Ok, let me preface this a bit by saying I don't think most foods are weird and I have a natural curiosity to try unknown to me foods at least once just to see how they are. I grew up on a goat farm and we had one of the first commercial goat dairys in Texas with a contract to the Dallas mozzarella cheese company to sell our milk to. We pretty much grew everything we ate meat wise including: goats, pigs, cows, ducks, geese, turkeys, and chickens and we even had doves at one point. We had a pond so fresh fish was also always an option. We ate the meat of the animals we slaughtered and we drank goat milk and had goat cheese and had eggs of all sorts. We also always had a large garden so fresh vegetables all the time. My dad had been a butcher in his younger years so we slaughtered our own stuff and made sausage and all cuts of meat right at home. As a younger child we really didn't go hunting but as I grew into my teen years we would go to the deer lease or to Oklahoma where my dads family lived and we would hunt deer and squirrel. So needless to say I am country as country can be and grew up doing all this so I don't really think of most foods as disgusting.

Anyway now I live mostly a city life and don't have the same barn to table touch with my food. So I watch a lot of food channel and other cooking shows because I have a cooking passion. I love to cook stuff I have never had. Anyway I ran across a program called bizarre foods. If you have seen this show it is about a guy who travels all over the world trying different dishes. Now some of these are very local culture type of dishes like various bugs and whatnot which I don't know if I could stomach, but some are just regular things that make me want to try them.

Being in the US we don't really have a real food culture, instead we are a hodgepodge of various cultures that we eat all the time. I mean pizza is a item we have delivered to our door and that is originally a French dish, of course Tex mex is a spin on dishes out of Mexico and we do also have authentic Mexican dishes too, we have any manner of restraunt but nothing is really a culturally ingrained dish but more we took something from someone else's culture and put an American spin on it.

I am just wondering if any of you have ever thought about something similar. What really set me off was I saw on the show that Andrew (the host) was in Australia and they have a food over there called vegimite (spelling may be off) but they apparently eat this food on toast mostly and near as I can tell from what he said the taste was like it is a savory yeasty type of spread so imagine a jelly or jam made of beer and bread that you put on toast. To me this sounds interesting and I am going to try to seek some out to see what it is like.

I am just wondering if we have any adventurous eaters on the board who have a similar affinity for different foods? I am willing to try anything at least once and just curious if anyone else is the same?

By the way I have tried some weird stuff, well it would probably be weird to some but to me it is a normal food that we don't get to have very often. The one everyone always freaks about is calf fries or sometimes called mountain oysters. If you don't know what that is look it up. To me these are good and not odd to eat, but some would think they are. The worst thing I have ever tried was squirrel, but I have been told it was because the way my dad cooked it. I found it to be very tough and stringy meat and it just wasn't good at all but I tried it. Pigs brains is another odd dish that most wouldn't eat, but I thought they were pretty good.

I know this is very off topic even for the off topic section, but this is just something that came to me tonight as I was watching tv.

This is a very un Australian thing to say- but vegemite is fucking horrible ( I can send you some)
Being raised in SE Asia I've tried a few 'funky' things- chickens feet


yum cha/dim sum is one of my favourite eat outs.

I have fond childhood memories of a variety of fruit.  My Nana had a rambutan tree
 similar to lychees

Not so fond memories of the smell of durian ( no other way to describe the smell other than fucking horribel!!)


Australian 'native' food can include

yes a grub!!!


Kangaroo is edible ( but is more dog food than human food!! )

If I had to live off one type of food it would be seafood ( not so much fish- bones annoy me ) but shellfish, crabs, crays, lobsters, prawns- OK I'm drooling  

I've tried kangaroo and liked it

aussiejames wrote:

This is a very un Australian thing to say- but vegemite is fucking horrible ( I can send you some)

You better watch it or they might kick you out of the country.

Those fruits look odd. I haven't heard of them except the durian and that was on bizarre foods tv show. He said the smell was rancid and the taste wasn't that good and it had an odd texture for a fruit. It has been a while since I have seen that episode.

I love Marmite, which is much like the Vegemite that AJ mentioned.
The ad campaign for Marmite is you 'either love it or hate it' and this seems to be mostly true when people are asked what they think.

How about Piccalilli? (a relish of chopped pickled vegetables and spices) Goes great with cheese and salad.
Don't be put off by its weird yellow colour




One of my fave relishes is Branston Pickle  




And HP Brown sauce goes well with most things  




Bryan, that must have been fun (and hard work) growing up on a farm with goats.
Goat cheese is one of my fave cheeses. Chevre et miel pizza! (goat cheese and honey). In southern Italy and France the pizzas are thin based and cooked on a wood fire - just delicious 


This thread is making me too hungry!  

I have not heard of any of those Paul, though they all sound good.  The hp bottle reminds me of a steak sauce we have here in the states called A-1 it is savory with just a tiny sweetness to it and goes well with beef for those that like it.

As far as the growing up on a dairy, it was something I do not regret but do not wish to do again. While most kids in school were still sleeping or getting up just in time to go to school, we got up between 4 and 5 am everyday and fed the animals before school. We then rode the bus to and from school and upon getting home it was homework, then chores, then if time was left we could play. For the milking part of the diary we had huge storage tanks and twice a week we had to empty those tanks into individual milk cans and transport them to Dallas. We usually did this late at night so there was no traffic and the cheese plant was closed. We had a key to go in and deliver the product so that no one had to be there. We could take all the cheese we wanted that they left in one certain cooler. We also made a soft cheese often called farmers cheese out of the milk using vinager. The cheese was always delicious, not like some of the store brand goat cheese I have tried. They taste really strong, and I don't remember any of our cheeses tasting like that.

Bryan, yes the HP sauce is savoury/tangy with a sweetness to it.
When I visited the States some years back I went mad on Ranch dressing.

Sorry I edited my last message while you typed this one.

Ranch is a very good dressing.  I did not realize they dont have that in France?

Edit: so finding out some countries don't have ranch has me wondering about other "everyday" items. I mean ranch is given out with everything here, as well as bbq sauce, ketchup, honey mustard, etc.. Do other countries have these type of condiments that you consider everyday to you, but others may not know of them?

A quick short story about something similar to this. My sister lived in Delaware for a while and asked for care packages. We always had to pack up kool aid, Dr Pepper, and ranch style beans as apparently they did not have those products freely available there at the time. I always thought that was strange as they had Coke but not Dr Pepper.

And one more thing, Paul anytime you have a hankering for ranch let me know. I am sure it ships easy and it has a decent shelf life so a week or two in the mail is no problem.

walkie wrote:

I've tried kangaroo and liked it

Never had kangaroo. Everyone always says new meats taste like chicken. I beg to differ. Squirrel was stringy and had a strange taste unlike any meat I have had. I had alligator once and it was very chewy and had a slight metallic taste I am told most reptiles have. I did not care for it but I only had it fried. A different preparation may change that.

I am just a food junkie.

Great stories, I didn't have anything different when I was young just the norm for England back then roastdinners, sheperds pie etc, but I do remember quince pie. This was a wierd sour but sweet tasting fruit, a couple of friends at the end of the street had a japonica quince plant and used to make pies whenever they fruited, the taste was nice in a weird way, I used to put sugar on mine

Adult life I guess snails is the weirdest for me. One of my birthday dinners was at a restaurant called escargoes? I cant spell it but I think the name means snails? They were a cross between winkles and oysters, but a bit snotty. I didn't mind them but I had been drinking, it was my birthday after all

I remember a rural holiday in Portugal, we stayed with some hosts, there home was miles from anywhere it was a 3 mile walk to the nearest shop which sold barely anything at all. The hosts had pigs and me being naive never thought that they could end up on my plate, but I was asked to pick one liked, I did and about 5 minutes later heard a scream that sounded like a man. It was the pig we all ate it on that night and I must admit it was probably one of the best meals I have ever had, I know you had it all the time Bryan but to some one like me it was an experience to say the least, among the bowls of pork was rice, salad in a lovely oily dressing and a type of crisp not a poppadom, and it was home made? there were other bits also, when I put it all together loved it. I put on 3 stone in that 2 weeks

I have never heard is a few things there. The quince sounds like a nice fruit to try. I have no idea what a winkle or poppadom are. One sounds kind of similar to a clam and the other maybe a bread or cracker type of product?

Great story on the Portugal trip. There is no doubt in my mind that the sooner it is from living to plate the better quality the product. One good thing about raising animals of your own is you control any thing going into the animal. The stuff we buy in markets is all processed and raised in feed lots where they are pumped full of steroids and hormones and other things. Farmers don't do that because they don't have to worry about the cramped quarters of a feed lot.

The same applies to fruit and vegetables. A vine ripened fruit is so much sweeter than anything you can find in the grocery. Most fruit shipped to markets is picked prior to being ripe so it can have a longer shelf life. Using peaches as an example, growers pick peaches while they are still green and not fully ripened. The fruit is then treated with a gas (ethelyne I think it is) to make the skin turn yellow and red. The starch inside the peach may convert to suger on some scale but nothing like it would have if left to grow to its full potential. The problem is the fully ripened fruit has a very short shelf life so it is impossible to get them this way unless you live close to the harvest area. That is why usually small roadside fruit stands with farm fresh vegetables are a better place to buy fruit and vegetables when possible.

I have yet to try escargot but I don't think it would be bad. I figured it is close to oysters on a half shell.

It is just like the half oyster but musky, if that makes sense :scratch:

Winkles are just like little sea snails, mainly bought pickled in jars already picked with a needle, but my nan used to pick them fresh and boiled twice and a dash of vinegar hmmm lovely.

I thought everybody knew poppadoms there just a giant crisp or i think you call them chips? Made of cornflour or rice not sure? Its just an in Indian entrée

This thread is making me hungry.

Are winkles salt water snails? To get them fresh you grew up close to a sea or ocean I presume. They sound great.

Yes and yes we did, we used to eat cockles and muscles as well, but not every week this would be once a month I guess I love America though, my friends dad Rick is american he also grew up on a farm I remember him telling us about tarring the barn roofs with bitumen in the summers when he was a teenager to help his dad, I would love that

Not sure if this ranks as a strange food but if you can try Reindeer it's amazing. I was in Finland a few years back and couldn't get enough of it. It was always served with Lingonberries, very bitter relatives of blueberries. To put this in context I am pretty much vegetarian only eating meat if it's in something such as stews so to eat a cut of meat for me is unusual. I imagine it'd be pretty much like the deer you used to hunt but I've never tried deer to compare and as I grew up in London there wasn't much hunting going on.

You've eaten Santa's reindeer?!!!

I've often thought it would be great to serve it to kids at Christmas and say it's Rudolf.

London has some food that sounds awesome. Fish and chips, bangers and mash, Eton mess, beef Wellington all sound delicious. We have a form of fish and chips with fried fish and French fries, but it is not traditionally served wth peas. I have never had Eton mess but it sounds very good. These are just a few of the dishes I have heard about.

If you want food from London the there are two to try. Pie and mash which is fairly normal but traditional and jellied eels which are disgusting.

Jellied eels don't sound that bad except they are served from cold?

Yes they have to be cold. The jelly is produced from the cooking process from the fish itself and sets only when cooled. Basically the eel is cut up and boiled in water with things added such as vinegar. The boiling draws out proteins into the water which solidify when cold to form the jelly. Tried once, never again.

Anybody else have weird food related stuff to share?