried oil-drenched bread, toasted bread, ham, sausage, beans, stewed tomatoes, eggs, potatoes and was absolutely obscene. and then there was the beer. did i mention the beer? we made it through one egg and a startling amount of english breakfast before calling it (mumbling, more like it) quits. the remaining egg was divided amongst ann, laura and squid, and probably thrown away later in the day. don't get me wrong, breakfast was fantastic. it's just that it got me wondering about the life expectancy of the scots. it's lookin' pretty bleak if they eat like this on a regular basis. needless to say, laura and i had both expected to leave after breakfast, but had to wait a good four hours before either of us felt alert enough to drive home. i wonder if they have darts competitions at the Horse Brass. i hope so.