Quorn
I turned veggie four years or so ago and so far have done rather well not missing steak and all but I struggle with my resolve when faced with bacon. Oh, the taste and smell of crispy Danish bacon served with mushrooms and cheese in a sarnie...

Imagine my delight at seeing "Quorn Rashers" for sale at my local Sainsburys. Having sampled the frankly agreeable sausages and the quorn mince which I use in my lasagne (the secret is in the preparation. Soak the Quorn in veggie stock and garnish with herbs) I was looking forward to seeing how the vaguely rasher shaped Quorn slices went.

Oh dear. The end result actually lookes like an inner sole from my trainers and I daresay tastes quite similar too. In order to get them crispy, you have to fry them until they fall apart. The end result is pink and overly salty with in indescribable flavour which has more than once made me wonder whether my Nike inner soles would make a more appetising sandwich filling.

[best Homer Simpson voice] Mmmmm.... Bacon!

[edit] My best mate is amusingly afflicted with flatulence which registers on the Beaufort scale after eating my veggie lasagne. I don't invite him round much these days.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Fri 18 May 2007, 17:17, Reply)

Stew in Tenerife
My wife and I stayed a night in a little village in Tenerife, sampling dinner at a local beachfront cafe, the kind quoted in the Rough Guide as "a truly local experience, sample local delicacies, eat with local people". So we order the conejo (rabbit) stew along with some veggie stuff, it was all going splendidly till wifey picks out a spikey bit and starts examining it from all angles.

Her: "what do you think this bit is?"

Me: "I think you'll find that's the rabbit's face"

I kindly illustrated my point by demonstrating the rabbit's teeth, eye socket and jaw.

Stew was delicious.
(HectorProtector, Fri 18 May 2007, 17:04, Reply)

Desperation dinner...
On a cold night in uni halls many years ago, I decided that I needed a warm & comforting dish. However I didn't have much more than packet soup, smash & a few herbs & spices. The resulting watery starchy slop on the plate reminded me too much of vomit & I had to go hungry that night :(

Kids! Please watch repeats of Delia, or get a book by this lady and teach yourselves to cook!
( Hidden Mouse, Sleeping Kitten Gromada? Gromada!, Fri 18 May 2007, 17:01, Reply)

Kellogs Frosties and Cresta Pop...
When I was about 10 I came downstairs one saturday morning at about 6am to watch Thundercats and have some breakfast... I must have still been half asleep because I poured Strawberry Cresta (It's frothy, man!) all over my Frosties... The stench still haunts me to this day...

Also, on one of the rare occasions that I have seen my real dad, the sadistic fucker made me eat the fat off of a pork chop when I was about 4.

I cannot eat pork or drink Crest even after all this time!
(aroe_m0rre, Fri 18 May 2007, 16:59, Reply)

eat what your given and be thankful
was my mums motto, we were mostly thankful we didn't have to have seconds

The horrors include:
Belly pork

Mince curry, microwaved mince with a tin of curry sauce the nasty type with sultanas in it

Pasta bake, pasta with soup poured over it and melted orange cheese on top

Lasangne, flat pasta, microwaved mince, tommato and white sauce with melted orange cheese on top

She would get a bit stroppy when I used to refuse to eat all of the chicken drum stick if I found blood in the meat.


She also made a special curry for my stepdad once when they were arguing it contained a full bottle of syrup of figs. He was on the crapper for a couple of days.

She stopped smoking and asked us why we didn't tell her her food was that bad. Shed better like the taste of talc shes not going into a good care home

I once ate kangaroo jerky that a guy in the office found in his desk it was 3 years out of date a bit tough and salty but still tastier than belly pork

If it wasn't for McDonalds and Turkey twizzlers I would be malnourished
(DryGoldfish, Fri 18 May 2007, 16:39, Reply)

You gave me what?!?
Bokmål and nynorsk are the two main variants of Norwegian. Before I took a job there (on a dairy farm in a northern province) I learned bokmål, which is what most people in the south speak. However, nynorsk was spoken in my village and is only slightly different in most cases. Sort of like growing up in Mayfair in 1880 then moving to the East End. Or Jamaica. Confusing sometimes, but doable.

Anyway, one afternoon I was completely knacked after unloading a semi (articulated lorry?) full of strawberry plants. I told my boss I couldn't lift my arms over my head and was sacking out on the grass.

After a bit, Uldrik re-appeared with a big steaming platter of pancakes and urged me to eat them, saying they would give me strength. OK, fine. His wife Hjørdis had prepared them especially for me. They were an odd blackish colour and I asked what they were. "Bløtekage" (white cake) Hmm, ok. Not bad. Not chocolate, but not bad.

I did feel better but wanted to know what the hell was in those pancakes and asked again. "Bløtekage, bløtekage!" he said, tapping the inside of his elbow. He saw my bepuzzled face and walked over to one of the cows and slapped her on the neck, "BLØTE. KAGE!"

I almost barfed. He wasn't saying "bløtekage", white cake, he was saying "bludekage", blood cake! (the words really do sound identical) They had opened a vein on one of the cows, bled her then made a little Viking snack for me with the resultant blood.

I did feel much better, though.
(TDub Nunc id vides, nunc ne vides on, Fri 18 May 2007, 16:30, Reply)

China..again
I posted before, but theres too much to tell, I know its their culture, and to be honest I admire they still keep the traditions. What is sad is that more and more infact hundreds of KFC's and MacD's are popping up everywhere, literally two on every street!

I will never forget the time I went for a meal witha group of chinese workers, keen to show our politeness we let them order.... :S

to start, Jelly Fish...cold uncooked
Then we had Pork belly, which looked and moved like blamonge.... in soy souce....their local delacacy :S
We order duck (thinking the same as duck at home) what we actually got was close to a leather sack, with no meat at all....

plus we had duck head:

[IMG]http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d141/paulcutler/hangzhou%20part2/jaws.jpg[/IMG]

i34.photobucket.com/albums/d141/paulcutler/hangzhou%20part2/jaws.jpg


yes, your are correct- they are brains......

we tried our best, most of it really was unedible, as our teeth were hopeless against its chewyness........but low and behold fast forward 3 hrs, I was lying comotose on my couch with a proper westerner belly , with 3 empty big mac boxes to the side of me.


Culture? you should see the mug of tea ive left on my windowsil for 3weeks.... now that has culture...
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Fri 18 May 2007, 16:27, Reply)

Not me, but...
I once watched a friend consume a sauerkraut-hotdog-jalapeno-neapolitan sundae topped with whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and strawberry sauce, for a bet...does that count?

Edit: On seeing some of the other answers, I guess this really wasn't that revolutionary/interesting/horrifying. Boooo.
(Rem Sir, why are you thrashing about on the floor?, Fri 18 May 2007, 16:10, Reply)

China
in line with Celerydemon's post below ... food in China is a bit of a mystery, especially when eating with the Chinese. The school I worked in for 2 months served lunch every day, which was fine if you stuck to what you knew. The problem was, my friend and I (both Brits) didnt really know much about what we were eating. After a week, neither of us *wanted* to know. We got a block of rice as standard, and then chose assorted bits and bobs. If it was deepfried (to kill it) or looked like veg, we'd have it. My friend tried the fish once, but apparently once was enough. One look at the water in the canals round the village should have been enough to forewarn him, really. We went to eat with the teachers once, and ended up sampling the delights of pig stomach (I would have been happy in the belief I had just consumed some rubbery burnt chicken to be honest). And I willingly tried some turtle. Blech.

Still, at least the school never gave us a whole fried frog (intact), which happened to an American acquaintance of ours. Small mercies, eh? (And to think I'm looking forward to going back!)
(zenmeban thinks the weather could be better, Fri 18 May 2007, 15:57, Reply)

Argh
My oldest brother makes this slop for his kids called "lashish-shlosh. It's a combination of lasagne and goulash.

Need I say more?
(TDub Nunc id vides, nunc ne vides on, Fri 18 May 2007, 15:53, Reply)

Napalm curry
Many, many years ago (my thirty three and a third birthday party if I remember correctly) I cooked a curry using a jar of curry paste from the (asian) corner shop. The label was all in urdu so I used what seemed like a sensible quantity.
I had a great time watching people trying to eat this - it tasted great, so people persevered, but it was hotter than hades!
The most macho of the men kept coming back and having another go, only to abandon it yet again.
Nothing went to waste, though. My then BF and I finished it off the next day.
The other year in Turkey a waiter noticed me eating all the chillis and thought he would have some fun. He brought me out some different chillis. I took this as a challenge and ate the lot, smiling throughout. God, that hurt, but I think I became something of a legend!
(misspiggy In danger of having to get a job, Fri 18 May 2007, 15:53, Reply)

Mmm, studenthood...
As students, we would regularly eat toast sandwiched together with cheese and brown sauce. When the cheese ran out, this would become simply brown sauce on toast, which is apparently popular oop North. It's not as bad as it sounds.

My boyfriend once ate a garlic pizza bread, topped with a tin of Heinz 'spaghetti and sausages' and half a block of mature cheddar. I have learnt that when someone makes something huge and/or vile, the best thing to say is simply, in a disgusted tone, 'You'll NEVER eat all of that'.

They always do.
(clumsyeloquence is a girl, Fri 18 May 2007, 15:42, Reply)

Just thought of another one...
I was cooking breakfast after an all night event, the usual large scale cooking: Lots of eggs in a big pan, lots of sausages under a grill, big conveyor toaster thingy.

We were also doing a soup (ASDA value) beefed up with noodles (ASDA value). The result was a thick gloopy 'liquid' which we could probably have served with a knife and fork.

Alot of it was returned very quickly (apparently not even students will eat anything). Not wanting to waste it, it was recycled back in the pot.

Edit: I just realised my contradiction. Some things (above) I won't even try once.
(Squash, Fri 18 May 2007, 15:33, Reply)

Will try anything...
once. And I tend to like pretty much anything.
As the result of going out with South Korean girl I've been treated to some fantastic food, including sea-cucumber (Yummy!) and jellyfish (yummy, if a little salty). Lived in Indonesia for a while and tried snake (again, yummy!)

The only thing that has ever almost come back up was chicken feet. Fried so the skin was a bit crispy, the individual toes were actually quite nice. It was only when biting down on the actual foot that the full gristly, spongy experience fully caught me. Took alot of effort not to return it to the plate from whence it came.
(Squash, Fri 18 May 2007, 15:28, Reply)

Camping Curry!
When I was 17 (1971) I went, with my regular canoe surfing mates, to Widemouth Bay in Cornwall. About 20 of us altogether. We all stayed at Widemouth Bay Caravan Park. One guy we had invited (he was older than us, had a car and we needed the transport) brought his girlfriend, who he was obviously out to impress (screw).

One afternoon we (except him and gf) went surfing. I can guess his motive for staying behind!

"I'll cook a curry for tonight." he said. "OK." We said.

We got back to see a pot of meat and stuff sizzling away.

"I'll put the curry powder in now." He said. (Remember this is a time way before curry was our national dish).

One spoon went in. "Hmmmm," he said, "doesn't seem much?"
So in went the rest of the tin!

Me? I twigged that it was going to be painful on the bog the next day. The rest didn't.

How I laughed.
(lozzzz, Fri 18 May 2007, 15:27, Reply)

commonsense
If you are in an African country with power cuts living in tents working as a civvy specialist with a big UN force, and there is a belgian restaurant ( well it was belgian congo) and when you finish the job you get taken there as it is the only restaurant for 20 miles, what would you have as a starter? My colleague who took over from me had prawn cocktail. sensible? 500miles from sea and either air or truck the only route for frozen prawns , the freezer power only on half a day?. An emergency air evac was close to needed but one of the UN docs did the biz. Few people would have the wit to order that.
(tootired Is searching for a funny sig, nothing good so far, Fri 18 May 2007, 15:14, Reply)

Funny food
food can be fun as well as a bit freaky. I ate a kekab from a shop in saltney, chester. 28 hours later i started to feel odd. not unlike the symptoms of eatable class A drugs. Then it got worse. cramps. sweats. torrents of painful squits. then hallucinations for the next 12 hours before i passed out. 5 days of painful stomach later i was back together again. Still the best mixed kebab ever - i went back again and was fine. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

I have also had a Spennymoor Brick. 3 sausages, chips and gravy in a chinese food metal container. basically it become brick shaped. It was awesome scran. But when i reached peterborough station on the way back to Naaaarrrwitch i had about an hour to wait. then cramps and sweating before i expelled every morsel in a haze of moaning in pain.

weakened, i got back on the train. Payback for a previous life misedemeabour i am convinced.
( bazza van der trance , ooh baby baby, baby baby. Get up on this., Fri 18 May 2007, 14:57, Reply)

Finger lickin' good
The local staff at my school like winding-up the foreigners about the wacky stuff they eat over here in China.
They usually order a mystery dish, don't/can't translate, then laugh at our faces when we eat it.

I ate something that was ... chewy.
And not in a good way.

When I asked what it was, my Chinese friend said, "Chicken!"
What part?
She started waving her hand above her head ...
... it was the bloody chicken's feathery-comb-head-thing.
And there was a whole plate of the buggers!

Another time, they ordered us dog meat, and let us all have a bit of the "mystery meat that tastes like roast beef" before telling us ...

A couple of them are trying to persuade me to eat eyeballs. Any animal will do, as long as I eat lots of them - apparently, it's good for your eyesight.

Oh yeah, and on my 3rd day here,
I'm chewing away on what I think is tofu ... until I'm told it's "some part of stomach".
Never found out which part.
Looked like tofu, though.
(Celerydemon, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:48, Reply)

The Grease Pit
There's a delightful greasy spoon near our College collectively reffered to as the "grease pit".
I dined there earlier this week, buying a speaciality of theirs called a "triple" (a medley of bacon, egg and sausage served between three peieces of toast)
Now i have a most agggressive case of the shits, causing me to dash upstairs every 15 minutes or so to realease a thunderous shart
( Fitznicely into a thimble, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:42, Reply)

Rubber with a hump
I went to a naval boarding school...I experienced enough minging food there to last a lifetime. I also have the requisite relatives who can't cook, the most outstanding memory of which was when one of my grans served me curry with sliced banana on.

Anyway. My parents lived in Saudi Arabia for a couple of years, and whilst there we ate loads of really good food. But at the supermarket where we shopped, there were entire sections of the freezer section that we just did not go near, mostly containing brains.

Then my mum got brave and decided to make camel kebabs. Young camel is quite nice and tender. My mum got a rather more mature camel. The result was the toughest meat EVER. Like, not just a little bit tough, you'd go to bite down to chew and it would spring back to its original shape. Blechy.

But the worst-tasting thing ever was when I accidentally put way too much vinegar on my chips and was too stubborn not to eat them. My mouth looked like a cat's arse for about an hour afterward.
(firemasque, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:35, Reply)

Some things are just too much the night after
many years ago, i`d started work, few old mates were still doing their finals and in student digs. Big party in Stratford, jonesey had the nickname of "the dustbin" and the catch phrase " do you not want that?" and yaffled any leftovers.

By about 3am only a hardcore of ladies and gents are left, music right down, talking pissed bollocks, and we lay where we fell. 7am sun up and as a seasoned party goer I go to get reinforcements for the flats supply of bread, eggs, bacon and beans at the Indian shop going toward Canning Town.

On return the jones has liberated some mash and greens from the fridge and says i`ll do a bubble and squeak as well, nice, all good stuff to soak up toxins.

What happens next? either in the recesses of a fridge like the one in the young ones, or from one of the assembled who couldnt make it to their flat downstairs, a tupperware container appears with a bloody kedgeree of unknown vintage. I don`t know what the fish was but it ronked, and nearly walked out of the container.

What does he do? mixes it in the bubble and squeak and starts frying it. Can you imagine how welcome that waft was?

I`ve managed to do a few egg and pig sarnies and the people on that were ok, a couple of them had already gone back on the booze for a tuft of the dog and were ok. but there ensued some porcelain bus driving not as much as the smell warranted.

Jonesey ate most of "it". the bubble/kedgeree.

I am sure to this day that was preplanned, because the last time I heard the story " we needed some scran I had a bubble and squeak and a kedgeree so I made a buggeree".

That is a lot of honking and heaving for the sake of a pun.

Later that morning Some people came back to pick up their records/ the decks etc once they thought safe to drive, walked in and said "fuck me, smells like a Bombay brass`s fanny in here!" I preferred " a bit Billingsgate for the morning after isn`t it?"

How no-one got poisoned I have no explanation for.
(tootired Is searching for a funny sig, nothing good so far, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:32, Reply)

Sweet and Sour Chicken
The local chinese takeaway is usually fairly decent.

That was until a couple of months back, when we decided to order one and get it delivered.

Well everyone elses was fairly decent by the looks of it, no real complaints. Well you know something is up when through 2 layers of "grease proof" paper, you can almost see the chicken. But i decide to have a couple of pieces anyway because i was starving.

I later regretted that decision

Length? The distance from the living room to the toilet.. ;)
(front_2_back is further inland from the coast than anyone else, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:32, Reply)

EW!
I once ordered a prawn curry in Tenerife. Yuk! Why did I think the Spanish would be able to cook a decent curry. And to make things worse they had left the heads on the prawns with their litte feelers swimming about the sauce. Don't they know that the British are squemish about these kind of things. I couldn't eat it and the waiter wasn't best pleased when I gave him the plate and ordered a tuna salad.

My dad and sister went to China a few months back and thankfully KFC and Mcdonalds had set up shop in the country so they didn't starve. The first thing he had for dinner when he came home was a chinese takeaway.
( girlinthehole, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:21, Reply)

School cookery classes have a lot to answer for.
The art geek in my life was never much of a cook, but we were still all a bit surprised when, in a cookery lesson at the age of twelve, she appeared to have evaporated pasta. There was still boiling water in the pan, but all the pasta seemed to have crawled out to start a better life in the Algarve.

She also tried to make cheese on toast in the toaster once.
(Shinigami, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:21, Reply)

Fucking food technology.
I scraped an E grade in this, despite handing in no coursework and taking the piss out of the exam.
And being utterly unable to cook.
I can't remember what the fuck I was making when I asked the hassled cookery assistant for brown sugar from the cupboard. She handed me a packet quickly and I took it without thinking. I was sprinkling it over my pastry or whatever when I noticed the faint smell of curry from somewhere. Never mind.
It was the odd lumps in my 'sugar' that made me realise where the smell was coming from.
The daft bint had given me curry powder instead of brown sugar.

Not to mention the time I was making chocolate scones (a bad idea in itself), was cleaning up after putting them in the oven, and on picking up my tray to wash it, found a mysterious bag of white powder on it.
I'd forgotten to put the fucking sugar in.
Instead of soldiering on and passing it off as a bad mistake, I made the ridiculous decision to mix it into a sugar solution and sprinkle it over the scones in the oven.
The result?
Glazed bitter chocolate scones. Nobody ate more than half of one.
(and now for someone completely different, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:19, Reply)

Cup of tea, please
A few years ago, when I first met Mr. WBM, I went over to his place one night after a particularly gruelling day in the office.

He asked if I wanted anything to drink, and so told him I was gagging for a cuppa. After translating that into "I'd like a cup of tea, please" he said no problem, he has tea bags.

Now, bear in mind, this is America and the Americans don't drink tea as a rule, unless it's cold. So, I asked him if he knew how to make a cup and he said of course. "Great, I want milk and 2 sugars, please".
5 minutes later, he proudly walks over to me. The tea looked a bit milky but I figured fuck it, I'll drink it as it was so sweet of him to make it for me.

Took a sip......Gah! It was a rosehip tea herbal teabag he'd used.

After that, I made my mum send over an emergency pack of Yorkshire Tea Bags and introduced him to a proper cuppa!
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:18, Reply)

University food
Is the worst. As part of my job I estimate building projects and having priced up a prison kitchen I found out that prisoners eat better. They spend £2.50 a day on a jailbird (so the porter said) and I saw 'brand name' products, like Mother's Pride bread. Whereas we had 97p a day for three meals.

I never ate school dinners so imagine my surprise at being confronted with a 'tube' i.e. an artery - in the beef.

By far the worst food was the fish. I don't know what fish it was but it was battered, the size of a small Perch, tasted rancid and made you gag. You could eat it with copious amounts of brown sauce. Just. Don't know where or how they bought it.

*The most effective diet is the gastroenteritis diet. Eat undercooked chicken - lose 2stone in a week!
(The Lithe Panther, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:17, Reply)

Puts hair on your chest
A few years ago I lived in Russia with a lovely Russian family. Although they were very nice, they did have some odd ideas about cooking, such as frying pasta.

The one that sticks in my mind though was one evening sitting down and taking a bite out of the cauliflower on the plate, only to find it tasted exactly like anti-freeze smells. Turns out that that the cauliflower was cooked in vodka.
(bacon roll, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:05, Reply)

the thought makes me gag
When I was dating my first steady boyfriend, Quentin, he used to create a monstrosity of gastonomic terror.

Gushmush (gush-for that was his surname, and mush because to call it anything else would be lieing).

Basically he would take a large bowl, empty a can of baked beans into it, slop in a few tablespoons of mayonaise, slices of cocktail sausages and cover it with cheese. He would then stick in the microwave on high until the cheese had melted.

He would then stir it up and serve it.
*shudder*
(MissB, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:04, Reply)

Location, location location

When driving through east hull Jhon Prescotts constuancy, I couldn't help but notice that the east hull labour party headquaters is right next door to a pie shop.
( willenium Fist bump for verification, Fri 18 May 2007, 14:03, Reply)