Prologue

In which we explore the process of exploration, and we take things and make other things from them for the purpose of being joyful in the process of exploration, and mix things up in a way that creates little mental explosions of aliveness, for no other purpose than to celebrate the uncircumscribeable, with a nod to Eraserhead and Quinn Martin. Oh, and also, pictures and tacos come out in the end.

Act I

Ingredients:

Act II

-Take the beef tongue, the camera and the chemistry into the studio, and lay out the beef tongue onto the cake plate. Decorate the base with some chard leaves and carefully place your lights around the arrangement to highlight the features of the tongue.
-Take some pictures of it and adjust as needed.
-While you’re at it and in the studio, take more pictures of other stuff you happened to bring along.
-After a long day shooting, bring the tongue home, place it in the fridge and forget about it.
-Leave in fridge for four or five days until your wife starts asking what the hell you’re intending to do with that disgusting thing.
-Decide maybe you should make some decisions regarding what the next step is for the tongue.
-Look at a bunch of recipes online, decide to not follow any of them and wing it instead.

Act III

-Put the tongue in a large pot and cover with six quarts of water. Add one of the onion, one of the heads of garlic, and two of the chilies, all chopped. Add the bay leaves, salt and pepper and boil for 4 hours.
-Let the tongue cool and peel off the skin. Cut it in half and slice off a piece a decide it’s kind of weird and probably not quite cooked enough. Pretend you’re cool and that all the strange gristly fatty bits don’t freak you out at all.
-Decide it can be better…

This blog post is starting to be a little text heavy and we know that can be a problem with today’s typical 4 minute attention span reader. Here’s something completely random and unrelated that moves, for the purpose of keeping overactive brains engaged. It’s even interactive, so when you click in it, it does interactive multimedia!

Act IV

-Cut up the tongue in about 10 chunks and saute the pieces in olive oil in a dutch oven. Add salt, oregano, one chopped onion, peeled garlic cloves from the second head, and finely chopped chili.
-Juice tangerine, remove seeds, and add the juice and the peel to the mix.
-Cover the dutch oven and place in oven at 325 for 4 hours, checking it occasionally to make sure it’s not getting too dry.
-Once it’s done, cut it into 1/2 inch slices and sprinkle with chopped white onion and cilantro, and squeeze lime juice on it.
-Serve it to your family and watch them give it the old college try, claim that they really like it but say they’re not really hungry.
-Eat a lot of it yourself because it’s pretty freakin’ good, actually.
-Eat tacos de lengua at lunch for the next 5 days.
-Have your family eventually admit to you they thought it was weird and disgusting, and please never make it again.
-Blog about it later because if you don’t blog about, how can you know for sure it actually happened?

Epilog

In which one has better figure out what the hell to do with the cow’s feet that were purchased with the tongue, because they’s really starting to smell. I hear tendon soup is a thing… Thanks to Tintypebooth for the help with the tintypes.