Britishers - and anyone not American. What's you favorite 'crap' foods?

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?

Good Gawd Sentinel…what you described makes us Americans look like gluttonous, high cholesterol, fat packing slobs than I care to be known as < giggle >.

I’ve always been a fan of Biltong(sort of like beef jerky, but you can use it to fend off wild dogs with, and not by throwing it to them either(hint, it comes in strips about a foot long)). Beef jerky just doesn’t compare.

Then theres Marmite, that stuff is awesome. I don’t care how disgusting you think it is, I eat it off the spoon.

Mopane worms. They’re not actually worms, so don’t panic. They’re actually a type of caterpillar dried and salted(and sometimes canned in tomato sauce). Very tasty, although the little legs get stuck in your teeth really easily.(kind of like popcorn in that regard)

Yogi sips, prepackaged yogurt drinks. Sort of like lassis, but not anywhere near as elegant. You can get them in grenadine flavor…mmmmm…

Fried scrapple, nothing like it. If you don’t know what scrapple is/is made of, you’re probably happier not knowing.

Of course, mine don’t really compare to anything that Sentinel named, but then again I’ve been eating dorm-food for quite some time, so my sense of taste is pretty much up and gone anyway. (when you get to the point where the tabasco sauce you cover the food with to make it barely palatable starts to seriously interfere with the taste of the food(and I don’t mean the spicyness of it interferes either) then you know something isn’t right)


Still later, Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a saucepan.

Nu Vo Da Da commented:

Oh, that makes it so much better. Whew, caterpillers are okay. :rolleyes:

I have to ask – though I might regret it – what is Marmite? Something like Vegimite?

Those worms you mentioned reminded me of the clear candy ‘suckers’ in Tequila flavor you can buy at stores here with a single Cactus worm in them. I guess it’s that worm thing from Mexico where you buy the bottle of Tequila – paint thinner – with a worm in the bottom. After you drink the bottle, you’re supposed to eat the worm. It’s either supposed to prove that you’re Macho, very, very drunk, have no taste or remarkably hungry.

In some parts of America, people with far too much money and far too much time on their hands and far too bored (having the ability to get everything they want) are starting up little clubs where they get to dine on fried insects. Mealworms, scorpions, Beatles, grasshoppers and so on, usually battered, de-stinged, and deep fried or crisped and dumped on rice or like croutons in a salad.

We have scrapple here.(YUCK!) We also have sliced and packaged tongue and blood sausage. (Also YUCK!) While perusing the meat section of my local grocery store one day I was stunned, horrified, shocked and revolted as well as fascinated to find packaged pig tails and chicken feet available. (The pig tails looked more revolting than the chicken feet.)

Marmite and Vegimite are exactly the same thing. Marmite is the British Brand name and Vegimite is Austrailan (I think).

My money’s on doner kebab with chilli sauce. Salad, but no tomato.

Sentinel, are you from Texas by any chance?

Your list has to have been taken from my memory bank, but you left out what we used to call “Hot Links.”

I like Vegemite, but I don’t like Marmite. I don’t think they’re exactly the same.

7-11 makes great hot dogs. Their “chili” sauce is suspicious, and the “cheese” sauce is bland; but you can dress the dogs up fairly well… and they’re actually tasty! The jury is still out on the hot dog shaped burgers though.

Wienerschnitzel (I wish they really did sell Wienerschnitzel!) has awesome chili dogs. Might be a guy thing, because most women I know don’t seem to understand why most guys I know like them so much.

Sentinel
Stay away from the microwave pizzas. Get pizza by the slice at a pizza shop.

Vienna sausage. (Vienna sausage = Wienerwurst = “weiner”. So are wieners and hotdogs (Frankfurterwurst = Frankfurter = “frank” = hot dog) the same thing?) I don’t much care for the plain ones, and the only place we could find the (better-tasting) BBQ kind was at military bases. I’m no longer a dependent so I can’t get them any more. :frowning:

Anything that comes in a gallon jar, suspended in coloured liquid, is a little gross for me to try. And on that subject, a Jewish friend of mine said I should try gefilte fish. They look like hairy white meatballs. Can’t bring myself to buy a jar.

Vienna Sausage is about as big around as your pinkie and one inch to one and a half inches in length. Not really a sausage at all, though it looks like one.

Yeah. Hot links. Those red, linked tubes of mystery meat, pickled in mystery juice, spiced up enough to disguise the real taste and containing enough congealed grease to make 'em slide right on through. MMMMMMM. Tasty.

Refried beans. Now there is a food that most doctors would like to see considered a poison. In most drive up taco places, they put the purplish - brownish mud on everything. They like to mix the beans with lard. The more lard, the stronger the flavor and the more money they save. Lard is cheap. Beans are not.

Jerky. All types. Meat heavily seasoned, dried to the consistency of old leather, tough, chewy, creates its own juice, tasty and spicy. (I prefer to make my own.)

Here in Florida you get to find places which will sell you smoked alligator tail. Alligator burgers. Fried alligator. Battered alligator. Never tried the stuff and I sincerely and intensely dislike alligators. (The only use for those tiny brained eating machines is to turn them into handbags and shoes.) I heartily question the intelligence of the Australians with their seemingly universal fondness of the beast, which frequently likes to dine on those who get too fond.

Hard boiled eggs. Period. No pickling, no mutilation of any form. Sold singly on counters in small convenience stores, or in double packets in the coolers. Usual consistency is that of a tennis ball. Used to be sold in bars in the Northern sections of the States. (Man! Those places must have become aromatic after chasing hard boiled eggs with mugs of beer.)

Hmph!?

After reading all of the crap foods we Americans eat, I’m starting to think that Europeans just might have a reason to consider us nuts.

Yeah, I also spotted those ‘hairy’ fish balls in the stores and came to the conclusion that the normally considered benign and pacifistic Jewish person had to be one tough mutha to first try them. I never have.

Now, I will virtually kill for good pickled herring. I’ve been know to sit down and eat an entire jar of herring chunks at one sitting. My grandmother used to have this glass salad bowl sitting on her kitchen table, from time to time, filled with a grayish, murky, liquid, in which spices and chunks of onion floated. She filled it with fresh herring fillets and let it kind of ferment for a day and then her and her family scarfed it down. MMMMMM! GOOD!

Caviar. (MMMMPH!!) Grocery store bought. In small jars. Costs anywhere from $2 to $5. SUX! BLOWS! BITES! And isn’t very good. Smells like fish left in the sun for a day. Tastes like fish left in the sun for a day. I view with much suspicion anyone who eats that stuff and says they like it.

Canned squid – pickled in ink. (I think I’m gonna heave!) Tried it once but the sensation of all of those little suckers in my mouth made it impossible to swallow. Spat it out. I consider it only good for bait.

This next one is NOT for the faint of heart nor the sensitive of stomach. This stuff should be marked with yellow and black radiation labels, sold in lead containers with a signed release form. People who eat this and like it should be avoided at all costs because they are the meanest sons of bitches in the Valley. It is good to use if anyone accidentally swallows poison and needs to heave it up. If we were to place tons of this stuff in bombs and drop it on Iran, Sadaam Hussein would abdicate instantly and run fleeing into his enemies arms. (Now, the FRENCH, might just like this stuff.)(So might the Japanese – they’ll eat anything.) Limburger cheese! Sold in small, innocent looking, silver foil packets in the cheese section. Sealed in plastic. (That doesn’t help much.) The fool who first ate this obnoxious, repellent, disgusting, indescribably rotten smelling stuff MUST have been starved nearly to death. Most good cheese makers would have probably tossed it out, thinking it had spoiled. (It did, but people often like to eat spoiled things.) Two day old roadkill on a wet Florida highway in summer smells better. Tried it. Almost barfed. Stupidly tried it again and almost barfed again and gave it up. (Even shitfaced drunk I could not get it down.) If you like it, then you have my utmost respect and stay the hell away from me while I let the authorities know a mad person is loose.

jeesis H cripes!

I live in Canada, and we eat chocolate bars, chips - made of potato, not bugs or anything else weird, nachos, popcorn…I have never eaten anything pickled (except dill pickles), and <gag> certainly never consumed anything with <gag> its own jell stuck to it.

Gonna go woof my cookies now.

Kel, I beg to differ, but we do have some weird stuff here.

All I have to say is dulse.

For those who are saying WTF??? Dulse is dried seaweed, very salty and chewy. I do not care for it myself, but I do know people who love it.


Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.

Hey! Limburger Cheese is great. Actually it’s not really one of my favorites, I tend to prefer stronger cheeses(Vacherin Mont D’or)(mmm, can be smelled up to 3 meters away, through the packaging), but it’s still quite nice as a finish to a meal.
American cheese, now thats disgusting.

Those pinkish purplish pickled eggs are treated with nothing more than beet juice. Easy to do at home, just save the water from a pot of simmered beets, drop some shelled hard-boiled eggs in, and let them sit in the fridge for a few days.

Or buy a jar of borscht, and drop the eggs in that.


Uke

Oh, but not for your classic pink pickled eggs. The beet juice is spiked with sugar, vinegar, honkin’ bunches of spices and aged for at least a few weeks to get that purplish blush.

Of course there are Puritan Pickled Eggs. Nothing colorful like beet juice added, just the vinegar/spice stuff. The eggs turn an interesting brownish buff color, and are interestingly speckled with floating things when fished out of the jars.

I am firmly convinced that a pepper pickled eggs are possible, using generous lashings of hot pepper in the marinade.

Just lost my appetite,
Veb

Being up late one night, unable to sleep and bored, I gave up trying to find anything aside from 8 million infomercials, 600 psychic networks, 50 antique B&W films, and 26 Buy-THIS-NOW shows and tuned into a Japanese warped cooking show. (I swear, the Japs are starting to go over the edge.) This was called IRON CHEF and several cooks raced against the clock to fix something weird for some guests to eat.

They were cooking crabs. Blue crabs. I like crabs. I love stuffed crabs, crab meat, steamed crabs, boiled crabs and artificial crabs. I didn’t like what they were cooking. For one, here in the States it is illegal to take crabs bearing eggs – a thick, dense matt of yellowish stuff on the underside. Not there. They EAT the eggs! (Bleech!) Then this lady took a living crab and a cleaver and hacked the poor son of a b into quivering chunks, tossed them uncleaned into a pot, added water and assorted seasonings and greens to make a crab soup. (We REMOVE the nasty bits – like the ‘lungs’ (frilly gills) and waste products.) They didn’t.

It kind of reminded me of a 3 stooges episode, where Curly was eating a lobster by cleaning out the meat and crunching down on the shell. I decided not to watch anymore and went and made a ham sandwich and read a book. (I spread a layer of vinigar chips over the ham before I put the top slice of bread on. MMMMMMM! Good!)

There was a Swedish foreign exchange student in high school. He said that in Sweden they eat “raw, rotten fish”. I’ve heard there is something similar in Iceland. The Icelandic name is something like “hakharl”. The article I read mentioned something about lye.

Does anyone know the Swedish name, and what this “dish” actually is?

Kelli, how can you forget ‘Prarie Oysters’ - the food - not the band.

Most sickening thing ever this side of the Calgary Stampede … and uniquely Canadian…

Um… “Mountain Oysters” in the US are sheep testicles, IIRC.

As for the Japanese crab cooking, ugh!! eww!! That’s cruel & disgusting!!


I was born with the Moon in Pisces!!
Leave me alone!!
SOB!!

Never watch the “Giant Eel Battle” on Iron Chef. The chefs dash up to a huge glass tank and fish out several live, squirming eels.
Keep in mind these eels are about 3-4’ long, black and slimy.

The proper technique for prepping the eels was much admired by the commentators. Each eel was stretched out on a board, a nail driven through the head and then they were gutted. I suppose the nail was to keep one end of the eel stationary during the process.

The judges and commentators watched intently, with chirpy asides about knife technique and recipe suggesstions while the eel guts were carefully scooped aside, some for later use IRC. Being a wimp, I could only aspire to a dry Triscuit in hopes my stomach would settle.

Still shuddering,
Veb

Sentinel,

Surprisingly enough, alligator is REALLY good. Kinda mild tasting, somewhat chewy. If I were you, I’d try it once just for the hell of it. Just get a batch deep-fried in nuggets–that’s the easiest way for a beginner to stomach just about anything new, I’ve found.