Chow… Just a Saturday (Geezer) Silly
Many here have traveled the world in uniform. This post is/was prompted by an exchange on FB with a young sailor just back in CONUS after a stint in Brussels.
He opined that one of the things he liked about returning was the variety of food he found. It took some time for me to get the neurons firing. At first I was a food fuddy-duddy then I remembered nuoc mam on anything and 33 beer, and Balut. Even after some reflection I am still a bit surprised that he couldn’t find variety in Europe, but that’s just me.
I’ve snacked from street venders in Olongapo and DaNang.
So… what is the strangest thing you’ve eaten? C-RATS and/or MRE’s don’t count.
Caveat: This may well not be the first time I’ve asked. If so….
Category: Geezer Alert!
Goat balls during SERE School, they were actually quite tasty. Schlambay in Afghanistan, think curdled milk with chunks of rotted cottage cheese and yogurt, then chill and enjoy!
Horse sushi in Japan.
One soju kettle infused night in Pyongtaek, Korea, I was that guy who ordered the chicken feet and ate them. Very crunchy and gristly.
Won a bet and drank my own pee one night. Hell, easiest $150 I ever made. That’s part of the reason I don’t drink anymore though.
I’ve had some “delicacies” in other parts of the world…guail. Yuk! Frog legs…meh. And since I am old, can’t remember what they were called…The neck glands from cows in Metz. De-licious!
When I got married, we went to a local eatery for lunch in Landstuhl. The waitress brought out bread and a plate filled with a “spread”. To me, it looked like bacon grease, solid. Passed it around, set some on my plate and waited for the fraulein to come back.
“Was is das?” She replied in english..”Ah, zat is schmalze. Ze fat of ze pig!” Indeed, it was bacon grease, known to be a favorite for bread as a appetizer.
Ugh. I agree dfac liver and Kim chi and yakisoba are nasty. I had squid in ft Sam at a Korean restaurant. That was good actually…
Live Termites
Iguana
@Scubasteve, urine is sterile, unless you have a bladder infection. Don’t recommend trying to survive on it.
But you can distill it to get the water out of it (two plastic bags, some plastic piping or hose, and twist ties, and the sun as a heat source). The dried residue is full of potassium nitrate. Add some ground charcoal and a little sulfur to that, and mix well. Now what do you have? 😉
The guys in our squadron got upset at the sailors bragging about eating all the balut up in PI on Magsaysay drive. So one enterprising young Marine at the Brown Fox bar decided to eat one of the many gecko’s that climb all over the walls there. Needless to say every other young Marine found this to be a wonderful idea. We had squadron shirts made up that said “We ate them live in ’85”. The momma-sans were getting pretty pissed at our eating all of their insect control.
Now that I live in FL., I enjoy eating gator tail, frogs legs, and deep fried turtle.
#57, One hell of a burning sensation, that’s what.
Korea, 92 – 93, mystery meat on a stick in Itaewon, Kaegogi at A fellow troop’s wedding. I was enjoying it until I was told I was eating “Ole Yeller”!
@59 – Add a fuse, add some rocks,tamp it down a pipe, light the fuse — BOOM!
Helluva burning sensation!
You guys are making me hungry.
As some of you may know, I am a Very Important Pussycat.
I occasionally peek in at this blog while sitting in my human’s lap. (Think Ex-PH2.)
I enjoy licking plastic bags.
Occasionally, I have also bitten off, chewed and swallowed a chunk of plastic bag.
The noise from the human corner is loud, obscene and explosive when I do this.
While stationed in Alaska, some of us got to know some of the native population of Aleut Indians and they fed us all kinds of stuff.
My favorite was Muk-Tuk, pickled whale skin. Once you got past the smell of the stuff, it was absolutely delicious !!!
We used to play cards on Saturday nights with a bunch of them and they would bring out stuff like Boiled Seal, Moose steaks, Moose Jerky, Whale Steaks, all kinds of different foods!!!!! That stuff goes great with beer, and a lot of beer !!!
That was the about the only good thing about being stationed in Fairbanks.
@64, Whale steaks? Whales are beautiful animals, and I always wondered what they taste like!
My sons and I were squirrel hunting many years ago in New Mexico when #3 son shot a chipmunk. He came back to camp bragging about it,thinking he was being funny. I made him go back and get it. We grilled it up and ate it. Not bad, just not a lot of meat on the bones. The look on his face as we dug in was priceless.
On deployment is the usual, local naan ( not bad just don’t watch the afghanis make with their nasty ass feet) goat kabobs were the shit, but they also gave then to you as well. Stateside I’m known to eat anything exotic; squid, sea cucumber, lizards, crickets, grasshopper.
If guys get paid to eat crazy shit on t.v. I figured I’d give it a try.
Boiled snails I collected from a stream during JOTC in the PI. Plus whatever else the Negritos put in the bamboo tubes they used for cooking.
All sorts of kimchied/hot sauced somethings or others when I got an invite into two different Korean nationals homes. Some I never did identify.
Dog on a stick – Camp Hovey, South Korea
oh, and Snake-ju
Can’t believe none of you older guys mentioned century eggs, the Vietnamese version of Balut. And no, I damned sure didn’t eat them just as I wouldn’t chew on that foul smelling squid jerky all the bar girls so loved. Nowadays I eat calamari every chance I get.
Common @ 48–Buckhorn Exchange on Osage is a must-do. Expensive, but oh-so worth it.
Eggs can be interesting. Quail eggs, duck eggs (common around here) and ostrich eggs.
But the strangest taste that actually WORKS for me, was a place I once went in NM where I asked for apple pie, and it came with GREEN CHILE in it. And it was freakin AWESOME.
And menudo–but only if it has the tripe in it. Only sure-fire cure I’ve ever had for a hangover. Something about that stomach just sucks up the alcohol and kills any headache/stomach/whatever.
Mackerel eyeballs
1965, Yokohama, en route to ROK, had unborn chicken (not an egg). Tasted fine with big glass of warm sake.
@75 SgtBob, you just reminded me of one of the most unusual food finds during my six years in. Also in Yokohama in 1966. Imagine a Texas boy’s delight at finding a small hole in the wall bar/Mexican taco joint in the Yokohama bar district. I took their word for it that the meat filling was pork. Remember this was 1966 when you could still have problems finding Mexican food in a lot of American cities.
@ 76
Yokohama is a great city. I love it there.
Oddest dish I’ve ever eaten (I refuse to eat chitlins unless and until I am literally starving and have no other choice) was a Korean dish called “Jeop Chang Chon Col”. That’s a spicy vegetable and meat soup – spicy enough to peel paint.
It was OK until I found what was obviously a piece of calf’s or pig’s heart complete with what appeared to be some of either the aorta or pulmonary artery (or maybe the pulmonary veins or vena cava) still attached in the bowl. I found that a bit disturbing.
I remember eating raw sea turtle eggs in Honduras in 91!!
Dog in the P.I – my Filipino uncle is a real bastard! Horse in Sicily. Nutrea (water rat) during a “mock” survival challenge. Rat meat tacos in Mexico during spring break (found out afterwards). Sea turtle eggs with lobster/fish soup in Nicaragua. Intestine in a spicy sauce in Korea. The list goes on and on; and sometimes wherever you are you just have to go with it…
Peruvian marinated deer hearts cooked on open flame….really very good….brains and eggs the other weird one….of course my folks were old school Germans, never waste a part of the animal that can be cooked or ground up and stuffed in a case…so growing up we ate lots of organ meat and other interesting sausage type products…
My sister-in-law is Native Alaskan and one Christmas brought muktuk (whale) to dinner.
While on a training exercise in the Czech Republic in the 90s we had the misfortune of eating their C-Rats. The main meat dish looked exactly like Fancy Feast, right down to the shape of the can.
Fried catapillars and cricket legs. Lived in Zaire 80-83…..
Grew up as an Air Force brat traveling the U.S. before I joined the Navy. Long as it doesn’t poison me or kill me outright, I’ll try anything.
I’ve had the horse meat, the Muktuk, Eskimo Ice Cream, (lived in Alaska for ten years), I personally love Kimchi, the older, the better. Went to some high-end place in Hong Kong that served braised duck feet with webbing and a bunch of other stuff I couldn’t indentify. The oddest was some tree-grubs on a MWR tour in Kota Kinablu. It’s like a fruit-gusher candy, only bug flavored.