I've never had chocolate raspberry cheese, but it sounds delicious. I love lemon stilton and Trader Joe's has a great cheese with apricot and a fabulous honey chevre that is to DIE FOR.
I also adore wakame!! I do like pickled plum paste in sushi (ume) but can't handle the dried salty plums. I bought a bag once and had to spit the first one out.
Speaking of the fake foods that weird me out -- flavored chips. They're not really unusual, since they've been around a long time, but really, ranch-flavored potato chips? BBQ-flavored? SO WEIRD. Yuck. I can't stand them.
Yeah, those are the things I consider weird, too. I didn't grow up in the US, so the sheer variety of chips and cereal and soda flavors still baffles me sometimes.
Love the cheese and fruit combination - fig mustard is an amazing condiment that goes fantastic with cheese.
Tongue and innards - yeah, sure, I've had them. Thinly sliced tongue in a vinaigrette is a pretty popular appetizer back home. The cooked variety in cream sauce isn't bad either, but the texture is somewhat offputting - basically like, duh, chewing your own tongue. Liver - sometimes I have a craving for it, maybe once or twice a year, and then I mostly cook it myself because I don't really trust restaurants with innards for some reason. Mr Heffalump makes an amazing spicy party appetizer from chicken gizzards. The only thing I'm shying away from is tripe, which my dad loves with a passion.
Oh, and I absolutely love the salted dried plums, too, and lots of the other varieties you can get at Asian stores. And seaweed salad. Yum! And lotus or bean-filled mooncakes. So good.
I love trying new things and am always excited when I find new stuff.
The fruit cheeses sound wonderful. I'll have to try some now!
Some weird things that I've tried are hot pickled quail eggs (spicy, but rather rubbery) and peppered raspberry jam (wonderful on meat sandwiches).
I don't think I could ever enjoy tripe. Just reading what you have to go through to cook it is off-putting. But then again, so is fixing escargot--place live snails in flour until they throw up, rinse, repeat until they no longer throw up--I seriously don't know if this is true or not, but for that reason I won't cook them, but I will eat them. They're kind of rubbery also.
The frog's legs I had once were interesting. It was kind of gross seeing them on the plate. I thought they had been prepared with way too much garlic. Perhaps they don't taste that good and the chef overdid the garlic to hide the bad taste?
I'm really hooked on trying unusual foods. It's like a poor man's way of world traveling.
Frog legs done well are really good. They do taste alot like chicken, but sort of a fish/chicken combo, or a crab/chicken combo. And they do look a bit disturbing on the plate, if served whole in pairs, because I think they resemble miniature human legs. When they're served as single joints they look more like chicken wing fiddles and drummies. I've had them deep fried, pan fried, broiled, and in a german restaurant swimming in hot garlic butter. The menu said "sauteed in butter," but they came to the table in a small cast iron skillet in about 3/4 inch of melted butter. Dark rye toast points were placed in the skillet (soaking up all that oily hot butter). Heart Attack on a plate (or in a skillet). I held up the little legs and let them drip dry before I ate them, and didn't eat the toast points. They tasted wonderful, but I can't believe that people actually sop up the garlic sauce with the toast points (I've done so with scampi butter, but this was just ridiculous the butter was so deep. Each toast point had to have soaked up at least a tablespoon of butter).
Alligator is very good also (but a bit chewly, at least deep-fried).
Flavored chips - I love them. In fact, I don't like any un-flavored chips. Still, there are some flavors I do find creepy. such as "Steak and onion, cheeseburger, ketchup and mustard, pizza...." The funniest was a guacamole corn chip that is green and avocado does not appear on the ingredients (I later saw these featured on one of the how things are made shows on Food Channel).
Tripe - I had this in Menudo (a mexican soup I had in a restaurant. It smelled amazing, but tasted horrible, and the texture was icky.) But then I had it in a thai/hmong restaurant in laab (a minced beef salad). The owners and hubby and I are becoming good friends (she and her husband are hmong, and on Sunday, I brought them a meatloaf and my recipe to try, because the husband loves meatloaf and they've not found a recipe he likes). She encouraged me to try the laab with the tripe (if I didn't like it, they'd make it without the tripe for me). It looked so pretty in little fringes, and it was really good. I mean, tripe has more texture than taste, but it was really very good in the seasoned beef mixture. It had lemon grass, cilantro, thinly sliced pieces of tripe and pork skin. The pork skin really freaked me out a little, but it was really good. It's not the fatty part of the skin, but the tough part of the skin, it has almost a crunchy texture, and looks like shreds of cucumber (kind of white/translucent). We were told that it "should" be beef skin, but you cannot buy beef skin commercially in the US, but when they make the dish at home when someone butchers a cow, they use the beef skin.
I love learning the history of foods. I watch both Anthony Bourdaine's "No Reservations," and Andrew Zimmern's Bizzare Food and Bizarre Worlds on the Travel channel. I think I could try most of what they try on the shows.
I probably could even try some of the insects, but definitely not the preserved raw pork, the stinky tofu, or the durian fruit.
Weird fruit (love weird fruit)
Carambola (or star fruit - google for a picture) in the stores usually don't have a lot of taste (just sort of mildly citrusy sweet, like weak lemonade). Grocery stores don't get them ripe enough (I've heard), but they're fun to put on fruit pizza or in fruit salads, because they're just so pretty.
Golden Kiwi (look like regular kiwi, except they're golden yellow instead of green). I hear they've also developed a hairless variety of kiwi.
Ugli fruit (pronounced ugly) and Unique fruit look like mutant grapefruit (wrinkly with greenish mottled skin). These are crosses between grapefruit and other citrus fruits (the Ugli is a cross between a grapefruit and a tangerine or mandarin orange). It makes an easy to peel fruit that tastes really good. Somewhere between lemonade and lemonade spiked with orange juice. Usually there's none or very little taste of grapefruit. They're pretty expensive most of the time, but definitely worth buying at least once to try.
White peaches and nectarines - Love these. They have a lighter more "apricot" taste (without the apricot dryiness). The saturn or donut varieties in regular and white are fun (instead of being round, they're flat like a flying saucer or donut).
Fingerling and red fingerling bananas (red bananas aren't red on the inside, just the skins). I think they taste milder than "regular" bananas, and they're only about the size of a man's thumb. And there's something just so cute about a tiny banana.
Preserved (or dried) squid - Hubby hates when I buy this, because it does smell a bit fishy (but tastes sweet, like crab). The package usually says "preserved (or dried) squid, but I call it, "squid jerky." It's pink and often either sweetened and/or seasoned with hot chilis. It reminds me (in appearance) like the shredded bubblegum "Big League Chew."
I was just talking about exotic fruits with a friend the other day, when he mentioned he'd never seen a persimmon before and didn't know how to eat a pomegranate.
The umeboshi (pickled plums) gross me out. I had one in Japan and almost spit it out. I don't know if the dried kind are any better.
My favorite food that gets stuck in the exotic fruits section - plantains. YUM. I love plantains. It took me a little while to figure out how to buy them though -- you can't use them until the skin is basically completely black.
Allison, I had frog in China and it was really good. It's a funny story actually, the translator who was taking us to dinner didn't know the english word for it, so she had the waiter bring out a bucket to show us, and there was this frog (well, maybe a toad) sitting in the bottom staring up at us! Once it was cooked it was unidentifiable though.
My local korean market has durian and I'm a bit scared to try it
When I moved here though, the variety of ethnic grocery stores was amazing so we'd go and pick something up and then figure out what to do with it afterwards. It was a way to try a variety of interesting fruits/vegetables as well as some canned/packaged stuff.
One of my favorite things growing up was tripas (intestines) and I made and ate plenty of menudo with tripe in it. Also, I had many dried/salted plums with chile on them growing up. Used to be one of my favorite snacks.
Whenever I think of flavored chips, I think of fish flavored chips that kids used to eat at my college and it grosses me out. I do like bbq chips though.
I'm pretty adventurous though and there isn't much I wouldn't have tried before following a vegan diet. I've eaten crickets and some unknown flying bug while I was in China. I also ate frog legs in china. I basically ate whatever was put in front of me.
Now I'll eat any plant based food, maybe even durian one day.
Well, I like almost everything. I grew up in a very rural area eating, shall we say game, and all parts of the animal that didn't squeal or moo. I even like escargot. All that said what I can't stand is jello. Especially if they've made it into some sort of 'salad'. My grandma made one with shredded cabbage YUCK! I just can't eat food that wiggles.
I like the fruited cheeses. We were gawking tourists in a Tesco store in the UK - they had sooo many varieties! We get a few here. I did mistakenly pick up a chedder with horseradish a couple weeks ago, though. Took it back to the store! I find an apple or pear with a good extra-sharp cheddar is a great snack.
And one of the strangest combos I've had lately is a cranberry horseradish sort of relish from Stonewall Gardens. It is very very yummy!
Let's see, in Costa Rica we were introduced to a fruit (that I cannot remember the real name of) that our guide call - really - snot fruit. And that kind of describes what the inside of it looks like! I found it to taste very mild, and not especially to my liking. THey mix it in yogurt, and DH found it tasty.
I've had star fruit in Hawaii, and it's since come the grocery store here, and like to use it for the look. Flavor eh, it's okay, esp mixed with other fruits.
Living in Alaska with a DH who used to hunt, I've eaten my share of moose, caribou and rabbit parts as well as of course all varieties of salmon! There's a fish here called hooligan, or candle fish, that the Alaska Natives like. They're kind of like big smelt and swim in schools like smelt - probably related. Anyway, DH and his friends go dipping for them and bring them home by the bucket-full. They are used to bait by may people, but DH likes them rolled in cornmeal and pan fried. Other people smoke them, or pickle them. They are super oily and IMHO, gross!
Another thing that amazed me in England was the varieties of potatoes, and the fact that they used certain ones for certain things. Maybe people here do that too, and I just don't realize.
From looking at other sites, it appears that rollinia mucosa is actually the name of the tree where you get 'snot fruit' from so it may be that it looks like snot hanging from the tree.
While I was in China, we bought some large berries from the side of the road. They were awesome. As far as I can tell, we don't have them here and I've looked.
Rambutans and litchi (or some people spell it lychee) are my favorites, but they're hard to find here fresh an dthe canned ones just aren't the same. When I was a kid overseas, we had a rambutan tree in our front yard and always had them fresh.
They're a sort of whiteish grape like texture once peeled. They taste like ... hm. I can't even describe it. Kiwi and grape and something else all mixed together. I loooooove them.
The only fruit I've ever had that made me gag was durian. Species-wise, they're actually related to the rambutan and the litchi, I think, but they're nothing alike. The flavor isn't too bad, but the smell is just atrocious.
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Last edited by PhotoChick; 11-26-2008 at 04:36 PM.
I will try any kind of fruit out there. Haven't like all of them, but only one caused a bad reaction.
When I was a kid, I had one of those mini fruit pies and it was cherry. Must have been a bad one, because I got horribly sick from it, and to this day I cannot eat a cherry! Even cherry flavored medicine makes me gag. Isn't that weird? I know I'm not allergic to cherries, but I just can't eat them.
As for organ meats - being of a medical mind, I really don't want to eat something that detoxifies the body. I mean, that's what the liver does - so why would I eat the organ that filters toxins... blargh. That's one of those foods that causes my throat to lock up.
As for organ meats - being of a medical mind, I really don't want to eat something that detoxifies the body.
Hah. That's funny because that's kind of the reason I don't like kidney. That and every time I've had it, it's been gritty and chewy. But I llloooooove the texture of liver and I just never think of it as a detoxing organ. But of course it is.
Well, my "icky" cheese was a sharp cheddar with cocoa and icing sugar on it and a shot of raspberry koolaid thrown in. Yummo NOT! original assessment still stands -
But the cheese person gave me a small piece of smoked cheddar (I'm a sucker for smoked anything thanks to my dad) and OH YEAH! I ran from her, scared that I'd scarf the whole plate in front of her (do not ever, ever food sample after being out in the cold rain all day).
I then felt I, ahem, HAD to buy something. I got a small piece of the cheddar and sat in the car like a little rodent, just holding it and smelling it . I'm going to have just a bit before bed, on one of the primo crackers I have hidden away for the in-laws visit, and then brush my teeth immediately and get into bed.
Yes, I believe I am a little this week!
FYI durian is the weirdest thing. Some people find it smells very pleasant, and others find it's like rotting meat. DH and I are in the rotting meat camp.
And Pringles chips are the one chip I cannot eat. There is nothing potatoey about them - like eating artificially flavored wall board. BLARGH!
I found it to taste very mild, and not especially to my liking. THey mix it in yogurt, and DH found it tasty. 
the whole plate in front of her (do not ever, ever food sample after being out in the cold rain all day).
. I'm going to have just a bit before bed, on one of the primo crackers I have hidden away for the in-laws visit, and then brush my teeth immediately and get into bed.
this week!
(this is way more fun than food porn)
