Sunday, January 25, 2009

How Many Strange Foods Have You Eaten?

The folks over at independenttraveler.com have a list of their top seven strangest foods. 



Here is a picture of one of them: blood pudding.  A favorite of the Irish for breakfast.  Now I have tried some of the items on the list, such as, the blood pudding.  A little trick I used to make it taste better was to cook it longer and pepper the hell out of it.  Of course, we were staying with relatives and they let me jump into the kitchen.  All the Americans visiting were quite thankful for my "improvements."  Though Father Aaron, the relative we were staying with, didn't seen too keen on having the pudding overcooked. 

I have also had the head cheese.  My mother use to have it around whenever my Grandfather, her father, visited.  I had it once and puked it up.  Of course when ever he visited we also had pickled pigs feet and pig knuckles.  Which were both hard as hell to eat with any sort of decorum.  On the plus side, I didn't have a huge shock while living in China. 

Often friends would order pig's feet, or pigs knuckles to see what I would do.  The only trouble I had was with the nail, of course I had trouble with the toe nails on the chicken claws, as well.  It didn't matter how the claws were prepared, bbq'ed, fried, boiled, pickled, roasted, seasoned, or vacuum packed and sold by Walmart; I had trouble with the nail.  Surprisingly the claws didn't taste like chicken.  I don't know what the nail tasted like, as I never ate one.  I just bit it off and spit it out, like a lugee.  In my defense the Chinese people did the same thing, perhaps with a little more grace and a more pleasant facial continence than I could muster.

Also living in China gave opportunity to eat, fish head, fish cheecks-very tasty, pig brains, cow stomachs, pig and cow intestines, pig ears, pig noses, cow tongue, camel-ka-bob, dog soup, fried star fish, and fried crickets, ants, grubs, worms, spiders, as well as scorpion-with the stinger on, no less.  None these foods were particularily painful to eat, though many of the fried ones tasted like burnt french fries.  This was especially true for the star fish which i ended up throwing away after three bites.

So what strange exoctic foods have you eaten, or would eat, if given the chance?  Eat on.       


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