the food rant thread

[T42]

Did the Inlaw Paw's favourite sweet & sour spare ribs for lunch and all he could say was "with my teeth?" and "messy".  He scoffed half a dozen last time around. 

[hellymedic]

Carrot in a chicken dish?  No.  Wrong!

My Mummy often put carrots in the chicken soup she made; nowt wrong with that!

[Mr Larrington]

The soi-disant "Country Pub & Eating House" near Fort Larrington is under new management and early reports of the new regime are not good chiz.  Lt. Col. Larrington (retd.) and I tried an alternative, which is nearer and less likely to have you almost crashing into fallen trees on the way.

Stop it!  Stop it with your jus on everything and piling the whole dish into a model of the Devil's Tower in the middle of the plate!  You are not Richard Dreyfus being a mental.  Also the chips were cardboard, the squid rubbery, the leaves (various) over-abundant and the waitresses not pretty enough (apart from the one yesterday lunchtime who looked like a young Patsy Kensit).  Stop trying to impress with poncery and get the fucking basics right, eh?

We shall not be back.

[Pingu]

...the squid rubbery...

Insert old, racist joke here:

[fuzzy]

...the squid rubbery...

Insert old, racist joke here:

Inna Benny Hill style?

[ian]

I ate a frog. I mimed a chicken. I don't see how the waitress couldn't mistake that for a frog. It's not called the frog dance, is it? Maybe the Birdie Song never reached China.

It does taste like chicken. But looks like frog. Bull frog says the receipt.

[tiermat]

I ate a frog. I mimed a chicken. I don't see how the waitress couldn't mistake that for a frog. It's not called the frog dance, is it? Maybe the Birdie Song never reached China.

It does taste like chicken. But looks like frog. Bull frog says the receipt.

A trick I have heard of from crazyguy is to carry a set of photos, as laminated cards, showing the raw materials. Universal language, innit?

[ian]

Frog looks like chicken too. The restaurant didn't have a menu, it was all on the waitress's iPad which was held at a distance and as she scrolled through the ingredients (it was one of the stockpot places, they basically boil up a cauldron in the middle of the table and you chose which animals and plants will meet their grisly fates in the hot liquid) we had to make approving and disapproving noises. Given the un-unanimity of the table, this was harder than it seemed, and I suspected sounded a little bit like Prime Minister's Question Time being conducted by Australians. A passing Chinese delegate from the conference tried to mediate if mediate can be considered to be laughing at the foreigners.

I wasn't actually too bothered by the frog, I was mostly trying to avoid things with tentacles (and I can mime those better) but we still ended up with prawns. I seriously think we got nothing that we thought we ordered.

On the other hand, it was actually quite tasty.

[tiermat]

By raw materials I mean in their pre dispatch mode, not post life mode conversion.

[Jurek]

I ate a frog. I mimed a chicken. I don't see how the waitress couldn't mistake that for a frog. It's not called the frog dance, is it? Maybe the Birdie Song never reached China.

It does taste like chicken. But looks like frog. Bull frog says the receipt.

A trick I have heard of from crazyguy is to carry a set of photos, as laminated cards, showing the raw materials. Universal language, innit?

We used exactly this ploy when I was working in Changsha, capital of Hunan province.
Pictures of Heiniken bottles on the smart phones, that kind of thing.
Didn't prevent the waiter offering us dog in the hotel restaurant one night 

[Basil]

Didn't prevent the waiter offering us dog in the hotel restaurant one night 

  Indeed.
But it is something I'm going to have to try before I die.

[Jurek]

Didn't prevent the waiter offering us dog in the hotel restaurant one night 

  Indeed.
But it is something I'm going to have to try before I die.

But why?

[ian]

The pictures were raw materials. If there had been a picture of an entire chicken or frog it would have been easy. I know what a chicken looks like. I have a PhD. Chicken and frog look alike at the raw material phase. At least the picture pig offal wasn't something you'd easily mistake for anything else (or something you'd want to eat). Nor the fish heads. God knows, I've already eaten enough fish heads to last me a lifetime.

Chinese stockpot is much the same idea as sukiyaki or shabu-shabu in Japan (both of which I've had several times), though a bit more earthy. May have contained actual earth, come to think of it.

[Mr Larrington]

The pictures were raw materials. If there had been a picture of an entire chicken or frog it would have been easy. I know what a chicken looks like. I have a PhD. Chicken and frog look alike at the raw material phase. At least the picture pig offal wasn't something you'd easily mistake for anything else (or something you'd want to eat). Nor the fish heads. God knows, I've already eaten enough fish heads to last me a lifetime.

We know a song about that, don't we, Billy!

[Basil]

Didn't prevent the waiter offering us dog in the hotel restaurant one night 

  Indeed.
But it is something I'm going to have to try before I die.

But why?

Because I haven't.
Why else?   

[Jurek]

The pictures were raw materials. If there had been a picture of an entire chicken or frog it would have been easy. I know what a chicken looks like. I have a PhD. Chicken and frog look alike at the raw material phase. At least the picture pig offal wasn't something you'd easily mistake for anything else (or something you'd want to eat). Nor the fish heads. God knows, I've already eaten enough fish heads to last me a lifetime.

We know a song about that, don't we, Billy!

OK
Understood.
But why would you want to? - that's the bit I cannot get my head around.

[rr]

The pictures were raw materials. If there had been a picture of an entire chicken or frog it would have been easy. I know what a chicken looks like. I have a PhD. Chicken and frog look alike at the raw material phase. At least the picture pig offal wasn't something you'd easily mistake for anything else (or something you'd want to eat). Nor the fish heads. God knows, I've already eaten enough fish heads to last me a lifetime.

Chinese stockpot is much the same idea as sukiyaki or shabu-shabu in Japan (both of which I've had several times), though a bit more earthy. May have contained actual earth, come to think of it.

There is one like that in Liverpool, but you help yourself to the raw stuff which is labeled in some approximation to English, still pretty hardcore though frog and beef tendon featured on the menu.

[ian]

The Chinese love cartilage. Western palettes struggle with it (big fat lie, Brits do, those dubious Europeans love scooping the gloop out of pig joints). Hence the chicken feet which tastes to me like sucking slime only to find you're stuck with a mouthful of grit-like bones. That and fat. I once caused great amusement to my Chinese hosts by dismantling a mountain of pork belly in an effort to find something that wasn't 100% lard.

I'm not, I confess, good with peculiar food. I grew up in the East Midlands, the epitome of exotic for me was crispy pancakes and potato waffles.

[Mrs Pingu]

I'm not the only person who doesn't get ribs then. (Just seems like a mechanism for getting sticky crap all over ones visage).

Makes note not to go to China.

[Pingu]

The Chinese love cartilage. Western palettes struggle with it (big fat lie, Brits do, those dubious Europeans love scooping the gloop out of pig joints). Hence the chicken feet which tastes to me like sucking slime only to find you're stuck with a mouthful of grit-like bones. That and fat. I once caused great amusement to my Chinese hosts by dismantling a mountain of pork belly in an effort to find something that wasn't 100% lard.

I'm not, I confess, good with peculiar food. I grew up in the East Midlands, the epitome of exotic for me was crispy pancakes and potato waffles.

A sewage treatment works up here used to get chicken feet from the local processing plant until they started getting shipped them to China*.



*Allegedly.

[mrcharly-YHT]

The Chinese love cartilage. Western palettes struggle with it (big fat lie, Brits do, those dubious Europeans love scooping the gloop out of pig joints). Hence the chicken feet which tastes to me like sucking slime only to find you're stuck with a mouthful of grit-like bones. That and fat. I once caused great amusement to my Chinese hosts by dismantling a mountain of pork belly in an effort to find something that wasn't 100% lard.

I'm not, I confess, good with peculiar food. I grew up in the East Midlands, the epitome of exotic for me was crispy pancakes and potato waffles.

When my daughter was in a boarding school abroad, she complained that they kept getting fed lumps of fat for dinner. When reading a Dervla Murphy book about the region I discovered that smoked pig fat was considered a luxury food in the region. The catering staff were probably right hacked off with the stuck-up western students wasting the expensive food.

[ian]

The Chinese (well the ones I know, I've not met all of them yet) find my delicate tastes amusing. Beef tendon, pork intestines, stomach churning piles of fat, random chicken bits. I'm one of those effete people who trims the fat off bacon (I can only eat it as carbonised crispy bacon). I have no tolerance for the texture of fat. Weird textured stuff in general makes my stomach perform ill-advised acrobatic manoeuvres. I had a big plate of brown (many countries seem to have two staple food stuffs, red and brown) in Indonesia. I've no idea what it was, but it appeared to contain some variety of meat. Except it had a mysterious texture. Everyone was looking at me in that eager way they do when they expect a guest to say something nice about their hospitality so I had to eat. All of it.

[lahoski]

The Chinese (well the ones I know, I've not met all of them yet) find my delicate tastes amusing. Beef tendon, pork intestines, stomach churning piles of fat, random chicken bits. I'm one of those effete people who trims the fat off bacon (I can only eat it as carbonised crispy bacon). I have no tolerance for the texture of fat. Weird textured stuff in general makes my stomach perform ill-advised acrobatic manoeuvres. I had a big plate of brown (many countries seem to have two staple food stuffs, red and brown) in Indonesia. I've no idea what it was, but it appeared to contain some variety of meat. Except it had a mysterious texture. Everyone was looking at me in that eager way they do when they expect a guest to say something nice about their hospitality so I had to eat. All of it.

How about stir fry pig's blood with chives?

[ian]

I think the old saying is that Chinese will every bit of the pig other than for the oink. I'm sure I've told the story, but I was in Hong Kong once, wandering around a night market over in Kowloon past the little street restaurants. There was a big table of Australians, mostly young lads and a couple of girls. Waiter comes out with a plate. On said plate was a pig's upturned face, staring heavenwards. Surrounding it was a puddle of green sauce that looked like the output of a bad head cold. Cue much cheering from the lads, demonstrating (as if there were any need) that testosterone is no substitute for good sense. One of the girls, on the other hand, promptly turned the same colour as the sauce and fell off her chair in a dead faint.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I think the old saying is that Chinese will every bit of the pig other than for the oink.

The Yorkshire saying is "Every bit is useful apart from it's squeak". There was (until floods and stuff) a stall on Leeds market selling the squidgy rubbery tripe bits. I'm unconvinced anyone in Yorkshire actually cooked pigs eyeballs.