today's secret ingredient:

This weekend has been very low key. And that's nice. Yesterday we watched 4 hours of General Conference (yay!) And the since I wasn't feeling very well, I also watched way too many hours of the Iron Chef Marathon of a previous season's reruns. It was awesome. Real chefs can create amazing feats of wonder with the weirdest ingredients. Probably the strangest concoction was Catfish and Grape Truffles. Though the host (Alton Brown) cautioned the judge not to throw up, she said it was surprisingly ok. I have my doubts.

The Oldest Carrotstick didn't complain too much about my Iron Chef obsession. She even watched some of it with me, and her eyes were opened a little to the world of haute cuisine.

Today, we watched Conference and had dinner at my mom and dad's. (It was yummy in a very non-catfish truffle sort-of-way.) When Conference was at last over, we packed up our stuff to head home. But before we left, she raided the pantry and grabbed some jerky for the ride home.

In the car, happily munching on her jerky and listening to her iPod, she paused for a second to ask me a question.

"Mom, what kind of bird is a Teriyaki?"

Me: "What?"

OC: "A Teriyaki. Is it like a chicken?"

Me: "Do you mean Pterodactyl? It's a bird-like dinosaur."

OC: "No, Teriyaki. Like Teriyaki Jerky... What kind of bird is that?"

This weekend, thanks to the Iron Chef, the Oldest Carrotstick and I were exposed to a world full of exotic foods -- frog legs, quail eggs, and now: the little known Teriyaki Bird. Dodo? Or perhaps the elusive Teriyaki?