How I learned to stop worrying about nutrition, and embrace the curry chips diet

I was skipping along the Dingle way, making merry with an elf at one elbow, and Fungie the dolphin with his fin crooked through my other arm. We sang, and sang...and laughed. Good times! We stopped at the chip house for curry chips. Fungie had dolphin-safe tuna and washed it down with a bottle of T-bird which had floated across the ocean. Then, satisfied, he lit up a discarded cigar stub that some careless tourist had thrown overboard into the harbor.

You probably can't think of a single Irish food, except perhaps corned beef, which is neither common or popular in Ireland. This is probably because they have a rough climate for growing a variety of crops, and had a long history of poverty (until 10 years ago, about) and having other people take all of the fruits of their labor. But there is a fast food delicacy (oxymoron?....I say "no!") in Ireland. Everybody knows of fish and chips and that it is perhaps the only popular food export from England. But its also common in Ireland and the attraction isn't really the fish, its the spuds. They put the wierdest things over a pile of chips: cole slaw, stuffing, peas and carrots. The best is a curry sauce....I looked it up, its made of apple, onion, tomato and curry powder (nothing too dubious). Going to Ireland and not having curry chips is like not having a stout...seriously what the fuck is your problem if you don't have a stout at least once. I don't care if you don't like beer, you can have one once. After departing from Cork, with nobody watching, I ate curry chips daily. Go ahead lock me up, I'll just do it again when I get out.

The other thing you need to know about is brown bread, the best bread I've ever had and a type of soda bread. People have offered me homemade "soda bread" in the states before and i thought it was total crapola. They always make the white variety (always much lamer in my opinion), and then totally ruin it by adding raisins and shit like that. It's like a giant dry scone. The brown variety is made with a really course whole wheat flour, buttermilk, and it uses the an acid-base reaction between the buttermilk and baking soda to "leaven" the bread...no yeast. It stays fresh for days even if you leave it out, and fits nicely into a muddy, dank backpack. I have no idea why this bread has not become popular anywhere else.