Back in the Stone Age, there was the VHS cassette tape. Along with it, the video store. The one near my old place in Toronto had a door in the back. Behind it, pornography. It's a little like that in Doha, only the porn isn't porn. It's pork.Apologies for the vulgar analogy. Allow me to explain.
Pork recently arrived in Qatar, forbidden as it is in Islam. And for a while there it seemed like the expats here couldn't stop talking about it, me included.
This is where the analogy comes in. The pork is distributed through the QDC (video store), the lone outlet in Doha that sells alcohol. I'm told the room where they display the pork (porn central) used to be the beer fridge.
So I bought breakfast sausages. And now this blog entry becomes a food review.
The sausages looked promising and plump. There had been a lot of build up: "Hey, did ya hear? They got pork now at the QDC." Cue the saliva glands.Anyhoo, to the point. I fried up those broom-handle thick babies until they were a golden brown. Then I buried them in a sea of baked beans, but not before I lay down a foundation of fried eggs, sunny side up.
I should have known better.
According to the label, Blakemans' Supreme Pork Sausages were a jolly medley of 50 percent pork, water and pork fat, with a side order of potato starch and soya concentrate, seasoned with E450 (iii) stabiliser, E221 preservative and E300 antioxidant. Eeeee.
The verdict?
I would liken biting into these sausages to chomping down on a wad of pork-fat-soaked paper toweling. It was that good.
