food sculpture

Part of last night's dream was about (of course) being on a group trip and getting ready to go somewhere. It was a large group, and I don't remember who was in it, where we were, or the purpose of the trip. The getting-ready part involved finding a bathroom, getting the bathroom fit to use (some shower-curtain difficulties), trying to arrange all my cosmetic equipment (which, in the dream, was much more plentiful than in real life), and forgetting several times to bring crucial items into the bathroom with me and having to go and retrieve them from wherever the rest of my things were. Also, I had a eureka revelation that I needed to remove all of my travel toiletries from their case and re-evaluate everything before each trip, because I had ended up with a lot of extraneous stuff and almost-empty containers.

The other part was less predictable. Still on the trip, I commented to a real-life coworker that her husband was "cute" [I met him yesterday]. She sighed and started talking about how he had been unemployed for quite a while and wasn't making any effort to find another job, and I realized I had stepped on a conversational landmine.

Then, the trip apparently over, I was at work and the same coworker brought a gift to my desk. It was something she was giving everyone in the office in honor of some holiday I hadn't been aware of. It was a surreal sculpture consisting of a chicken (cooked or uncooked, I wasn't sure), with all manner of small raw vegetable pieces stuck into the skin to make it into a whimsical rabbit-like animal. Small pieces of carrot made up the "fur", and other vegetables were used as facial features. The overall effect was like a very strange stuffed animal, and I wasn't sure what to do with it. Should I cook and eat it? Use it as a decoration? I played with it a little at my desk, trying to seem appreciative because she was very excited about these creatures. I tried to figure out if it was pre-cooked or not, and came to the conclusion that it was cooked just enough to be technically done, but still uncooked enough that one could bake it longer to cook the surface vegetables and make a nice crust on the meat itself. Then she commented that she didn't think it was "food safe", and that it was just a decoration that would last a few days, for whatever holiday this was. It was very confusing, and I also realized after waking up that it was way too light-weight to be an actual chicken.