The Other Me

Am here to give my testimony of how I turned into a gelatinous cube. Now, pay attention and feel free to take notes. Please leave questions for after my presentation. Pictures are allowed, welcome even. Just don’t use a flash.

I started on a farm nearby. You should have seen me then: young, fresh, plump. And green, oh so green! Full of dreams and illusion, I was. So proud when that Sous-Chef selected me amongst my peers at the local organic market!Ah! I thought I’d be a star then. That she’d take care of me. That people would flock from miles around just to see me, so that they could put my picture on Instagram! As I said, green.
What happened next instead is that some under-minion suffocated me in a vacuum-pack and slow cooked  at 62C for three hours. As if that had not been enough, he then beat me up into a pulp with an immersion plunger before passing me through a fine mesh to get rid of any remaining fibre. As if there would have been! Haven’t I said enough I was young and tender?
Anyway. These guys are thorough and the under minion knew he’d be kicked out of the kitchen if ever there was a problem with my juices. And they do check: When this was done, some upper minion took over and passed me though another mesh just to be sure – I wonder they didn’t have to sign all sorts of paper work for quality control, these two – and then weighed me. 
Something wondrous happened at this stage. There wasn’t so much of me left, so he added the exact same weight in cream into the pan. How wonderful that felt! We hit it off immediately, holding hands and contemplating mischief over a droplet of saturated fat, making plans to be stars together, the culinary equivalents to Ginger and Fred. Our romance soon increased in the heat of a pan, our atoms swirling and going dizzy until… Well maybe I shouldn’t tell you all this. Let’s say that, for a moment there, we were as one.
But then some other guy materialised nearby and took over, sprinkling all sorts of spices in our mix. Things were never the same between cream and I after that. We had diverging tastes, you see? I went the way of salt and liquorice and cream… Well, cream went: pepper, rosemary blooms, spike lavender, and smoked lichen - Forsooth, smoked lichen!  Tsk. - Mind you, I blame these celebrity chefs. They never know what to invent next.
We could have split up then I guess but entropy and molecular physics had us in their clutch by that time so we just went on pretending nothing had really happened there, carefully avoiding each other’s eyes. And this is probably why we ended-up both noticing agar-agar at the same time.
I really cannot tell when it had entered the picture. I swirled around the pan and it was there. Everywhere. Oozing, spreading around with that wolfish ingratiating smile. Gathering us into its fold, titillating our particles with murmurs of exotic positions for our electrons. It was so conveniently neutral that we could both embrace it. And it could spread thin enough to satisfy us both. It was disturbing. And appealing. But I’d never been in a threesome before, so hesitated. It was cream that convinced me in the end. We went dancing around the pan and in the waltz,  my mind went away. If I try and think about it, I have some vague recollection of someone using a whip but I really cannot tell if this was a dream or if it really happened.

All I know is that when I woke up, I was… different. Green still, and fresh. Yet different. Both cream and agar-agar had disappeared and in their place – in our place – was this gelatinous cube you have now in front of you. Do take pictures, if you please.  I do realise I am not the main actor on this plate, alas, but you wouldn’t want to vex a fellow, would you? Besides, I was placed here for a purpose, both esthetical and gastronomic. So please, by all means, do Instagram me.

 
This is in reply to one of the #EuropeanMonsters prompt