Foie gras"Foie gras (pronounced 'fwah grah') has been exalted in some gourmet food circles as a prized delicacy, but if most people knew how foie gras is produced, they would be horrified. Foie gras, the French term for "fatty liver," is the product of extreme animal cruelty. It is the swollen, diseased liver of ducks and geese who are force-fed just up until the point of death before being slaughtered. Birds suffer tremendously, both during and after the force-feeding process, as their physical condition rapidly deterioriates. In just a few weeks, their livers swell up to ten times their normal size, and the birds can scarcely stand, walk, or even breathe.
http://www.nofoiegras.org/FGabout.htm
All of the words in blue font above could be used to describe the dining experience at Vue De Monde, last night, where quite fittingly, many of the courses featured foie gras. The forms that it came in were: smear, cigar, licorise allsort style blocks, mousse, terreine, grille a la poire et au Gewyrztramer and more. Shannon Bennett (the chef, owner, part-time mad scientist) has taken a leaf out of Iron Chef and included diseased liver and porcine located truffles in almost every dish. All delicious, meaty, creamy, saturated fat laced with the taste of soft earth.
Then there were the bubbles. Some poor kitchen hand out the back has got a little plastic container and a wand that he got in a party bag. His job is to serve wrapped air. He dips the little wand in the container and blows a little pile of bubbles on to the plates. Sometimes the air is enclosed in an invisible Japanese vegetable called "enoki" and this is called "bubbles", other times he gets out another container and a bigger wand, then his job is to blow bigger bubbles of air wrapped in invisible rhubard into a little pile and this is called "foam". This is not the beaten egg white style of bubbles/mousse conoction that I was familiar with. We were paying for serious soapsub-sized bubbles, and that was what we got. Unfortunately, I'd had froth for lunch so I was a bit full.
