Foreign food that scares me...
 

For my husband's birthday, he wanted to take a group of our friends out to Chinatown to "experiment" with foods we'd never usually try. If you're interested, here's some photos (in "Eric's 28th Birthday). It was an adventure. But thankfully, there were no casualties.

Anyone else have any unusual foreign food stories?

Tip from OC:

Know the language BEFORE you order food in a foreign country.

Another note, Feel free to make random marks on a bill that is presented in Chinese and does not come with a translation into English.

If there are any people who were at the Joy Tsin Lau GTG way back when you should remember me doing just this in retaliation for the unreadable bill.

Brian

Steak tartare and a couple of other raw red meat dishes took a little getting used to, love it now though. Lots of strange things in Vietnam but I doubt I could identify any. Snake was odd.

I love steak tartare. I also had ostrich carpaccio in Toronto once (yummy!)

However, even *I* won't try whale anus sushi. It was offered once in a Hawai'ian sushi bar and I'll try anything once. Except that.

My husband was sad that we couldn't order the birds nest soup that night. Yes, birds nest soup. They take a swallow's nest and boil it with some veggies and herbs. Their saliva, which is used to hold the twigs together, is supposed to be very tasty and high in some kind of vitamin. Only problems, it was $85! for 4 people and you had to order it the day before. I guess they have to go find a nest? They also had shark fin soup. I was curious, but my friend said it wasn't all that good. It too was $85. Geesh.

I cannot freakin' believe people pay to eat the saliva of birds. What. Is. Going. On? Grossest thing I have ever eaten was a buffalo steak burger but only because I didn't know what it was. Toughest thing I"ve ever chewed thru. Yuck. Though it wasn't foreign food. I avoid things like that. Scared.

birds nest soup is yummy!

Why anyone would pick the anus of a whale to make sushi out of makes my head ache.

Well, you just ate bird's nest soup, so it can't be a huge leap to eat whale anus.

I ate tongue soup in Germany. I was expecting chunks of tongue in a thick soup with vegetables and stuff. What I got was a bowl of thin clear broth with a big whole tongue sitting in it staring at me. The part that grossed me out was that as I cut off pieces, and put them in my mouth, I could feel the taste buds of the cow rubbing against my own taste buds. Kind of felt like I was licking a cow's tongue. And I was, basically. I had eaten tongue before, sliced, on a sandwich, and it was good that way, but I wouldn't recommend the tongue soup in the student cafeteria at Albert Ludwigs University. I finished it though.

There are a lot of scary foreign foods out there. Tongue, chicken feet, blood pudding ... but I think some of the most insidious are those in which the frightening ingredient is disguised in some way ... ground, sliced, or gussied up to the point where you can't tell that it's from an unpopular part of the animal.

We have plenty of domestic frightening foods too ... some of which I even really enjoy.

Like Scrapple. yummmmmmmmmm.

However I do shun many of the other Pennsylvania Dutch Delicacies, including headcheese and souse.

I went to Sweden two summers ago and for one of our dinners, we were served a plate of cold fish products - pickled herring, smoked salmon, other cold, slimey fish bits. I liked the smoked salmon, but that was about it. It was a weird assortment of cold fish. I don't like cold fish.

I tend to think that all Chinese food is dirty, so I try to avoid it at all costs. I know that is a stupid thing to think, but I can't help it.

Headcheese. Yuck. When you are a kid, you have to eat what the parents feed you. I haven't had headcheese in over 25 years.

About beef tongue: you are supposed to remove the outer casing (taste buds) before eating it. It otherwise is fairly tasty. I enjoy experimenting with foreign foods and I prefer to NOT know what it is until after I've finished eating it.

Italy was a good place to experiment...lots of yummy things and combinations of foods that are not found in American Italian restaurants. Colombia was also fun, but never eat dog meat. Trust me on this. This is also the place where I broke a statue with a coconut. This was inadvertant and a story in itself. For another thread. Eating in Egypt was...an adventure. Never again, but once so that I can say I did it. And survived.

I will never understand those Americans who visit another country and insist on eating only familiar American foods, or McDonald's. Note the separation between their menu and actual food. This is intentional. It's more fun to try new things, if only to say you did it and offer an educated opinion on them. What fun is it to say I visited a country and ate nothing but hamburgers? And spent $500 on booze in "the Gut" but didn't visit any touristy sites?

I always will lament that I missed the port visit to Greece. I like Greek food and would love to try new things there. Also to see the various historical sites like the Parthenon and such. I might even remember to take pictures. I once took a piece of advice from a chief. To wit: Think of what you will tell your grandchildren when they ask what it was like in such-and-such country. Will you have only drinking stories of how plastered you were? Or stories of how you saw this and that? Decide for yourself. After that I hung out with the older hands and saw a few wonderful things and avoided most of the drinking stories. Save Palma de Mallorca and Rota. I will NEVER be drunk enough to repeat those stories again.

Brian

Your parents must have been into torture. and Brian--there is a difference between "foreign" food and plain grossissity. My stomach is turning...gads.