Well, first off, it was an accident.
Second: I thought they were kidney beans?
Last Monday, someone in this home made a curry. It didn’t go right, though. There was an issue with the right rice not being available at the store, and long story short, it was a touch undercooked. The sweet potatoes had some crunch. After a couple days of experimentation, this person told me that the curry didn’t taste too bad if you squeezed a whole lime out onto it. Then, this person went out of town. Leaving me, wanting to eat a little healthier and also wanting to be a good guy and clear up the unwanted leftovers, eating the curry for five days. At least four of which may have involved me eating edamame that was a host for mold.
On Friday—an hour or two before the surprise birthday (not a birthday surprise)—I noticed my supper smelled a little funky. Specifically, it smelled like barf. Just a little bit like barf. I know people hate thinking of the smell of barf, but it smelled a little bit like barf. Sorry. I didn’t choose the smell.
I finished the bowl.
The thing about smells is that my nose does a bad job of identifying them. For whatever reason, I have a poorly functioning nose. It doesn’t always get smells right. And I, knowing that curries can sometimes smell bad anyway, thought, ‘Ehh, it’s probably just the lime juice mixing with the spices.’ (It might have been this, to be honest, but if anybody knows what rotting edamame covered in lime juice smells like, please get in touch so we can confirm that this is what happened and that I didn’t sleepbarf into my leftovers.)
I ate the curry for three more days.
That recipe made a lot of curry.
It wasn’t until last night, having scooped the final serving of the stuff into a bowl and having microwaved that bowl and having put the Tupperware in the dishwasher and having eaten half the bowl, that I noticed a local, specific source of the smell. It was the kidney beans. It looked like they’d erupted and, with their innards, discolored the rice around them. That part of the bowl seemed like it smelled worse than the rest. That, I thought, was the source of the smell.
I was talking about this later with the person who made the curry, and they said, “Oh, Stu. There weren’t any beans in there.” To which I replied, “Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no.” Then, pulling up the recipe, they listed the ingredients one by one until they got to edamame. Technically a bean, but still bad news. Because even to this mildly colorblind blogger, edamame should be green. Edamame should not be the color of kidney beans. And neither should edamame’s innards.
What happens now? Well, I could get superpowers. I could die. So far, I feel…fine? I had to chug a bottle of Sprite last night (my friends were hazing me again) and I kept that down, and while my gut was feeling a bit off on Sunday, I chalked that up to the it-had-been-open-for-a-long-time parmesan and the it-wasn’t-close-to-its-sell-by-date-but-it-did-taste-bitter milk I’d had with dinner.
It would be helpful to have a stronger sense of smell.
