Horror food

Readers of this blog often comment how adventurous I am. While it’s true that I like to push my culinary boundaries, I have my limits.

Just in case you think I recklessly eat every weird thing that comes my way, I thought I’d share a few horrors that are well down my ‘to eat’ list - such as this offering that I spotted this in a local Chinese cafe yesterday.  I suspect I may get around to trying it one day just for the hell of it.  

This product range really amuses me. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to design cheerful packaging that belies the horrors within. What’s even funnier is that it’s all labelled in English even though, apart from a few weirdos like me, most native English speakers would recoil at the thought of eating duck icky bits.



A foodie friend recently invited us over for dinner and, when I asked what he’d like us to bring, he replied “scare us”, so off I toddled to the shop selling the abovementioned duck bits.

Sauced, semi-dried duck tongue.

Given that he lived in Hong Kong for many years, and his wife is Hong Kong Chinese, I should have known better than to present them with this lame attempt at horror food.

They hoovered them up without a blink and offered to cook me some freshly prepared ones some day.

I’ve cheated a bit with this example, because I ended up eating a couple of the duck tongues. They’re ok.

Pig spine soup (spotted on the menu of a Korean restaurant in Queen Street).  As much as I admire this restaurant’s pragmatic honesty, I don’t like pork and the dish’s main ingredient is spine. What more can I say?

The other night I heard Kieran coughing and spluttering out in the kitchen, followed by the tap running hard. It transpired he’d gone to make vegemite toast and, in his rush to satisfy his hunger, had grabbed the first jar he saw with a yellow and red label. Poor lad; this sambal is seriously HOT.

The Chinese may have cornered the horror food market, but Stutz burger bar in Ohakune is giving them a run for their money.

My husband and kids reckoned their burgers are the worst they’ve ever tried. As for Stutz’s garlic chips, even my greaseaholic family was flummoxed by this soggy garlic butter topped nightmare.

They offered me some, and I was tempted to kill off my arteries and try them just so I could regale you with how ghastly they were. But my nerves failed and I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Like mother, like son

Despite my best efforts, I’ve found that parenthood and exotic food don’t always go together. I’ve managed to train my family to at least try some of my more unusual offerings, but they don’t usually go for seconds.

Plain fooders Don and Rory are lost causes, and I confess to knowingly serving ethnic foods that are torture on a plate to them. But my 12-year-old son Kieran is another story.

Like me, he has always been interested in trying new things so I didn’t have to look far for a companion when I saw an Indonesian culture and food festival advertised in this morning’s paper.

I’m relatively familiar with Indonesian cuisine but it has a very low profile in New Zealand due to our miniscule Indonesian population (3261, according to the 2006 census).

Most of the Indonesian food I’ve tried has been of the satay / gado gado / beef rendang variety but I know there’s far more to the cuisine than those dishes. Needless to say, I was seeking something at the more ‘interesting’ end of the scale when Kieran and I headed off to the festival.

Like the local Indonesian population, the festival was small; four or five food stalls, a similar number of craft stalls, and a simple programme of movies and cultural performances.

True to form, I steered us towards the food stalls with the weirdest looking offerings.  Here's what we bought:





Croquettes that I think were made from
pancakes stuffed with carrot sticks and something
else, crumbed and deep fried.  Served with a very
tasty peanut sauce (and a blob of hot chilli
sauce for me!).





Croquette innards.



 

Fish cake stuffed with egg.  Served with a
slightly sweet-sour-hot liquidy sauce that had little
chunks of cucumber in it.  Nice enough but it would
have been good to have a bigger spoon so
that we could get more sauce with the fishcake. 
I love the way runny Asian food is often sold 
in little plastic bags that are tied with a
rubber band; so pragmatic!

A medley of weird things.  Clockwise from bottom
left: hot chilli sauce, fried green chilli, fried cubes
of mysterious savoury gelatinous stuff, fried tofu
cubes, fried brown stuff, tempeh (the big rectangle
of grey-white) with unidenfitied sauce, sweet
jackfruit curry, soya sauce (?) boiled egg. 
Unusual. Not a favourite with either of us but
I'm glad we tried it anyway.



Steamed coconut flavoured cakelets.  Nice.



















A sweet cold soup that was similar to
the Indian dessert, Falooda.  The Indonesian
version contained cubes of Nata de Coco (a
densely textured coconut juice jelly), bits of
avocado, finely shredded coconut flesh,
mysterious orange bits that may or may not have
been mango and/or carrot.  Tasted far nicer than
it sounds.























To be honest, none of it knocked my socks off but it was nevertheless great to try the real deal and we’ll be back for more next year.

What did knock my socks off, however, was Kieran’s willingness to try everything. He didn’t like all of it, but was still open to the experience.

I’m so proud to be his mum!