Food that I'll have nothing to do with

[Cudzoziemiec]

Discovered a second type of cheese I'll have to remember to have nothing to do with: vegan "cheese". I think it's even more unpleasant than smoked cheese.

[L CC]

All fake foods are rank. Gluten free baking, meat free 'meat', artificial sweetener.

The only good fake food is marzipan fruits.

[Regulator]

I've never had smoked oysters in a fish pie, but I like the sound of it. Until it changed ownership, one of my local pubs always did a very good steak and oyster pie.

Smoked eel is divine. I quite like the flavour of jellied eels, and I'm not bothered by the jelly, I just don't like having to pick out the horrible knobbly bones. My dad is a big fan of jellied eels and tends to just crunch up the bones and swallow the lot. 

I like whelks too but they really don't agree with me and always make my stomach churn. Cockles I'm fine with.

Someone earlier mentioned eating shellfish straight off the beach. I would never do that - they need a good week in a purification tank first, unless you really enjoy having an upset stomach. I guess it depends on the beach.

Part of my last year in NZ was spent at a boarding school (this school) and when school finished we'd often cross the road and go to the beach (with one of the nuns in tow to keep an eye on us).  We'd regularly pick fresh shellfish off the rocks and eat them.    The town/area, Kaeo, is named after the fresh water mussels that are found in the rivers around there.  There were several oyster farms in the area as well.

[hatler]

The concept of jellied eel is foul, I don't think I've tasted them. I have to honest, I pick the jelly out of pork pies, I just don't like the jelly texture full stop.

I had a job at Parr's Pork Pie factory one Winter filling pork pies with jelly. (And no, I didn't eat them for many years after.)

[ElyDave]

At the risk of offending people (bite me, losers), 'keto' stuff mostly seems foul, ingredients in the wrong proportions sprinkled with weird, and missing the important thing, the grand consolation of life. Blessed carbs.

What kind of life is that lacks the heavenly soft pillows of mashed potato? Or pasta, dripping silky sauce or noodles in a spicy broth? I'm sorry, but 'cauliflower rice' and 'courgette spaghetti' should be criminal offences with harsh sentencing recommendations.

Also gluten-free, which mostly seems a scam to sell nasty processed food in the guise it's somehow healthy to the gullible. I once got served gluten-free spaghetti. Ghastly extruded tubes of congealed wallpaper paste, but without the flavour. Even the sauce would have nothing to do it, preferring to sit in a sad puddle on the plate, saying why, ian, WHY? I don't know.

Much as I agree with the sentiment- of course the real thing is tastier and cutting out a food group is madness, but this is a lot like a drinker extolling the virtues of a single malt to an alcoholic.

Potatoes are just a gateway drug to hardlining sugar. There's only so much lard my frame can carry and if I could eat in moderation FFS, I wouldn't have got here. Jeez, if I'd become addicted to cocaine I might have lost my septum but at least I'd be thin.

I'm just teasing, as is the nature of the topic, no one needs to justify their diet.

But come to the Holy War, you are wrong about potatoes, and will be put to the sword.

As long as it's not a slice of sharpened potato I'm fine with that.  Potatoes are hard to match to the insulin.

[Gattopardo]

No, fried mushrooms are slimy and thus a no-go, so have to be shovelled off my breakfast plate onto my wife's. Usually, while she's not looking. That's another thing the American breakfast gets right, they never slap sloppy mushrooms on my plate.

I always get angry, as a reformed botanist, that mushrooms are always included with plants. They're not plants. They're far more closely related to animals.

Only if they're not cooked properly...  properly cooked they won't be slimy.

If it is the tinned mushroom in water can they ever not be slimy.

[Gattopardo]

At the risk of offending people (bite me, losers), 'keto' stuff mostly seems foul, ingredients in the wrong proportions sprinkled with weird, and missing the important thing, the grand consolation of life. Blessed carbs.

What kind of life is that lacks the heavenly soft pillows of mashed potato? Or pasta, dripping silky sauce or noodles in a spicy broth? I'm sorry, but 'cauliflower rice' and 'courgette spaghetti' should be criminal offences with harsh sentencing recommendations.

Also gluten-free, which mostly seems a scam to sell nasty processed food in the guise it's somehow healthy to the gullible. I once got served gluten-free spaghetti. Ghastly extruded tubes of congealed wallpaper paste, but without the flavour. Even the sauce would have nothing to do it, preferring to sit in a sad puddle on the plate, saying why, ian, WHY? I don't know.

Much as I agree with the sentiment- of course the real thing is tastier and cutting out a food group is madness, but this is a lot like a drinker extolling the virtues of a single malt to an alcoholic.

Potatoes are just a gateway drug to hardlining sugar. There's only so much lard my frame can carry and if I could eat in moderation FFS, I wouldn't have got here. Jeez, if I'd become addicted to cocaine I might have lost my septum but at least I'd be thin.

I'm just teasing, as is the nature of the topic, no one needs to justify their diet.

But come to the Holy War, you are wrong about potatoes, and will be put to the sword.

As long as it's not a slice of sharpened potato I'm fine with that.  Potatoes are hard to match to the insulin.

I forget that different methods of cooking alter the insulin needed.  Some times different types of people.

[Mrs Pingu]

This big pile of processed meat products. The stuff that was moussy and the one with the unidentified chunks in were particularly boak inducing.
IMG_2534 by The Pingus, on Flickr

[Wowbagger]

When I was a child I spent a prolonged period in traction living on a combination of Hospital Food™

And now I've got Eels - Hospital Food as an earworm...

Eels... there's a passage in The Tin Drum about catching eels by leaving a horse's head under water until they move in to feast and then hauling it ashore. They're tucking in so avidly they don't let go until it's too late.  A friend in Darmstadt used to come close to puking any time anyone would mention it, so of course every so often we did.

It must be about 50 years ago now, but I recall an article on eel fishing in the angling press. An old boy from the Essex coast was interviewed about his eel-fishing exploits in the environs of Foulness Island, IIRC. It went something along the lines of "Now lemme see, the best eels I ever saw? Well, there was this dead German soldier in the creek and some of the eels eating him - they were as thick as yer arm!"

[rafletcher]

This big pile of processed meat products. The stuff that was moussy and the one with the unidentified chunks in were particularly boak inducing.
IMG_2534 by The Pingus, on Flickr

Hmm, the "unidentified chunks" one looks very like the pigs-head brawn my mother used to make.

[citoyen]

Hmm, the "unidentified chunks" one looks very like the pigs-head brawn my mother used to make.

I was also thinking brawn. Which is actually much nicer than it sounds - definitely much nicer than its alternative name 'head cheese' makes it sound. As long as you don't mind the jelly.

[L CC]

I think it looks delish. I may be peckish.

[rafletcher]

We used to have it served with thin toast and home-made picallili.

[T42]

This big pile of processed meat products. The stuff that was moussy and the one with the unidentified chunks in were particularly boak inducing.
IMG_2534 by The Pingus, on Flickr

Hmm, the "unidentified chunks" one looks very like the pigs-head brawn my mother used to make.

Supermarket-grade brawn aka fromage de tête (which sounds like a nasty scalp condition) often comes with bits of cartilage and, on occasion, skin with bristles still attached.  When the kids were small we called the hard bits teachers' teeth, ditto bits of sinew in bacon.  None of that bothers me, nor yet pigs' feet, which are rather fun to prepare.  When we lived north of Paris a stroll round the Sunday market then pigs' feet and beer for lunch was one of my favourites. Nobody else's, though.

[ian]

I used to have an old cookery book that was full of recipes like brawn (I like any recipe that includes advice on how to clean the insides of the animal's ears). No pig part was safe in olden Britain. I recall a variant of mannish water, a favoured disposal method for dead animals in Jamaica, that really involved spending an entire day in the company of a large steaming pot of pig offal.

I'm not sure why vegetarianism was so slow to get started.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Discovered a second type of cheese I'll have to remember to have nothing to do with: vegan "cheese". I think it's even more unpleasant than smoked cheese.

Today I spotted some half-price pizzas in M&S. So I got two. It was only when I was home I noticed they were vegan cheese, or as they call it, "cheeze". Probably not actually the worst pizza I've ever had. Lesson: RTFL!

[ian]

I had a vegan pizza the other year (that time before COVID when you could go places that had other people in them) – it was  Hackney, so probably the default setting for pizza.

It wasn't awful, but the pretend cheese disappeared into the mix.

I did make vegan tacos a few weeks back which actually were very good – roasted spicy cauliflower and a sauce made from cashews and coriander (I wasn't trying specifically to be vegan, they just sounded nice)

[Cudzoziemiec]

There's a huge difference between a taco, pizza or whatever, that simply doesn't contain meat, cheese, eggs, etc, and one made of fake "cheeze" or imitation meat, etc. Though I'm not sure if a pizza would work without cheese.

[ian]

You need wit wiz, as they say in Philadelphia.

[quixoticgeek]

Mayonnaise.

It's the sperm of satan and should be banned.

J

[hellymedic]

Mayonnaise.
It's the sperm of satan and should be banned.
J

My extended family lived on mayonnaise; it's one of the first things Mum shoed me to make. I preferred the Hellman's my paternal grandmother used to Mum's home-made, or the Continental ones Mum now favours.

It seemed to keep my maternal grandfather and his brother going for over nine or ten decades...

[cygnet]

Mushrooms.

I can't believe it's taken 6 pages before this vileness has been mentioned.

Its taken many years of training to get to the point of not bowking over cream-of-satan's soup. And that's with all the world's condiments added to disguise the flavour.

Un-blitzed stuff is Audax hold-your-nose/get-it-down-'cause-there's-no-other calories-coming desperation measures. Which is apparently not the correct approach to take in a "posh" restaurant where the chef is following either the "a large grilled foul single piece of the inside of the devil's buttock cheek", (or the sliced and stewed variation thereof) approach to imaginative and flavourful vegetarian cuisine.

[ian]

I'm sure I mentioned mushroom soup somewhere, but it is indeed grey and tastes grey. It's food equivalent of licking mould off a cheap bedsit wall while wearing nothing other than yesterday's underpants. It tastes of sadness and defeat. I can't handle anything that comprises a totality of mushrooms, but as an ingredient it's tolerable.

They're still not plants though.

[Mr Larrington]

Coleslaw.  Cutting cabbage into thin strips does not make it any more edible, plus it killed Ogden Nash.

[FifeingEejit]

In reference to the settings thread I forgot one.

Toast that is browner than an Scots IR worker wearing factor 50 on an overcast and dreich day in Ballater.

Or in other words I like my toast to be warm bread anything else is inedible.