Hungry Thanksgiving 2023!
WHOO HOO! I got the Thanksgiving page finished and queued up a couple days in advance! It turns out I really AM still capable of getting ahead of the game on holiday content! Let’s hope I can make this work with the Christmas stuff starting next week! Because yeah, just in case you missed me saying it SEVERAL times already, next Tuesday will be the last regular Far Out There page for a couple weeks. Starting next Friday, with the 1st of December, we’ll have a stretch of daily Christmas comics, and HOPEFULLY I’ll have enough pages already finished and queued up by then that I won’t be stuck at the computer all holiday season. We can only hope!
No XalGox?
Are XalGox even considered Meat?
I’d think the XalGox that are grown on trees are considered Fruit, the ones grown in the ground are considered Vegetables, and the XalGox grown in herds are considered meat. (Huge, Silent, Motionless incredibly creepy herds of millions of XalGox 😮 )
Or maybe they are officially considered meat from a dietary standpoint, but Layla just doesn’t consider them meat?
At first I thought Marshall’s pained expression was because of Layla’s order, but after reading the hovertext now it just looks like he’s just realized that particular joke and is trying very hard not to look at the turkey, or possibly is horrified at the thought of what Layla might have done if he’s inadvertently mentioned turkey breasts and she thought he was making that joke.
Xal-Gox are their own unique, horrible food group all unto themselves, so their inclusion in an “all meat” dish would be considered, at the very least, non-traditional.
But then, where Layla’s concerned, the fact that this concoction they’re discussing includes various seafood is already odd. I’m pretty sure a steak-lover like her would consider fish, at best, “honorary” meat.
Xal-Gox were introduced as a snack that’s sweeter than it looks, so I always thought they counted as something akin to Chocolate or Lollies, though probably Chocolate. Even if they’re grown, they are also known to be immobile, so I suspect that they’re probably more plant than meat, as well.
I’m not sure I’d consider crawfish to even be an honorary fish, much less meat…it really more of a big water bug. But then that probably wouldn’t look as good on a menu. I certainly don’t want to argue with Layla if she wants to mix mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and water bugs in the same dish – it’s a fine holiday tradition!
Crawfish is in the same Genius as Lobsters, so they’re as much fish as lobsters are fish. In that they aren’t. They’re still animal-based seafood, though, and may be considered as more meat than what fish should be considered to be.
Yeah, Lobsters and Shrimp are just water bugs also, of course, but I singled out Crawfish because it’s got “fish” in the name, like it’s trying to fool us into thinking it’s not a bug – Shrimp and lobster at least aren’t falsely advertising themselves. Unless you count “Jumbo Shrimp”.
I’d definitely consider fish = meat before bugs=meat, fish are more closely genetically related to tasty mammals and birds. Layla probably judges more on the tastiness than the genetics,
I suspect.
I’m not sure exactly where XalGox are on that genetic tree. Since we know there’s no alien life, of course, they had to have been bioengineered from something at some point. Probably from something you’d never suspect.
That sounds like turducken cranked up to eleven. I think that much nested stuffing would require quite a bit of mad science to accomplish, especially when several of the animals mentioned are generally larger than the animals they’re supposed to be stuffed inside of, so it might be beyond Marshall’s cooking skills.
The boring answer would be that it’s not whole animals but increasingly small cuts of meat wrapped around each other. The Far Out There answer is just that The Future has learned to bread both really big quail and really small alligators.
The way to make this properly on Earth is (based on my rough knowledge of animal sizes & guesswork):
Alligator, Boar, Swordfish, Goat, Lamb, Turkey, Goose, Duck, Chicken, Salmon, Pheasant, Crawfish, Quail, Shrimp, Pepperoni & Sausage Stuffing
It would probably be impossible to cook to “perfection”, not only because of the thing being the size of a beach ball at minimum, but also because half these ingredients, specifically the Seafood, cook faster than the others. You would need to cook it in pieces, and stuff each layer together to cook the others at precisely the right time. Best chance your hands would be burnt from the stuffing of one half-cooked beastie into another.
Marshall ought to be able to manage it, his cooking appears to be at least 75% Mad Science already (the remaining 25% being hand-to-monster combat):
https://faroutthere.com/comic/page-1246-thawing-your-ingredients/
https://faroutthere.com/comic/page-1247-a-brief-to-do-list/
https://faroutthere.com/comic/page-1253-this-food-is-bad-for-you/
Reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live skit featuring Guy Fieri.
“For this next dish, we’ve stuffed a chicken into a duck, into a turkey, into a lamb, into a goat, into a small horse, into a big horse, into a cow, into a Cornish game hen.” [takes a platter of tiny Cornish game hens out of the oven] “I call it the turduckelagohohocoen.”
A combination that makes the food monster that Stilez is fighting in last weeks page look like a harmless lump of Xal-Gox.
Interestingly, this is actually fewer animals than the 1807 “rôti sans pareil” which was composed of 17 birds- the smallest was stuffed with a single olive- which I realize would offend Layla’s sensibilities. They’re all increasingly small birds which is presumably rather easier than putting an alligator in a quail.
(Food as spectacle rather than taste is WAY less of a thing than it once was. Thank goodness)
…that, or the spectacle just got way more minimalist and pretentious, like those fancy restaurant meals that are just one bite on a giant plate with weird sauce squiggles all over it.