Modern Vespa

I was going to say what weird meals but that word seems to have taken on a slightly different path these days

The reason I ask is for lunch today which was a rushed affair I used up whatever I saw in the fridge that was quick easy and edible.

Ingredients were

Mushrooms - fried
Tomatoes - fried
Onion - fried
Cuscus - for some reason two different colours maybe spelt Couscous?
Onion Bhaji - came in the same salad mix as the Cuscus/Couscous
Vegan Smoked Cheese
Porkpie - Not sure if anyone other than Brits know what this is? Basically its processed pork meat surrounded in a jelly (not jam) with a short crust pastry
outer layer. Not healthy, I am a little ashamed
Slice of wholemeal sourdough bread - made by a a lovely Polish lady a few streets away.
French (Dijon) Mustard.
An Orange - This was Dessert

Washed down with a pint of Blackcurrant juice and Lemonade


I'm sure you can all come up with something at least as unconventional.

Seaweed, cabbage, tofu, and chicken....
Edit: A&W Rootbeer for the drink.

Fermented soybeans. Smelled like rancid socks and tasted slightly like blue cheese which isn't to my liking. On the other hand, raw minced fish guts from the Bream fish were pleasant.

AKA "Nattō", a Japanese delicacy. There are very few foods that I just flat-out refuse to try a second time, and nattō is one of them. It is easily the most disgusting thing I have ever put in my mouth (and that's saying something).

(I also really like blue cheese, so there's that).

You might want to try it again in its fried fritter format--you get the same taste, but without the gotta-be-born-into-it texture.

I once had a meal that was just pretty much raw chicken. There were other things, but didn't have much appetite after a good try. Beer can only do so much...

The thing that I personally find the "strangest" is the usual preparation of shishamo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishamo). What's wrong with a lightly fried fish? A few things, in my book.

The first is that you just eat them whole, bones, innards and all, which is a little off-putting to me. They are always bigger than you think and never quite cooked enough. Next, is that the way they are fried: they have this hilarious surprised/horrified look on their faces. Also, they are usually served when they are getting ready to spawn and full of roe, which gives gnawing through them a certain je ne sais quoi that I'm not a fan of. Finally, to add insult to injury, males may be injected with roe, as there are not enough spawning females, to meet demand. I think this may have something to do with the surprised look on some of their faces...

Addendum: the other thing that made the whole thing strange is that I only ran into shishamo as part of school lunches in Japan during certain seasons. Trying to set a good example for the kids, I muscled them down with a smile...but I still have flashbacks.

A can of Chunky Beef soup, cold, outside a cave entrance near Tucson one Thanksgiving night, long ago.

Not the strangest, per se, but one of the most memorable.

On a corporate work trip to the LG factory in Kumi, South Korea, the "big boss" on the LG side (not sure exactly how they ranked) wanted to take us out for dinner one night. We piled into the chauffeured cars and headed off on what seemed like an excessively long drive into the mountains. We arrived at a small mountain village, and as we approached the restaurant from outside, someone in our party yelled something at the restaurant staff (who were congregated outside enjoying a slow evening). They all scurried inside, and we were shown a table in this otherwise completely empty restaurant. A short while later, one of the staff brought a collection of plates of food. And then another collection. Then another.

One of my US colleagues at that point leaned over and said, "Oh, I think this is going to be the meal of 100 plates", which I think maybe refers to Hanjeongsik, but I'm not sure. But in fact we had so many plates that they were stacking plates staggered on top of plates on top of plates, such that there were maybe three layers of plates in some places.

Everything was present on our table. Seafood. Meat. Vegetables. Kimchi. Pickled everything. So many different flavors, so many different dishes. Even some marginally difficult ones, like roasted crickets (tasted like teriyaki crackers) and things that might have been some kind of sea worm in chile sauce.

I made an effort to try everything on the table. Or everything in reach, anyway. But as there were only about 6 or 7 of us, there was no way we could finish everything.

I have no idea what this meal cost. I was just a peon along for the ride, so I was not important enough to be meant to know. But it was amazing, and memorable, and I'm glad I experienced it.

That's wonderful! You may have gotten more new flavors and dishes that night than most of us have gotten in years.

Oh, definitely. And that was what stood out most about this meal -- not just that there were a huge variety of dishes, and not just that they were mostly unfamiliar flavors to my Western palate -- but that there were so many flavors that were so vastly different from each other.

I tutored English to two young Korean American sisters twenty-five years ago. I'd go their home, and I would tutor them in their living room. One day, I arrived and their parents were gathered in the dining area with five or so adult guests. They invited me to join them for a meal (even though I stressed to the girls that I had already eaten). I tried various Korean foods, and did my best to enjoy them (or at least appear to enjoy them). I remember not liking a single food. It's a little ironic that I now eat either sauerkraut or kimchi every day.

Not a full meal, but an appetizer, in Havana, in 2016.

Many years ago I was living in Tampa Bay on tour with the renaissance fair. On our last night in town some of the locals took us to this sushi joint.

Not that sushi is odd (one of my favorites) but being from Detroit extremely fresh fish is not commen.

The odd part was the chef served us rolls with whole unpeeled shrimp that we were encouraged to eat whole....

It may have been the saki talking, but they were delicious, crunchy and sweet.

I have since tried to replicate the experience and failed every time. Maybe it was the quality of the shrimp, or how they were prepared...

Snails in garlic butter out of the shells.

Not that strange, but it was during a corporate event, I had had one over the eight, and I couldn't get my alcohol addled noggin to comprehend the workings of the snail tongs, in that if i squeezed to hold it when I tried to fish the critter out, the whole thing just dropped back onto my plate.

I had become the evenings entertainment for those present

In my defence, this was nearly 40 years ago when i was a spotty yoof!

I was trying to remember that extremely foul smelling and tasting Norwegion Fish dish, then this video showed up explaining it all.

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=DISGUSTING+NORWEGION+FISH+DISH&mid=9FC73D3F9C2A45E6DA049FC73D3F9C2A45E6DA04&FORM=VIRE

My grandmother is full Norwegian and never ate that as far as I know. Thank you grandma! She did give us half a muskmelon with a scoop of mint chip ice cream. 😋

This is the one, this video had me laughing so hard when I first saw it.

This poor guy is just determined. The very definition of the spirit is willing but the flesh isn't.

I'm not trying it, I have seen enough.

Really not all that strange but I absolutely love black licorice. When I was a kid 8-10 years old it was my favorite flavor of ice cream. I still love licorice but haven't seen black licorice flavored ice cream in forever. They used to have it at Baskin Robbins 55 years ago.

I have since found out that eating a lot of black licorice can kill you and as a kid I ate as much as I could get my hands on. Apparently the toxic effects get worse as you get older? If you haven't heard about licorice being toxic you are fine as long as you don't eat too much. People with heart, liver, or kidney health issues should avoid.

ahem...around here we eat this as a Christmas delicacy too

To be honest, it hardly smells to anything when ready. The cooking phase is a different thing.

Often served with white sauce and some pepper....and again, honestly, those bring most of the taste, the ready fish itself does not taste much of anything.

I've never heard of licorice ice cream, sounds really nice though.

But I have had licorice Porter which is an old fashioned British dark ale and it's absolutely lovely.

I've only ever seen licorice ice cream in Sweden. I loved it.

so you have never been in the military then.

don't tell that to the Dutch people black licorice is a daily staple to them, slated, sweet, sour, candied, just name any way you can and you can have it that way.

I had a similar experience not at a restaurant but in a korean home. the men ate first and drank and when we were done the girls could then eat when we left the sitting area around the floor table matt there was no traditional tables like us westerns use. I also saw a older korean man eating a broth style soup with chop sticks once. that was amazing to witness, his chop stick motion was so fast he created an upstream effect of the broth to his mouth while sucking it in .

Oops, I guess it was strange for me.

I usually buy up large on local sweets for the kids when travelling.
In Sweden I grabbed a few bags of Salty Liquorice. Turns out it's flavoured with ammonium chloride. That was pretty disgusting.

But better than the guinea pig my travel mates were eating in Peru.

Not a meal but a drink...
"Orange" Fanta in the USA.
I'm old enough to know better but somehow I always forget it's not the Euro version, and buy it anyway.

What's it like?

I never did finish Tales from Asia. In fact, I think there's still an open tab on my laptop that has a draft of a post I wrote while I was there.

The most off-putting food from that trip that comes to mind is bahn xeo, a coastal crepe just south of Nha Trang. The batter is chocked with seafood, often served whole, and then grilled into one continuous pancake. The shrimp arms and tails and all the other various bits that would never leave an American kitchen are encased in each bite.

As one of my Vietnamese friends puts it, "it's how we get our calcium."

The Danes also seem to love all things licorice. We had licorice ice cream bars there. Licorice and chili Gammel Dansk, salted licorice, plan licorice, licorice allsorts, everything imaginable. If I had to move, I'd move to Denmark.

Can't beat a porkpie with daddy's sauce

Jellyfish

Good one.

I ate this and they eat lots of jellyfish. The meat was weird, kept weeping liquid. Can't cook it too much or gets hard. The meat had a mild flavor. I'd do it again.

I remember licorice ice cream when I was a kid also. I liked it, but mom didn't like the black smears I got all over my face and shirt. Evidently in response to this concern, I remember white licorice ice cream appearing in the stores a while later.

While traveling in NE Siberia a few years ago, it was traditional to have vodka and appetizers (zakuski) between bouts in the banya (Russian sauna). Two of the frequent treats were thin slices of frozen raw fish (pretty much like surimi) and thin slices of frozen raw pony meat.

I have very seriously considered becoming a food tourist.

I would really love to be able to taste authentic al pastor where they cook it on the vertical spit and cut thin layers off just as it is at the perfect doneness. Pork gets dried out and tough quick if overcooked. I also love menudo and my wife and I stumbled onto the best we have ever tried in Yerington Nevada when we went through there for me to look at an old pickup truck.

My family are also fans of Asian food and I have heard there are places in southeast Asia where there is street food that is really good.

Also one of the best things I ever tasted was when I went to lunch with these guys I was working with in San Francisco. It was a little hole in the wall shack over the water on some creek or estuary and they guys I was with said just ask for "Adobo". The old lady that ran the place made sure everybody got enough to eat so we could hardly work after lunch. Filipino food, I have never again been able to find anything like it.

I would definitely eat the frozen thin sliced fish and pony although I don't see myself traveling to Siberia.

Just wondering since I haven't traveled much what else should be on the list of places to go mainly for the food? Is the Malaysian street food that you hear about online really all that?

Watching old episodes of Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" show would be a good place to start if you want a survey of world cuisine. So would "Somebody Feed Phil".

Speaking from personal experience, Singapore is an outstanding food destination. Singaporean cuisine is a fusion of Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, and Indonesian food. In addition, Singapore boasts world-class restaurants specializing in almost any world cuisine you can name, making it a foodie heaven.

I'd pile on and second this. A few more reasons to recommend Singapore are: the hawker culture still remains, making low-cost culinary adventuring easy, as well as a stunning number of restaurants per person; Singapore itself is fairly compact, has good transit (and Grab), and takes its climate seriously; one can operate confidently in English almost anywhere, as it is an official and bridge language.

I think Singapore gets a bad rap sometimes in popular culture, but I've always had a blast and the food and people have been absolutely terrific.

The visual appearance should warn you off in the first place, a hazard warning label shade of orange, from the artificial colouring dye(s) in it. I suspect they are on a European ban list?
It goes downhill from there.
But each to his/her/their own!

I realized I neglected to mention this after I posted, and came back to amend my post. Agreed 100% -- the hawker "street food" culture (though it is not exactly "street food" in the strictest sense) is amazing and quite affordable.