That got your attention, didn’t it?
What type of crap foods do you from foreign shores like to gnash on from time to time? Odd, strange stuff like you can buy here in 7-11’s or little stores?
I used to love pickled eggs – especially those which came in those great gallon bottles of red liquid that turned the eggs pink. MMMMMM. Good – but, whew! An hour later, better be alone when the gas attack comes.
I still love pickled pigs feet, served ice cold and with their pickling jell clinging to the trotter. Eaten with vinegar potato chips and chased with beer.
We serve up gallon bottles of red sausage in a red pickling liquid. Each 4 inch chunk is greasy, spicy, chewy and delicious – and you need to be either 28 or younger or have a steel stomach to eat very many of them. They aint cholesterol or anything friendly. (Doctors cringe when they pass bottles of them in the stores.)
Spicy sausage, cooked for like 2 days on a slow grill in a store, each 8 inch chunk served up dripping yellow grease on a hot-dog bun, to be seasoned with salt, pepper, mustard, hot sauce or onions and consumed with great delight. (Antacid tablets usually make up dessert.)
Chunks of expensive smoked fish, dry and salty, usually Dolphin, brownish in color and reeking of Hickory or Oak smoke. Delicious when eaten by itself, with a great dill pickle or some vinegar chips. Needs to be chased with an Australian sized beer because it makes you thirsty.
BBQ Rib sandwich. Yeah, you heard me. RIB sandwich. A great slab of ribs cooks in spicy BBQ sauce served on two slices of bread. EXCELLENT! (I had to be told HOW to eat it. They give you extra sauce on the side, so you open the bread, scarf down the ribs and dip them in the sauce, then use the bread to clean your greasy fingers, mop up the left over sauce and eat it also.) In most little, off-of-the-main-road stores where they sell this delicacy, the slabs of ribs have been baking under heat lights in the sauce for about 2 days. They’re a little chewy.
Vienna Sausages. Little 2 inch sausages in a can – regular, hickory or BBQ. Real mushy. Kind of tasty. About 10 to a tin, packed in flavored jell or sauce. You ALWAYS break the first one prying it out. (Best consumed when you’re considerably drunk.)
Convenience store hot dogs. These babies are grilled on a rolling grill and about 8 inches long and an inch in diameter. No one knows what they are made of and best eaten while red and juicy. (The stores will gladly sell the tough, overcooked brown and dry ones to you for the same price.) Served on a hot-dog bun to be slathered in mustard, chili, cheese, onions, relish, salt and pepper. (Best eaten when desperately drunk.)
Nachos. Crisp corn triangles that are all warped. Served in a pile with hot, melted cheddar cheese poured over them. (AT least it LOOKS like cheddar.) Assorted things added like sliced olives, onions, tomatoes - cubed - and diced green peppers. Chili is also a popular topping. Can be found in convenience stores. (Uh – you have to try them to believe them.)
Premade sandwiches. Found in all night stores – often two days old, sealed in triangular packets. Mostly common is tuna salad, then egg salad, then ham and then roast beef or baloney. They come with a see through thin slice of ancient tomato (even great chefs in Europe cannot cut tomatoes so thin) a leaf or two of wilted lettuce and a gob of some form of cheap mayonnaise. Mostly dry. Mostly very little meat. Best consumed only if you are hungry enough to eat your sneakers and nothing else is around. Wash down with much beer.
Microwave pizza slices. (UGH!) Pizza, presumably once fresh but once made – perhaps a month earlier – packed into little sealed containers and frozen. (The makers did not spend much in the way of quality ingredients. A meat pizza slice might have like 4 or 5 little balls of potential meat on it, each about the size of a small raisin.) Zapped in a microwave provided by the store they taste like cardboard with garlic and tomato sauce accidentally dropped on them. They NEVER cook up right either. (Best eaten when so drunk your pals drag you into the store. – Better still, best eaten by your pals.)
Lastly, but not leastly, DANISH MEAT FOOD PRODUCT. It comes in a small can, half the size of an average SPAM can. DO NOT READ THE INGREDIANTS because you’ll regret it. Inside is a lump of somewhat firm, yet pasty pink meat. It smells good. It tastes salty and a little like spiced ham. It slices like cold peanut butter. It spreads like pulped liver. IF you try to fry it – like you can do with SPAM, – it foams up like insulation from a can, sizzles, hisses, stinks and almost turns runny. What happens after that, I don’t know because I threw it out. (Best eaten — not at all.)
So, what strange things are common in YOUR countries?