Slick – Pumpkin seed oil

I love vegetable oils more than animal fat, and I love animal fat a lot. Butter is indispensable for some soups and sauces if you live in a wintry environment, and when it comes to fries – sorry, Hindus - cow lard is the fucking acest. But otherwise, vegetable fats are so adorable and various and smashingly awesome. So to focus on the positive this week, I’m going to write about all the vegetable fat that I love. Especially since I've realized that there's a range of things I've started consuming here that I don't remember in Canada (possibly from want of looking) and I'm worried I won't be able to get in Australia.

I’m the sort of person who feels stress in a) her brains and b)her tummy. At times like this, especially after the whole turning-bright-yellow following the massive self-abuse leading up to my thesis defense years ago, I pay careful attention to what my tummy is asking for, food-wise.

And lately it’s been asking for pumpkin seed oil by the shot-glass. God bless the fucking Germans for introducing me to it. Have already gone on about the glories of pumpkin flesh, and could go on about the delights of pepitas as well; pine nuts are off my radar at the moment until they get cleared by an allergist, so pumpkin seeds have been making their way into our pasta and salads and pizza and everywhere else – lovely little fuckers. (Really very, very versatile, but bear in mind they burn pretty fast, so if you top any oven-cooked thing with them pop them on or in close to the end).

But pumpkin seed oil; that’s a lovely fatty nectar of the gods. I drizzle it onto crumpets in the morning instead of butter now. And salad. Decorating soups. Vanilla ice cream and granola. Actually just about every other dish where I don’t have to cook it. Fuck, is it good. It has this sort of clean richness to it. It’s heavy, it’s almost like you can taste its colours, and its colours are one of the strangest things you can see in a food, because it looks like a straightforward green, but when the light shines through it, it turns wine-red. But while it’s almost as though you can taste the bizarreness, it doesn’t leave any clingy traces, like most oils; just a nice sort of mouth environment of “mmm, I just ate a bunch of pumpkin seed oil”.

Well, as you can read, adjectives are failing me. This shit is good, let’s put it like that. Also – and this is just second-hand anecdotal as, to my knowledge, I've never fucked a vegan man - its absurd amounts of zinc, which us normals tend to mostly get through seafood or other animal flesh/product, help vegan men fuck more enthusiastically and frequently.

In fact it has so many touted health benefits that I'm paranoid that when I return to the New World the only place I'm going to find it is in horrid little new age 'pharmacies' that smell like mothballs, with the oil sealed into a animal-free soft-wall easy-swallow capsules designed to prevent you from actually tasting it when you consume it. Like this. Fucking travesty. More on that when I get to the flax oil, but for fuck's sake; the medicalization of society in general is a hideous enough prospect, leaving the medicalization of fucking food to one side. Pumpkin seed oil is a fucking delicious gift of the gods. Any company that suggests you consume it without feeling it is a bastard who's out to screw you out of one of life's unique, even transcending pleasures (I really like it, okay?). It's fucking evil.