Probably a type of kishka, or Croatian blood sausage. In fall at butchering time, I never quite knew what my FIL might serve. Blood sausage, brains, kidney, tripe...nothing wasted, not ever. It was all somewhat wasted on me since I didn't join in, but then I hadn't grown up hungry or ever gone without. I discreetly left the table over the kishka (krvavica).

A friend had a memory of her grandmother stewing chickens feet and for a reason I can't remember, we decided to try some. She acquired the feet and we cooked those, more for a lark than a meal (there was a lot of giggling and some wine involved). DH left the table over that one.

Sea cucumber. Not at all like chicken!

Well, I've been to Kenya and didn't get offered monkey brains! LOL!

I have eaten a few strange things though...one I remember was in Venice when I ordered some pasta thing with assorted sea foods....roughly translated from the Italian. Besides the usual whole baby octopus atop the pile of pasta, there were several unidentifiable legged and clawed things. I asked our host what I was eating, and she said, "Oh they just cook up anything they can dredge out of the lagoon." I learned "Grappa, per favore"....and "Di Piu Grappa" and enjoyed the pasta, ate the octopus and a few shrimp and something that looked like a tiny mutant craw fish...but left some things with more legs!
I also have eaten bear, moose, bison, rattlesnake, snails, alligator ....and several things, the memory of which were thankfully blurred by martinis.

Drywall spackling compound.

As a joke, someone made a cake using spackle. It did fool me for the first bite.

It looked like a fantastic delicious cake.

dcarch

Wow, nothing exotic in my repertoire to compare to ^ but I am not a world traveler. Probably the most unusual, at least it is in the PNW was alligator. For my 40th birthday someone gave me the White Trash Cookbook, along with a piece of frozen alligator. Not sure how they came by it around here. I wouldn't go to the trouble to find it again, that's for sure.

I'm not a world traveler either so probably the most "unusual" proteins I've intentionally eaten are elk and alligator. On the flora side I'm the only person I know (other than my siblings) who've eaten beechnuts. We shook them off of trees onto a spread out sheet in the fall. Beech trees start producing seeds at about 40 YO (incredible) and then sporadically after that. It was a treat for me, while my classmates looked on skeptically, to shell and eat them during lunch period . ;-) Disease has, sadly, killed many of the beeches.

I don't know if I've eaten anything that unusual. Octopus and snails, but they're standard menu items. When I saw the title of the thread, I was thinking it was more like the weird foods thread we had before, and my immediate, because recent, thought was bananas with mayonnaise, which is surprisingly not bad (at least with good mayonnaise). :) Why anyone would think of it, I don't know...

Hmm. I didn't think they were weird when I ate them, but I've had calves testicles, along with brains, tripe, sweetbreads, liver, heart, kidney, tongue, etc. I still make stock from the chicken feet when we process chickens. Liver dumplings at the home of a nice German lady who was a friend of Mother's. Possum, snapping turtle, raccoon, porcupine, muskrat, squirrel, elk, antelope, bear, deer, moose, lake fish of all descriptions, crawdads, pheasant, quail, partridge, duck, goose, other things I probably couldn't identify, LOL. Anything my brother could shoot or catch was dinner at some time or another, and every part of that creature was consumed. I've eaten a cricket encased in a lollipop and fried grasshopper courtesy of my Japanese aunt. No dog or cat, but I've eaten horse. Also wild mushrooms, dandelion greens, purslane and lambsquarter.

I'm picky, but I'm adventurous, two things that would seem to be mutually exclusive, but apparently are not.

Annie

Certainly not mutually exclusive, Annie. It's not like you'd eat drive thru liver dumplings! Or chain restaurant, preprepped in a pouch partridge. Or lambsquarter picked before its time and shipped in fumigated bundles halfway around the world.

Jelly fish, years back in a Chinese restaurant. It was cold/room temperature, in thin slices in some kind of soy, ginger, etc. sauce. Frankly it didn't taste like much of anything beyond the sauce. Odd texture though, kind of like an old rubber band - crunchy on the outside and a bit chewy on the inside.

Without having anything to compare it to, I have no idea if it was well prepared jelly fish or not. I probably wouldn't order it again because, beyond being able to say I ate jelly fish, it was kind of boring.

Rattlesnake--it does taste like dry chicken.

Oh my word, what hasn't been foisted on me (45 countries and counting). Fugu, snapping turtle soup (really tastes like chicken), chicken feet & cockscombs, rocky mountain oysters, preserved bird embryo eggs (balut), all sorts of insects, grubs, jelly fish, sea cucumber, pickled herring roe on seaweed, fish eyeballs, a live fish still breathing (served sashimi style), live octopus/squid (still sticking to your mouth), animals commonly kept as pets, whole live little fish tossed live in oil and cooked in the shape as they tried to escape.

I've had more than one meal where I've ordered stuff where I was uncertain of the translation of the cut of meat and got a suspicious protein not resembling any muscle. Just eat it and enjoy, ignorance is bliss (except in the case of balut, where it's obvious what you're eating). I'd draw the line at monkey brains, however.

I'm not a world traveler so mine are pretty mundane. Here are some that come to mind: Milkweed, crawfish out of my pond (didn't know we had them in NH), alligator, periwinkles (shellfish), bull frog legs (again from my pond) and whole baby eels.

Like Annie1992, I ate anything Dad hunted, caught fishing or raised, no waste allowed!

Sea urchins and piure. Piure is a shellfish like a bag of red organs inside a stone and tastes like sea urchin.

Nope. Nope. Nope. I don't eat weird things....although some may call my extra, extra rare steak weird. If it tastes like chicken....I will just have chicken, thank you. My husband and I were just talking about this the other night when some weird tv show was on and they were eating maggots out of a rotten bull scrotum. Oh, noooooo. I wouldn't eat one maggot for a million dollars....as bad as I need the money. (I often have to clean out maggots in wildlife I have rescued and it is the most repulsive thing I have to do. The smell.....gags me.)

My mother always served her homemade chicken soup with feet (toenails and all). I never thought it was weird until I invited a friend over for dinner and she bolted when the soup course arrived.

I've had it all having traveled so much in the past. But really it is just a natural protein in other cultures that has become a bit of a 'tourist' bucket list to try what is natural and common...and 'free' for most cultures. A travel story to tell.

So much of the proteins are abundant and have not a bit of flavor so are 'sauced' and added to potato or rice, (cheap) starches.

That show did an episode in Newfoundland where i have a home. I know the Chefs of the two restaurants they featured and have had many of the 'bizarre foods' prepared. None are odd at all to us now. Cod tongues and britches. Seal loin and flipper.

But i do draw the line when some NYC restaurants fly in some 'specials' in season...like the tiny tiny noodles DH ordered and i leaned over the table and quietly pointed out that each tiny noodle on his tiny plate had two eyes and were wiggling. (lol) and had zero flavor but was somehow 'special'.

In Greece i did taste all the parts of a sheep head and misc body bits. The shoe-string fries were not potato...

Balut, no way do i want to eat that...ever...(a well formed duck or chicken embryo still in the shell).

I do use duck and chicken paws (feets) in my stocks all the time and always in the freezer...

Cod tongues are amazing and i will always try something new once. I have 2lbs of cod tongues in the freezer for a very special early fall meal. DH left the house when i cooked the cod britches for the first time and nearly puked. But he loves scrapple having not grown up with it. I had a friend that would leave the house when i cooked scrapple...

LOL, sleevendog, my Aunt left the house whenever Grandma made headcheese too. The grandkids leave when I make liverwurst too, and I don't think scrapple is bad at all!

Lutefisk, now I draw a line there, although I love nearly all things "fishy".

Annie

I was a waitress in highschool /college and worked at HappyJacks pancaked house, lol. OceanCity MD one summer. Tourists from where-ever-all-over always asked about scrapple on the menu. "it is gray and crispy"... RedNeck pate. Lots of loves and lots of hates. We always offered a slice free.

annie1992 - My mother left the house when my Dad made Headcheese. LOL Dad loved the stuff. On the other hand, Mom loved Blood Sausage. They made that together. It's all a matter of perspective. I never thought either of those items were weird.

I ate all sorts of weird things growing up that Dad brought home. Most of them I'd still eat.

I've eaten alligator, bear roast, sweetbreads, heart, kidney, brains, testicles, tongue, tripe, pig ears, haggis when in Scotland (where they are allowed to add in lung), frog legs, jellyfish, snake, pheasant, squirrel, scrapple, ostrich, head cheese, smoked silk worm cocoons. That last was pretty bad, but most likely bad because of whatever (probably toxic) stuff they were smoked with. Wasn't too fond of blood sausage, either.

I like all the rest of the above, but with prions around, I'd forego the brains these days.

I would try balut, btw.

Sleevendog, where do you find so many cod tongues? I'd try them.

Newfoundland for cod cheeks, tongues, and britches, (roe). Obviously all cod,scrod have the same parts but usually kept among family, friends and local markets. Extra time to cut those parts so not a moneymaker.

Like any travel destination, you will find unusual delicasies found nowhere else. Many coastlines catch cod, Atlantic and Pacific, and probably have their own preparations and recipes.

(we have a home in NFLD and a boat and kayaks we fish from....our best friends and neighbors are commercial fishermen....think 'deadliest catch')

Oh!! I absolute;ly LOVE LOVE shad roe....I'll bet cod britches is the same kind of wonderful!

Looks very similar in a google image search. Yet hard to find a 'fresh' from the water image. We call it britches because it does look like a pair of pants....like Barbie capri pants...(chubby Barbie)

"Greece[edit]
Taramasalata, salad made with taramá
Taramá is salted and cured carp or cod roe used to make taramosaláta, a Greek meze consisting of taramá mixed with lemon juice, bread crumbs, onions, and olive oil; it is eaten as a dip."

I tried to explain that to my house guests but they hit the door when i had it simmering on the stovetop with some hard boiled eggs for a breakfast treat, lol. (a bit stinky first thing in the morning). I should try smoking them outdoors.

Also love taramasalata.....but it needs garlic...don't forget the garlic!.

I don't do extreme food. Probably the weirdest I've tried and pretty mild when compared to some of these is beef tongue. My MIL prepared it and it was good but the next time she made it I went to her house early and saw the tongue raw and that was it. Living in Florida I have had gator which isn't that bad, slightly fishy tasting but more like chicken. I do actually like liver and liverwurst but that's it in the offal category. But I'm not going to say "never" with the really weird stuff. In the event on an apocalypse I'm sure I'll close my eyes and swallow just about anything I can get my hands on.

Horse in France. Tough meat despite delicate sauce meant to hide meat texture. No Bueno!

"Horse in France. Tough meat despite delicate sauce meant to hide meat. No Bueno!"

That's because you are not "The Galloping Gourmet "

dcarch :-)

My only experience with horse meat was in Nagasaki. On the last night of a 30-day bus/train/plane tour of Japan, our guide took us to a sushi bar and ordered it. I had no idea what it was, because she ordered in Japanese. It looked like slices of beef tenderloin served on a large plate with a bowl of brown sauce in the middle. I ate three pieces thinking it was the best raw beef I'd ever eaten before I asked what it was. There were no leftover pieces before the next dish arrived.

I grew up on "weird" food without even realizing it. Mom prepared Jewish Eastern European meals--lung n'rice, tongue, brains n'eggs etc. When my friends bolted, I understood that I ate "cootie" food:(

@sleevendog -- Taramasalata --- once was enough for me. I would never be allowed to bring that in the house. Any of the pickled/fermented roe products of any culture are a bit too much fish for me. Caviar yes, pickled herring roe, no.

I was in an upscale supermarket in Houston and a guy was giving out crackers with some kind of spread on it. It didn't taste bad. I saw the yellow specks in it and I said, "Is that cheese?" He said, "No, it is carp roe." Oh, barf! I raised Japanese koi at the time and I know what carp roe looks like, but mixed up in that other stuff....didn't taste THAT bad but I wouldn't eat it. As for horse meat sushi....horses in Canada are shipped alive (by air) to be slaughtered for sushi. It is very expensive but the cruelty to the horses is beyond comprehension.

I grew up eating many PA Dutch specialties and they didn't seem unusual to me. I didn't like scrapple or blood pudding much but enjoyed stuffed pig stomach, tongue souse, liver, snapper soup, dandelion greens, and stuffed beef or veal hearts. We also had game like venison, rabbits and pheasant and all kinds of fish.

We'd catch and eat Jersey blowfish, which nearly everyone threw back into the water because their tough skin made them so difficult to clean and the entire amount of edible fresh was about the size of two index fingers. They were one of my favorite fish. Imagine my surprise when years later, I stopped in the old Macy's Cellar food emporium in Manhattan and saw 'Chicken of the Sea' at the most expensive price per pound of any of the fresh fish. I immediately recognized them as blowfish.

Around 1977, DH and I were vacationing at Club Med in Martinique. A group of us went out in a boat for a picnic lunch and anchored off a tiny island. One of the staff built a fire and another went out into the sea and caught lobsters, which were grilled over the fire. Then he returned to the ocean with a big basket and started throwing these spiny things about the size of a navel orange into it. When it was filled, he whacked them open with a knife and squeezed some lime juice on them. He passed spoons around and we scooped out what looked like crab roe. It was my first taste of sea urchin, or uni, as it's more often called now.

Frankly, a lot of popular American processed foods fall under my idea of "Weird foods."

Ain't that the truth!

Boyohboy, don't I agree on the American Processed Food thing, read that ingredient list and some of it can't even be pronounced and probably shouldn't be consumed!

I have, however, eaten horse. Back in 1973, there was a PBB poisoning of cattle in Michigan. Several thousand pounds of fire retardant was accidentally added to livestock food. After a lot of cover ups, finger pointing and denial, it was determined that the feed was contaminated. The government said there were only two disposal sites, but later investigation turned up many more throughout the state. All health departments in the state were contacted and only two responded. In the burial
pits; 33,000 cattle, 1.5 million chickens 1,470 sheep, 5,920 hogs, 865 tons of feed, 17,900
pounds of cheese, 2,630 pounds of butter, 34,000 pounds of dry milk and 5 million eggs were
buried.These events were portrayed in the 1981 in the documentary "Cattlegate" by Jeff Jackson, the true-fiction film Bitter Harvest starring Ron Howard, and in the book "The Poisoning of Michigan" by Joyce Egginton. At first the deaths of the animals were blamed on the farmer's lack of care or skill. Yeah. After a year, the animals were culled. Most of Michigan still has PBB in their system and the USDA says that most of Michigan's farms are so contaminated that every product produced is contaminated with some level of PBB.

Anyway, as farmers were bulldozing their livestock and livelihoods into pits, everyone was afraid to eat beef. Horse meat became very common. We were lucky, because we raised out own livestock feed and purchased none of the contaminated stuff. I remember some guy from Chicago stopping at the farm and telling Dad he'd give him 17 cents a pound for the whole herd. Dad told him that for 17 cents a pound he'd eat every damned one of them himself.

So, anyway, nearly everyone in Michigan during that time has eaten horse meat.

Annie

Annie, horse meat is sold in grocery stores in Quebec. :-(

My party trick when I was young was to eat Purina Bonios straight out of the box :-) and I liked nibbling raw oats out of the box (still do, really).

I will not eat Vegemite.

My DM always prepared quotidian Cuban fare: Lots of fresh seafood, and every single dish included white rice (Rice is to Cubans what mashed potatoes is to 'Mericans).

Although, when we were kids (good kids, too), mom went through a brief period of serving beef tongue, oxtail, beef liver, etc.

No one knows
what the hell she did with the rest of the cow. Regardless, we ate it, begrudgingly.

However, the weirdest, not to mention, most disgusting thing I've ever eaten would have to be "Jutía." I've also snacked on roasted fish eyes, but that was intentional.

Sol

So, speaking of frightening packaged foods, it was just pointed out to me that the ingredients in PopTarts are fairly benign, though some chemical, whereas the ingredients on the in house bakery at the national chain grocery are gruesome!