Still better than feeding it to them, though - I suspect even the Spanish Inquisition would hesitate to do that.
Yeah, the durian I had tasted banana-ey pineappley with a touch of onion.
Oden
Take things you wouldn’t be too keen on eating fresh (turnip, pressed fish paste, taro root, another pressed fish paste) and leave them sitting in a pot boiling intermittently for, oh, about a month. Serve from a wooden pushcart only taken out at night when the health inspectors are gone.
It’s a fraction the price of regular dishes, and can be easily found at 3am when you’re dead drunk.
I suspect if they did not cover up the taste with heavy doses of other ingredients, they’d be deported from the US.
Now now, fellow Cincinnatti–dweller…goetta isn’t too bad (it’s far superior to Scrapple, which I suppose isn’t saying a lot), and Cincy-style “chili” is pretty damn good on a hot dog with mustard, onions and cheese (coney).
I can’t stand that stuff on spaghetti, though. I just don’t like it at all, as it’s too watery for the noodles to hold it.
I LOVE Cincy chili! Agreed, it’s gotta be Skyline. Back in my meat-eating days, I couldn’t get enough of their Coney’s. Three at a time smothered in the goods!
Any chance you’d be willing to part with that recipe?
None of these are particularly abominable in my book, but people are hesitant to eat them because of their relative exoticness and our midwest white bread sensibilities.
Some Eastern European local delicacies include:
Duck’s Blood Soup- aka Czernina, nuff said. Never had the opportunity to try it.
Hungarian Chicken Livers - Reallygood- basically sautteed chicken livers creamed with onions, paprika, finished with some brandy, maybe. Eaten with bread or toast points, rice, or noodles.
Turtle Soup- It’s been a local specialty here on the Lake Erie Basin and in the Great Black Swamp since the area was settled, still available in some finer restaurants.
Happy to, Drain Bead. Let me rustle through my various recipe files–some paper, some electronic, disorganized mess and I suck–and I’ll e-mail it to you.
I went to Bali last month, and on my things-to-do list was: TRY DURIAN.
We stopped at a roadside fruit stand where they had a couple hanging up. My Javanese girlfriend was going on about how wonderful durian is, that it’s an aphrodisiac, the most delicious thing in the world. I couldn’t get within a meter of them. The smell was something like vomit, with undertones of dirty diaper and hints of wet dog. Our Balinese driver said he didn’t want me to put one in the car. I sampled mangosteen (so good that I bought a kg of them), but I had to stand at least a meter away from the durian to eat any of the fruit I bought.
Kecap was pretty gross too. I think American kechup is a profitable use for rotten tomatoes and a terrible thing to do to good tomatoes. I use it about once every two months on fried potatoes, never on meat or eggs. Indonesian kecap is much worse. Imagine soy sauce mixed with karo syrup. That’s pretty close to it, but not so salty.
The sambal was good. Imagine american kechup made with chili peppers and without the sugar.
I’m going to have to disagree with you here. The Cuban food that is served in most Cuban restaurants in the US and Canada is in most cases pretty standard Cuban food. We’re talking black beans, rice, fried ripe or green plantains, and those are absolutely staples of the Cuban diet. True, somedays you can only find rice, and some days it’s only beans, and meat, we had heard something about this thing called “meat”, but most felt it was just a myth.
My point is that, while most Cubans will not eat like you can at any Cuban restaurant outside Cuba, that does not mean that the dishes served there are not Cuban.
I do have to add a caveat here though, I have been served refried beans at a Cuban restaurant in Jacksonville, Flroida when I asked for beans. So you are not completely off base.
Abominably delicious…
Tony Packo’s Restaurant’s:
Chili Sunday -A sundae you eat before dinner! Tony Packo’s world-famous chili, sour cream, and shredded cheddar cheese, all layered into a sundae glass, and served with warm taco chips on the side.
Fried Green Pickles - Tony Packo’s Original Pickles & Peppers hand-breaded and deep fried! Served with ranch dressing, Tony Packo’s Salsa, and Tony Packo’s Spicy Ketchup for dipping.
Packo’s is basically a Hungarian Delicatessen… nothing like it. The Chili Sundae looks a little incongruous, it’s like a savory chili parfait or pudding. The pickles are quite the twist on deep fried dill pickle slices because they are spicy, pickled with just enough heat from Hot Hungarian Banana Peppers. Really nice breading.
I agree, javanese ketjap is quite different from the american tomato-based condiment. Any reason why the name was adopted?
Hmmm…Maybe something is lost in the travel, then. They sell fresh durian at some of the Asian markets here, and I bought one, only to be severely disappointed in its lack of offensive stench. I mean, it was stinky, but it was hardly the stinkiest food I’ve ever eaten (that award would go to surstromming, fermented herring. I love fish sauce. I love herring. But this shit was orders of magnitude beyond either.) All in all, the durian was pretty yummy. Kinda banana-y, tropical, creamy, onion-y, maybe a background hint of cheese or something. I remember it being pretty heavy–a little went a long way. After having it fresh, I’ve also had it in sticky rice, (at a restaurant here called Sticky Rice, which specializes in Northern Thai cuisine and has insect dishes on the permanent menu), and it was awesome in that.
A few mentions of Tibet but nobody’s brought up (and I mean that in both senses of the word) tsampa. Man, that shit is nasty. “Roasted barley flour” as a definition does it too many favors. Texture of dirt, tastes like dirt, looks like compacted dessicated maggots barfed up by a dog. No wonder Tibetans seek escape from the profane in spiritual union; no wonder they say “life is a suffering sea”. See the suffering on her face.
Also rancid yak butter tea. 'Nuff said.
Momos, though. They’re damn tasty. And I also had yak bourgignon, which was delicious.
In the central US and Texas, in addition to chips and salsa, ‘American-Mexican’ places put out ‘queso’ which is supposed to be melted cheese, I think. The queso used in Texas is at least cheese-like, if not very good tasting, similar to Velveeta. The stuff in Oklahoma is vile. It is a thin, watery, off-white fluid that tastes both bitter and acrid and is most reminiscent not of cheese, but diluted low quality margarine. People eat it by the pint while waiting for their food. It is truly a disgusting spectacle.
Really, most Americanized Mexican food is abominable, at least around here. It’s the same handful of ingredients, recombined and usually deep fried:
Low grade ground beef, adrift in orange fat
Chicken, boiled and shredded such that it resembles fluffy sawdust
Refried beans that are mostly Crisco
Flour (?!) tortillas
Iceberg lettuce with a dash of diced tomatoes
Mountains of preshredded processed Cheddar cheese
Salsa composed of crushed tomatoes and too much salt
Yet more of that accursed queso
I refuse to go to these places with friends anymore, no matter how good they claim their latest favorite is, there is no difference. It’s Taco Bell with waiters.
I was visiting colleges in that area, and my mother and I stopped in at a diner near one campus and they showed us a brick of the stuff.
I think it was at that moment I decided not to go to that particular university, solely due to the presence of scrapple in the vicinity.
Guatemalan food is pretty lame. They manage to ruin black beans by pureeing them into a gloopy paste. This is inevitably served with gloopy cream, salty tasteless cheese, and some egg. If you are lucky you’ll get a slice of ham or some fried plantains to take the edge of the bland gloop-and-dairy feast.
Their tortillas are good though.
Oh come off it. Flour tortillas are a specialty of some Northern regions of Mexico and the United States. Tex-Mex cuisine has long history going back to well before the American west was under the control of the United States. It was created by Mexicans, on Mexican soil, and continues to be enjoyed by Mexicans in a place that is deeply culturally influenced by Mexico.
Now fake cheese and nasty meat are something I can’t abide with, but the “a real Mexican would never eat a burrito” thing is just pretentious.
True, but if this is all that you served (morros y cristianos, etc.) your restaurant wouldn’t do too well in a cosmopolitan restaurant in the States, even while throwing in a piece or two of unseasoned, flavorless pieces of pork. I had to eat this in Habana, and staple though it may be in Cuba, I would never pay good money at a restaurant in Miami or Los Angeles for it.
Typically restaurants that announce themselves as serving “Cuban cuisine” fancy up the food into something that is seldom found in the Cuba. Would you pay $12 a plate for rice, beans and tortillas at a Mexican restaurant because it’s in West Hollywood and has fancy decor? Probably not (though some people inexplicably to), so they serve up some tasteless piece of meat and you think you’re eating real Mexican food. (The ratio of good Mexican food to bad in L.A. is about 25 to one, in my estimate).
I agree with you there–I was there for 5 days and lost 3 pounds. The non-farmers cheese and crema all tasted like sour milk. Always huevos racheros and beans, and maybe you could get some waaay overcooked chicken. Everyone likes to rave about food from wee little villages off the beaten track, and I went to them and the food was lousy. But yes, very fine tortillas, though.