just off the top of my head...

Cobra blood, Thailand

monkey, kudimundi Panama

Raw goat, balut, cobra PI

I thought we did this before?

Yep.

http://www.professionalsoldiers.com/...ead.php?t=1260

In fact, I'm going to merge them.

How does one prepare cobra blood?

Kenya
 

Bill wrote - A burned goats head on a bed of rice in Kenya.

Damn Bill,
That sounds like one of my trips to that wonderful place. I was riding in a land rover after dark and the driver kicked up a herd of Dik-dik, a dog size antelope. He started chasing one of them in the rover and knocked it down. He jumped out, cut it's throat and tosed it in the back.

When we got to the place we were going to RON he gutted and cleaned it and threw most of it in the back to give to the officers when we got back to the camp area. He built a fire and put the head in it upside down. When the head was cooked enough for him he pulled it out of the fire and ripped the jaw off, cracked around some to get to the brain and then offered to share with me. Very interesting.

Later that night the two of us were sleeping on our ruck sacks against the rover when I was jolted out of sleep by load growling and snarling. It was just some wild dogs from the local area after the gut pile. Since I was wide awake I thought I'd just make a small fire and drink coffee until sunrise.

Pete

Quoting myself. Read the link below, and you may give up eating brains.

Terry

http://www.mentorcorp.com/pelvic-org...on_history.htm

My ex-wife made a casserole from a recipe she found in some vegetarian cookbook. It had sunflower seeds, spinach, and brown rice amongst other things in it. It was hands-down, the worst thing I ever tried to eat in my life. The second worst items were pancakes made with Spelt flour. My dad was into this "Eat Right for Your Type" diet, and would only eat certain things specified for his blood type.

The dog ate the casserole out of the trash but wouldn't touch the "speltcakes". Of course he promptly barfed said casserole all over our apartment. This canine would eat cat turds out of a litter box and not get sick.

More humourous than gross but bberkley's post reminded me.

When we came to the States Panee actually learned to cook american food from watching TV. At the time there was a Wesson Oil ad running on TV. They sliced bread and deep fried it in Wesson oil to show it didn't saturate the bread.

Yep! She did. I didn't want to hurt her feelings so I never said anything about it for years.

are those flying thermite, by any chance?
The locals where I come from would gather thousands of them before (or after, can't remember) the monsoon from every light source, place them in a bowl of water, then stir-fry them. Looked like a pile of flies or black-n-white fried rice from a distance.


I don't know how they do it there, but back when I grew up, they just cut the head, drain the blood, and mix it with local liquor. The night guards would mix it with beer and sometimes egg to keep them sharp through the night.
Some info from a US businessman:
http://www.fabuloustravel.com/gourme...ood/cobra.html

I won't call the nastiest thing I ate nasty at all, it did look nasty and non-apetizing but it tasted great (+ the warm sensation); snake and monitor cuisine, fried, baked, etc....and no, they didn't taste like chicken, I'd say better, although too many bones with the snake like freshwater milkfish.

As for balut, if it's the same thing with geese egg that failed to hatch and then kept for days until it lets out sordid odor, that is indeed nasty.

The nastiest thing I've ever eaten is Cuttlefish Fafaru.

I did an exchange trip with RIMAP (Régiment d'Infanterie de Marine du Pacifique (Polynésie)) in 1992. Fafaru is nasty, even when you make it with good fish, but making it with Cuttlefish is about the only way you could make it worse.

Basically, they take a dead fish that they find on the beach, chop it up without cleaning/gutting it, and add it to a bucket of clean salt water for about 3-5 days. They just let it sit there on the beach. Then they dump it through a strainer and recollect all of the water.

That water goes in a bottle for about a month. That's the "marinade". Then once you've got some fresh, cleaned, sliced fish, you pour this bottle of death by projectile defecation on to it.

But that's not quite how you prep cuttlefish in Tahiti. You don't just slice it up like sashimi. That isn't vile enough. You have to find a nice flat piece of dry beach sand. and bury it in a hole about 4" deep covered in... of course... salt water and some kind of pepper for a few days.

Then you rinse off the sand (as much as you can rinse off) and let it sit overnight in a vat of the above marinade.

Then you give it to the foreign troops you are cross-training with, and tell them that it is a local favorite. It will make you crap fire AND water at the same time, and you can try for distance while you're at it.

The runner up (and we're talking a very distant 2nd place) is this stuff that I drank in Japan while waiting for the Rappongi Train Station to open up at 0500. Most everyone here is familiar with the wide variety of unique items you can get from vending machines in Japan (understatement).

As I am sitting there waiting for them to open the gate to head back to Yokosuka, a young L/Cpl in my platoon is busy dropping about $500 in change into one of these machines. He walks up to me with a room temperature can... white, small red stripes, red lettering in Japanese. It has a picture of what I took to be a coffee bean with little vapors coming off of it that turned into exclamation points. I'm thinking coffee.

It didn't smell like coffee, but it didn't smell bad either.

I take a sip... big mistake.

It was some kind of "nicotine drink"... in a country where people smoke a cigarette before they smoke a cigarette, they have nicotine drinks. It made my tongue numb while simultaneously causing my gums and lips to burn, and making my nose run.

I have never actually tasted a dead camels asshole, but I'd imagine this stuff is probably what you'd use to kill the aftertaste. It tasted like nothing that I could describe. I spat it out almost instantly... all over the kid who had given it to me. Serves him right. Incidentally, it destroyed the shirt I was wearing too.

The unidentifiable crap they fed me in China - made me sick for a week. Oh yeah, the pickled chicken feet were pretty nasty too.

Thai Cuisine
 

Had cobra blood at a Thai SF graduation party in Kanchunaburi. It was just as Magician described. He may have forgotten that the Mekong (local liquor) was hot and packed a real wallop. :D

At the same party they served monitor lizard. I popped mine into my mouth and ate it. I saw the looks on the Thai's faces and realized I was just supposed to pull off the legs and eat them. :o

Probably the grossest was walking through the markets. Various soups and curries were cooked in those square 3 gal. tin buckets. They were covered with flies and looked gross but actually were pretty good.

On the trains, venders went up and down the isles selling roasted canaries.

"More friends of TerribleTobyT"

"This is a pic of ODA-563 as it was configured Oct 75, during a JTX in Iran, near the mountain village of Qom.

"USSF personnel-SFC Charles (Hawkeye) Thomas, SSG Toby Todd, SFC Bob Bunnell, CPT Ricard Seim (MI, TL), SFC Cecil Ames, MSG Alex Kalognomous (Tm Sgt).

"Kneeling are two squared-away Iranian SF NCOs.

"I've often wondered how they made out after the Fall of the Shah."
Attached Thumbnails

Shortly before this pic was taken, two lambs were slaughtered, gutted and put onna spit over an open fire. Before the spit had made two full turns, the Iranian SF soldiers had their version of K-Barsout and were cutting slabs of meat offa the still cold carcasses. And offering them to us'ns!!!

We drank copious beer and cognac to wash that stuff down!!!!!

Toby

Ooops, need someone's hep posting the pic that went with this!!!!!! :D


edit to add...there ya' go

PM inbound TobyT

That stuff is nasty. Even the Japanese I worked with didn't eat it. But every year it would show up. It's something they pass off on others. Kinda like we do with fruitcake.

SPAM .. :D Little Mayo, slice of cheese, what a sandwich.

Grits, hate 'em. Not all Southern boys like them. Why eat that when you can have a plate of eggs over medium, bacon, cat head biscuits all smothered in milk gravy and a big ole glass of milk.

Joe K needs to jump in here. The last time that I saw him, he had some wicked pics of enormous insects that he had encountered in Cambodia...or was it Laos....maybe it was Burma. I forget. Does not matter. Bottom line: he took the photographs, and then showed the .... specimens to the villagers he had hired to help him.... so that they could eat them. Those people ate everything.

I was damaged by the photographs. Just knowing that other humans had consumed those creatures scarred me. Just knowing that those creatures existed....aside from my nightmares.....was bad enough. National Geographic has got NOTHING on Joe K.

Here is a photo of a guy's lunch. When I had an office at BIAP, the guys who screened everyone coming into the country used to come and hang out, periodically. I had coffee, and my secretary was hot. Guy can tell you about her. Anyway, one day, they saw this on the monitor as they were screening bags.

It turns out, a guy really liked goat head. So he wrapped one up, and he stuck it in his luggage, and he brought it with him so he could eat it later.

It was one of those things that you would never believe unless you saw the photo.

:)

Yep. Looks tough to photoshop that too, although I suppose it is possible.

While going through a survival school (1965), I learned a great many things, rabbits, snakes, white grub worms, etc, etc, will keep you alive.

During the grub eating phase we were all given the choice of eating a large white grub which had little hooks on its legs. Some of the guys had trouble swallowing them as they would attempt to hang on with the aforementioned hooks, the choice was to have one's grub cooked to order. I was the smart ass who volunteered to have mine cooked, the look on the instructor's face was priceless, and I knew immediately that I had stepped on my peepee.

My grub was cooked in the same rancid grease that had been there since the original class, I presume that once in awhile they would additional grease to the pot. It was the worst tasting thing I had ever experienced, I tried desperately not to get sick, to no avail! I was the only one to get sick!

LESSON LEARNED!!

Terry

I was in the airport the day that the screeners all went apeshit laughing their asses off over this.

Hijack!!!!!
 

Speakin of screeners-I did that for a short time in the early '90s here in San Antone International.

Y'all should see how somma the sex toys show up on the color xray m'chine!!!!!

:eek: :D

Now back to the nasty shit to eat!!!!!!! :rolleyes:

If you make camp with bedouins the way they welcome you is with warm goat milk. I realize this is a drink in a food thread, but it tasted like shaved goat ass and turds and looked just like it. I had to smile and say "thanks for the hospitality you area kind and gracious host" all before I had a massive evacuation.

Damn, I think I might just have you all topped. Ufu is the American Indian word for the partially digested food remaining inside the stomach of a rabbit. Had to eat it at Survival school. It litterally is about half an inch from being shit. It has the consistency of copenhagen fine cut, but more tacky, and tastes like...well, shit. Worst damn thing I've ever seen, smelled, or eaten.

The Winnah!!!!!!!!!! :lifter

That is a great line.

LMAO

Bull snacks.
 

I hope you ate them ATER they were removed from the wrapper!!! :) :)

mcwalker, you have failed to follow the simple instructions here.

You are about 5 minutes from the end of your time on this site.

If I were you, I would read and heed the stickies and intros, quickly.

Tempus fugit.

TR

Outdone!
 

:D Until I read about Ufu:eek: , I thought the following must be the worst dish on earth, but Ryan has outdone me.:( Here was my entry anyway, just in case any of you desire to cook an authentic Arabic dish.

Ingredients:
1 X baby goat
1 X bag of course grain flower

Directions: Boil goat all day in a large 10 gallon alluminum pot until dissolved (Don't worry about the bones as they will mostly dissolve or add crunch) Pour in flour and stir until the consistency of white lithium grease.

Serving Suggestions: Serve in original 10 gallon pot, sit around on the ground with 20 other blokes, dip your right hand in and scoop out healthy portions of the miasma (don't mind the 1 inch layer of grease on the top, but do be prepared to burn your hand in it). Enjoy!:confused:

Hint: While eating remember "Hearts and minds;hearts and minds!" (And all the other organs as well!)

De Oppresso Liber

Heh, My Cousin Vinnie.. they missed an opportunity there, but then again it's harder to make fun of us Southerners eating grits if the Italians actually had enough brains to recognize that GRITS = POLENTA.

Of course I'll take mine with a pinch of salt, a bit more pepper and a proper dose of McIlheny's Tabasco (red).

As far as weird, stomach turning, nasty looking foods.. well..

at home:

Headcheese/souse, can't stand it.

Possum, tasts like sh!t.

Squirrel, not too bad.

Rabbit, damn fine eating, especially with proper BBQ sauce.

Racoon, ok, but not as good as squirrel, and too much effort to run down, kill and dress. AND I'm not going out in the woods at night with a bunch of armed, moonshine fuelled 'hunters' ever again.

Chitlins, smell like sh!t while cooking, smell like sh!t while cooling on my plate, still smell like sh!t in the garbage where I'll dump 'em, because they taste like Possum ;) .

Pickled Pigs Feet, tastes pretty much like pickled bacon dipped in pig sh!t.

not so far away from home:

Rattlesnake, not to bad, not exactly chicken.

Rat, not to different from squirrel.

Grubs, had to try it. Kind of like stale popcorn.

Ants, had to try it. Not a fan.

Chocolate covered ants, barely even noticed they were there.

Chocolate covered grasshopper, nasty surprize inside.

Korea:

Kimchee - 'rotten' (fermented) cabbage, red pepper and vinegar, some people think is smells foul, I personally love it. Actually, there are MANY types of kimchee, this is just the one most likely to be found at an American grocery, if you have a local asian market, I'd recommend trying every kimchee they have. Almost all are universally excellent (at least as far as I'm concerned).

Dog (Rottie or Dobie) - hair singed off with blow torch, roasted over spit. Similar to squirrel, took a long while to find a place that had it, and would trust an American enough to serve it.

Dog (small unknown mutt) - in a "health stew" tasted like someone smuggled in a truckload of chitlins.

Kimchee Soup ('Rotten' Cabbage Soup) - will clean your sinuses from across the room, melt your face 5 feet from the bowl, make your eyes burn from the fumes, and singe the hair off your ass on the way out the next moring, but well worth it for those who love hot food with interesting flavors.

Hong Kong:

100 and/or 1000 'year' Tofu - AWFUL AWFUL SMELL, really rough to take unless properly 'seasoned.' Wish I had my tabasco with me.

Negative,

Thats like calling tater tots, mashed potatoes. There's a distinct taste and texture difference between the two. I'm thinking if you served a hardcore Southerner a bowl of polenta for breakfast you'd better be running for the door after he took the first bite.

TS

Polenta is a boiled, slow-cooked cornmeal "mush" -- typically made with coarsely ground yellow corn meal. In some regions of Italy (especially in the north), it's a beloved everyday dish and is topped with meat, fish, pasta sauce, cheese, or vegetables. Cooled and hardened, polenta can be sliced, sautéed, or grilled, and served sweet or savory. Or you can create a layered polenta torta, reminiscent of a lasagne.

Grits are "coarsely ground pieces of dried corn moistened into a mealy paste" that have a mythic role in Southern culinary culture. Historians suggest that grits played an important role in early Southern agriculture, providing food for the first English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, and later helping Southerners survive the Great Depression.
http://ask.yahoo.com/20021007.html

For some reason, adventurous eating isn't a trait common to fire houses. Beef, potatoes and bread are revered, at least in my department. Vegetables (if you HAVE to have them) should be corn, so as not to offend any of the other firemen. (green=gross to many firemen?!?!?) I am known throughout our department as "he who will eat anything" , and it's mostly true.....except...... Herring! I was so completely grossed out when I was in the the Baltics, northern Germany, Holland, Scandanavia and all those other Herring eating countries.

I like fish....love sushi.... I CAN'T STAND HERRING!

Most disconcerting: live octopus in Korea.

Lifelong bad karma: the live monkey brain thing in Indonesia, gack.

Sickest I've ever been: Kimchee home made by a ROK roomate in college. He was in ESL language school and was seriously jonzing for kimchee. He fermented it on top of our radiator. I prayed for death for two days - ended up in the hospital.

I may be taking this thread in a different direction, but .....

weirdest : beggin strips (like tough and chewy burned......bacon of all things:) )

fish food flakes ( like bits of newspaper soaked in dirty dishwater,
then dipped in salt)

Dude, you got it all wrong, You're supposed to feed those things to the Pets BEFORE you eat them (the pets that is)

Accepted TS.

I should not have taken the shortcut and used "=".

However, I am compelled to beg to differ on said difference.

Grits and polenta are much closer than tater tots and mashed. Grits are common to many cultures by different names, and almost assuredly Polenta's Daddy.

I'd say more like the difference between country mashed potatoes with a lot of skin left in (grits) and creamed potatoes (polenta). Or possibly, the difference between a M1911A1 and a Colt Lightweight Commander.

Just because the Italians sissify it by screening out the little bit of 'grit' left in grits, doesn't mean it changed that much. As far as toppings and 'refined' treatment of grits, cheese grits are nothing new, and neither are grits cakes, grits 'spoonbread', fried grits, chicken and cheese grits, shrimp and grits (even if Forrest forgot them), pork chili hominy, baked garlic cheese grits, and grits casseroles with whatever you like in them. Anything that has been done with Polenta, was probably done with grits first, just "grittier", without the uppity Italian chef attitude.

Many southern wives will switch to polenta when grits get a bit uncomfortable for the old dentures. Pappy will know his gums don't take as much flak, but he won't ask, and Mammy won't tell. Momma's with grit eater family history to uphold will sometimes use the same substitution with stubborn kids till they get past being so picky.

Me? As long as I can put my hotsauce on it if it needs it, I don't care a whit.

It was a metaphor used to make a point, thats all.:rolleyes:

I've used polenta in recipes, and even to my under-educated palate there's a definite difference.

TS

Hell TS, if I still lived in grits country, I'd probably drive over with a case or three of your favorite beers, a few bottles of my favorite single malt, and a couple of bags of grits and polenta to cook and compare until we were on the same wavelength.

Dang it! That was mine! lol.

I didn't think ANYONE else would know about Balut.

Should have known Sir Reaper would.

m1

While living in Japan, I tried a concoction of squid gut-sacks, raw squid chunks, and sake, that was fermented for one week. I discovered that the only thing that tastes worse than squid shit is rotten squid shit.

P.I. Balut, dryed chicken feet (the claws make great toothpicks), puppy.

The worse I've ever seen anyone else eat was in Pataya Beach....young drunk Marine...very busy girl...stage....slimey banana slices. You get the picture.

Worst thing I have eaten.... ever.
 

My mom's Tuna Casserole. Would rather swish balut around my mouth.

You know you're going to burn in Hell for that one. LOL