Lamb Gets The Chop

My lack of posting over the last week stems in part from an incredibly tenuous wireless connection---which seems to come and go depending on what color socks I'm wearing and whether my last meal contained any ingredients beginning with the letter "s"---and also from the fact that I'm unable to type with one hand, and I'd have needed to type with one hand if I was to type at all over the last few days, because the other hand would, at any given time, most likely have been holding a drink.

On Saturday night, we went to a Turkish restaurant in North London called Testi. For me, the name provided amusement enough, but in a stunning twist of irony, my friend Russell actually did order some testes---lambs' testes, in fact. Apparently, they're all the rage in Turkish dining establishments---I stuck to the hummus and stuffed vine leaves myself---and our waitress presented them with a flourish, announcing cheerfully "Testicles!" as she lowered the plate in front of Russell, who was waiting bravely to dig into his evening meal.

After a brief and worrisome mix-up involving a hole in one of the lambs' testes---"oh my god, is it a vein hole? Oh no, it's just where it was cooked on the skewer"---Russ pronounced them "a bit spongy" and wrapped the remainder up in a napkin, which he tucked into his pocket for later. (I imagine one feels like less of a man if one appears in front of the waitress not to have been able to finish one's portion of lambs' testes. Besides, you can't exactly place them in the To-Go box on top of everyone else's baba ghanoush and chicken kebabs, can you?) Upon remembering the unwanted leftovers in the pub some hours afterwards, he reached into his pocket and stuck the crumpled napkin and its contents into the ashtray on the table, which was immediately whisked away and replaced with a fresh one by an overzealous barmaid, as we looked on in horror.

"Well," said Doug as the unsuspecting girl ferried the discarded lambs' testicles away deeper and deeper into the recesses of the pub. "It certainly gives new meaning to the phrase 'the nuts are complimentary.'"