"Exquisite Course"

A Food-Word Game

While you Pee-towners are slacking off on sleds, some of us reside in above-freezing environs and have to keep the blogroll a burnin’. Here is a parlor game that we’re calling “Exquisite Course” that’s sure to pass the time for anybody stuck in their kitchen, closet or car.

But wait…let’s back it up a second. You see, we at Hot Knives have been scheming for weeks over a concept of postmodern, deconstructionist high fallutin’ vegan fast food recipes we plan to unleash on the world shortly. Think Sprite, as a salad.

However, it dawned on us that we might be getting a twee bit ahead of ourselves. After all you can’t get to postmodernism without hitting a little surrealism, right? In this case we mean a saucy liberation of our unconscious minds through imagination, free food association and weird, guttural wordplay. This game is fun, sure, but it’s also a serious way to stumble upon dream-like dishes of sick proportions. So here’s how you play:

If you’ve played Exquisite Corpse before, you can probably already guess. We happened to try a couple rounds as two people (once bored in a car, once drunk at a bar) but it suits a threesome much better. Simply start at the beginning of the alphabet and have one person kick-off with the first ingredient that comes to mind (“all spice”). A second person adds either another ingredient (“apple”) or a preparation method (“roasted”) and a third player tosses out a larger dish-type (“hummus”) and voile you’ve got “all-spice apple hummus” or whatever. Now, many of them won’t be, well, realistic, but you can imagine how it both passes the time and pushes the proverbial envelope right? Here are two standout rounds that we got too frustrated or drunk to finish...

Round One

Avocado aspic jelly
Banana crisp cereal
Collard greens dolmas
Date-pear compote
Eggplant quiche
Fava beans w/fries in a barley wine and butter sauce
Gravied tomatoes
Hot pickled broccoli
Ice wine shallot vinaigrette
Japanese eggplant caviar
Kream of kale soup
Lemon-lime "Sprite" salad
Macaroni and morel casserole
Nicoise soup
Olive pineapple pilaf
Peanuts (fresh) in butter
Parsnip relish
Quinoa-mint spring rolls
Rice cream
Sake-bomb tempeh w/ coconut mash

Round Two

Ancho-Baratta cheese
Beet chevre
Champagne shoshito shots
Duvel eggplant steak
Endive frittata
Frisee BBQ onion rings
Gravy hummus
Harissa spanokapia
Juniper jelly compote
Kettle parsnip w/ vodka salt

YOUR TURN...