Weird food

[Dimsumkid]

Thousand year old eggs (preserved duck eggs), we would slice them up in 1/8ths and eat with sweetened, pickled onions. Trick is to eat them in small portions or to mix it in with rice porridge for added flavor. They were preserved in a mud and clay mix, but now they speed up the process by chemically treating them. The egg whites are an opaque black and the yolks are a dark muddy green and grey color.

I got to try the Philippine delicacies, penoy and balut eggs. These are various forms of embryo stages (10-20 days). These are really an acquired taste as the beaks and bones are already developed. I tried them once and they're above what I could handle.

 

[rodi]

Many of the thing posted so far have been normal fare on our table since I was a little kid. Bread with butter sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon was a regular breakfast. We also regularly ate beef tongue, pan-fried beef heart, breaded & fried hog brains, liver & onions, and pickled pigs feet, just to name a few. I liked all of it except for the brains and the liver.

The one thing that most of my friends regarded as weird, was bagna cauda.....melt some butter (the more the better!) in a large, heavy sauce pan, slice and sauté several cloves of garlic (again, the more the better!), add in a couple tins of anchovies, and a good 'squeeze' of anchovy paste. When the garlic is slightly browned, dump in a quart of half & half, whipping cream, or heavy cream (or a combination of them), and bring up to a slight simmer. Take it off the heat, and serve it up in bowls to dip crusty bread and/or veggies in. When us kids were very little, and hadn't acquired the skills needed to dip bread w/o making a huge mess, the folks would serve ours in mugs to just drink it! YUM!!!

Bagna Cauda sounds very yummy - not weird at all. An italian take on a cross between new england style chowder and fondue. I googled and it talked about it being made on Christmas Eve or New Years Eve... I might add it to the Christmas Eve Feast of the Seven Fishes we do every year - sardines definitely count as a fish. (Most of the other dishes we serve are southern Italian - so it will shake things up to add a Piedemont region dish to the mix.)

 

[brewer12345]

I've actually tried skate once in a restaurant and enjoyed it, and have heard a few tv personalities (Andrew Zimmern, et. al.) say it can be quite delicious. What I can remember is that it was very tender and good.

What didn't you like about it? How it was prepared? Texture?

Texture, kind of dull flavor, the fact of dealing with the damn skates just to get the wings.

 

[Idnar7]

Fried liverwurst sandwiches. My mom thought everything needed to be cooked. She would fry them until black and crunchy. Stunk up the house something fierce too.

 

[athena53]

Cream cheese and olive sandwich on rye bread. Black olives are best, but green are ok in a pinch. Also, must drink chocolate milk using Nestles Quick to go with it.

My mother used to pack cream cheese and green olive sandwiches in our lunches on Fridays during Lent. Wonderful stuff.

I got to try the Philippine delicacies, penoy and balut eggs. These are various forms of embryo stages (10-20 days). These are really an acquired taste as the beaks and bones are already developed. I tried them once and they're above what I could handle.

We have an Asian grocery nearby and they carry balut eggs. They have warning lables on them. I guess they've had a few customers who were horrified when they got them home and tried to prepare them.

 

[Wishing]

Grilled peanut butter and dill pickle sandwich.

Oh, I also used to take bleu cheese and butter sandwiches for school lunches when I was in grade school. My Mom hated bleu cheese, so she admitted to loathing the sandwich making process.

 

[meekie]

Texture, kind of dull flavor, the fact of dealing with the damn skates just to get the wings.

I just had skate wings for the first time about a month ago. Found them at a little fishing village, and luckily the guy selling them cleaned them up for me.

I got them because of the story that my mom remembered that they used to use a round cookie cutter and pass them off as scallops in restaurants. I love scallops, and she can't eat them, so the skate was a good treat. I coated them in breadcrumbs and fried them, but I can't wait to try some different methods.

I'm a pretty adventurous eater, the whole octopus that look like rubber toys were pretty weird to me, but other people think the chicken feet or rooster balls I've had are pretty weird. Then there's all the japanese stuff my family fed me that I never knew what it was, there was a salad like thing that ended up being jellyfish.

 

[WhoDaresWins]

I also like ox tails. I haven't seen them in the stores around here for years. They seem to have gone the way of soup bones. My Mom used to make beef vegetable barley soup and I liked to scoop out the marrow from the bone and eat it with salt and pepper.

Bagna cauda brings back a work memory. A fellow I used to work with talked about it in the lunchroom and how much he liked it. He brought it in for us to try along with cabbage and bread as dippers. After he heated it up it, the smell permeated our floor for hours and he was told by one of the more olfactory sensitive supervisors (his, as a matter of fact) not to ever bring it in again. I thought it was pretty good myself.

 

[Goonie]

Other slightly unusual things that I've eaten, and like, are tripe...had a huge bowl of homemade menudo Saturday. Spicy Sous (which is much like head-cheese). Also I have eaten quite a bit of wild game over the years as well, and still do whenever the opportunity presents itself.....squirrel, pheasant, rabbit, frog legs, venison (roasts and sausage patties), bison (I had a relative who raised them), elk, ostrich, beaver, barbecued raccoon (a close friend used to bring it to our church potlucks), alligator (fried, blackened, or soup), rattlesnake, barbecued eel (in sushi), boiled crawfish (often!), and, though only one time, elephant roast.

I don't do raw or unprocessed meat, fish, fowl, or creepy-crawlers, but if it's cooked, cured, or preserved, I'll give it a go! I still want to try, against the best wishes of my Norwegian friends, lutefisk! And in that same vein, I have an old Native American cookbook, where I found a recipe for Jellied Moose Nose! I don't think I could ever top that one as being on my weird food list.

 

[candrew]

A sandwich made with a thick slice of liverwurst on white bread with onion & mayo.

 

[Nodak]

My grandparents were German immigrants and oxtail soup or boiled cow's tongue were common meals.

 

[haha]

I got a good laugh over it, too! I don't buy sauerkraut to drink the juice btw. When I buy sauerkraut(a couple of times a year from a farm market that makes their own from their own cabbage) I incidentally like to drain out a little of the juice and drink it. My mother did this, too. Years ago I saw sauerkraut juice being sold in small cans but I don't know what the purpose of marketing it this way would be unless to drink it.

It's a killer laxative. Every German I knew growing up always drank raw sauerkraut juice. Every butcher shop had raw sauerkraut in a barrel and would sell you more kraut, less juice, or vice versa.

Re Nodak's post above, I still love thin slices of cow's tongue. We also always had head cheese, which my uncle made.

Ha

 

[freebird5825]

Potato chips with plain cottage cheese spread on (not dipped into) them.

It's an interesting combo.

 

[Revlefty]

Add bologna

Peanut butter and mayonnaise on any kind of bread....sometimes I add bacon. My great uncle ( and aunt) taught at Pepperdine and he introduced me to this sandwich.

Put bologna and tomatoes on that sandwich and I'm loving it.