Cuisine

  I love food.  My wife says I have very expensive taste.  The monetary value of the the things I like to eat are sometimes cost prohibiting.  That's why I try to make due with what I can get my hands on.  I like trying to cook for myself.  Instead of going out to a Mexican restaurant for some menudo, I buy a can of Juanita's.  I cut up some cilantro and onion, put it into a pot with some water and boil it for about 10 minutes.  Add some lime juice and pepper if desired.  Then I open the can of soup and put it into the pot.  Let that heat up for an additional 10 minutes and viola!  A menudo fit for a Chinese/Korean zombie novelist.
  I love German food, Filipino, Ethiopian, Spanish, Thai, Mediterranean, Indian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, American, Italian and French food.  I also love Cajun and soul food.  I'd say I love Japanese ham sammiches, but I think that's a lost cause.  Most of these foods I had first at restaurants around Tucson, Arizona.  You don't have to be a world traveller these days to open your eyes to the varieties of tastes out there.  Did you know that the most popular way of eating food in the world is with your fingers?  Second most popular is chopsticks.  Fork and spoon only comes in third place.  Do shish kabobs count as finger food or are they in a category all their own?  I wonder where bobbing for apples ranks.

Pastry Deities

  Why is the Virgin Mary always showing up on tortillas?  That's great for reaching out to the lost of the world who eat tortillas.  I know occasionally Jesus shows up on taco shells and tortillas too.  So those of Latino or Hispanic origins are covered.  Over in the Mediterranean area, what about showing up on some pitas?  Or if you want to catch people while they're young, show up on some zwieback.  Mary could make a killing appearing on ham sammiches, unless, of course, she wants to reach Japan (by now I've probably lost the entire Japanese ham sammich demographic).
  What if the other deities got in on the pastry circuit?  You could have Vishnu on a marble rye.  I'd love to see the Buddha on a bagel or something.  Mohammad, Siva, Eck and Azna could all get in on the action.  Now there's the little potential problem of recognizability.  I mean, I wouldn't know Hermes from Adam.  Zeus yeah, everybody knows Zeus, but what about Poseidon?  If I saw him on a tater chip, I'd probably just dip him in some ranch and munch away.  Maybe that is what's going on all over the world.  People are eating up all the gods.  Oh yeah, what about those poor lost souls on the Adkin's diet?  Are there any diet deities?  A flatbread sammich would make a nice backdrop for the Unmoved Mover.  I sure could go for some proselytizing pastrami right now.
  On a side note, it occurs to me as hilariously humorous that in the French version of the Bible when Jesus was on the mountainside and fed 5,000 people with a couple loaves of bread and a few fish, it translates into pain (bread) and poisson (fish).  Sounds like he pulled a Jim Jones on them.  At least he didn't turn the water into Kool-Aid.