Unusual Food?

Growing up in Japan, I had the opportunity to eat lots of unusual (for America) things. I once ate a sparrow head (beak and eyes removed). It was served yakitori style, 3 heads on a stick. It had teriyaki sauce on it. My dad dared me to eat it, said he'd pay me 5000yen (to a kid, that was a LOT of money). So I ate it. It was...sort of good...kinda crunchy like rice crackers.

But I said no thanks the next time it was offered.

Conch right off of the little fishing boat it was caught in, marinated in lemon and lime...delish! Alligator and giant tiger shrimp. Alligator, good...tiger shrimp....bad, way bad..after taste lasted all day long. My son (11) came home from Australian with an insane love of Kangaroo. Now I am vegan so my food escapades are reserved to new fruits and veggies. Every time we visit this one grocery store a few towns over we pick a new fruit or veg to try, they always have new and exotic things!

I've tried alligator, cow tongue, tripe and cow heart. I didn't like any enough to have them again. I enjoy sushi and sashimi, and especially like sushi with roe on it. I love escarots in mushroom caps. I like liver and smoked oysters. Nothing terribly exotic. I have been tempted to try balut (Filipino fertilized chicken or duck egg), but I chickened out.

When we lived in Alaska I ate bear, caribou, seal, fermented seal oil, muktuk, whale (bowhead) heart, whale meat, whale flipper, agutuk (eskimo ice cream which is frozen crisco or lard, white fish broken up and berries), plenty of salmon roe, fish head soup (the cartilege is crunchy!)...I can't even remember what else. I liked all of it except I was not really into the whale flipper...this is known as eskimo chewing gum. The bowhead meat is a red meat like steak but it's very rich. I could not eat a lot but it was good.This was a whale hunted by Inupiaq people in a village on the North Slope. The entire village is invited to the captain's house that night for a feast and they give you a plate filled with some of everything. I don't even remember every organ/thing I tried!

My Japanese friends had me try all kinds of raw seafood...delicacies for them. I liked everything except uni which is sea urchin. The texture was gross!

In Africa I tried mopane worms which I did not like bc they were big and squishy and fried termites which were nutty and crunchy and very good.

Where I come from (Switzerland) horse is not unusual. As a matter of fact it is so "normal" they served horse steak at my husband's work cafeteria. Also, as a kid I ate a lot of hunted meat like deer, elk, wild boar, rabbit and ate stuff like pig's feet, blood sausage, liver and tongue was also very common food. I really liked blood sausage before I became vegetarian. My mom would fry lots of onions with it and serve it with a side of potatoes and applesauce. The cow's tongue came with a brown sauce. You strip the outermost layer of tongue skin away because it's very tough. The meat underneath is very tender. I also liked it a lot. However, once I moved out from my parents I never cooked any of these items myself. I personally love seafood so I've tried a lot of crazy seafood items from roe to seaweed to octopus, eel, soft shell crab and all kinds of mussels. I also tried snails a couple of times. Once for Halloween we bought cockroaches for snacks. Needless to say they weren't all that popular. I tried it but it wasn't a great snack. They tasted kind of minty and I didn't really like the crunch they had.
I also had truffles at a fancy restaurant once (yummy) and salads made with flowers (very yummy and it looked amazing). I love any kind of blue cheese. In Greece I once ordered stuffed squid. I expected something like fried calamari rings stuffed with something, but what came was a huge white boiled squid that was stuffed really tightly with some rice stuffing. It looked and tasted very unusual. Not my favorite item. Great question. I love adventurous food.

i now feel extremely unadventurous and slightly nauseated.
i love snails and frogs' legs. does that count?
:X khairete
S.

The most adventuresome I have gotten is sushi. I would probably vomit if I saw 1/2 of what you ladies have mentioned being served. Brings up memories of watching "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" when I was a kid. Snake surprise and chilled monkey brains.

My husband's favorite food is called Pacha. Basically, it's a goat's head. VOMIT.

Roe is very common here in Hawaii.
Many different kinds, per culture.
Japanese food has many different types and colors, per various fish.
It is more commonly seen on sushi, for example.
And grocery stores here also commonly sell it.

What is common here, is probably not common or unusual in other places, ie: Regional foods, ie:
Eel (saltwater and fresh water types), raw Sea Cucumber, raw fish prepared various ways and per various ethnic dishes, Hawaiian food/taro/poi/ Kalua Pig cooked traditionally underground, dried fish which is hung outside to dry after being caught and filleted, raw octopus and squid, tripe stew, raw oysters, raw "Opihi", Escargot, Tartare, Taro leaves, Mochi, Pho, Ox Tail soup, Turkey Neck soup, Foie Gras prepared Hawaiian style, dried cuttlefish... preserved eggs, and much much more.... etc.
all very yummy! So many different types of foods here to try.

My husband is from Portugal. Before I met him, I ate the food that most half-Italian / half-mutt people ate....lasagna, fried catfish, stew, homemade ravioli, BBQ, etc....

Since meeting my husband, my favorite food went from my mother's lasagna to my inlaws' Portuguese Octopus Stew...the best food ever! Other foods my inlaws would cook were tripe (stomach tissues of sheep or cow) and rabbit and large sardines. There were alot of other foods to which they introduced me. The only food they made that I would rather not eat again is the rabbit......my piece of rabbit meat I was first served had a very tiny bit of rabbit fur/hair still attached (sorry for the visual).

Besides these foods (that at one time seemed unusual), I have also fell in love with sashimi...specifically the octopus, squid, and scallops.

Last but not least...I could eat my weight in raw oysters (not so unusual I think).

Love, love love sushi, which has now become too ubiquitous to be considered exotic, I suppose. Love a wide variety of fish and seafood.

I grew up eating Kim Chi, which I can't eat anymore, but still miss. Poi, I have tried a couple of times-- will take a pass on that. Dried cuttlefish? Like it. Some of the pickled and dried seed candies from Hawaii? Love.

Ate a great fish stew when I visited Brazil years ago. Still remember it. Paella? Heaven in a dish. Don't know that I've ventured any further than that. Love Middle Eastern/Lebanese food as well. Again, hard to think of it being 'exotic' as humous can be found nearly everywhere and I have a shaker of sumac zahtar in the cupboard!

I have had camel. It was horrible.

Man - you have some interesting questions!!!

Eel while I was in Belgium.

It was slimy.

Horse meat. At a friend's house in Switzerland. They ate it alot and called it "roast" or "bbq". And they didn't tell me till much much later. It tasted better before I knew what it was.

Kidneys, tongue, chicken feet, pigs feet, tripe, gizzards, roe, eel, sea cucumber, snails, fermented duck eggs, octupus, squid. None of that was unusual or exotic. I grew up on the stuff. Like my dad used to say, those Chinese people will eat anything.

I accidently ate brain. It was disgusting. Chewy, slimy, nasty.
ick ick ick.

Tuna fish and general tso chicken. I am not the least bit adventurish when it comes to food:).

Turtle -- yes I liked it.

None. I eat the basics and don't stray from it. I'm so boring I don't even try new things at restaraunts. I eat the same.old.boring.thing.all.the.time. lol

Octopus. It's disgusting.

Depends on what you consider unusual. I've eaten caviar, lychee nut, and chocolate covered ants. I have not eaten fried chicken feet (but my husband has - if you go to dim sum with people who order off the menu you may not want to know what they ordered...)

The caviar was too salty, the lychee nut was OK and the ants were just crunchy chocolate.

Oh, and I've eaten haggis (not bad) and scrapple (tasty, but don't ask what's in it).

umm I love cooking, but unusual? I'm a safe cook with kids lol I like making delicious food and I have to know what's in it.

The weirdest thing I've ever been offered to eat was a live firefly squid, which is considered a delicacy in the part of rural coastal Japan where I lived at the time. That time I did manage, with the help of a sympathetic Japanese friend, to politely decline.

The oddest thing I've ever tried and liked was sliced raw sea snail. At the time, I did not know what I was eating. A friend put it on my plate, I ate it, found it good, and then found out what it was. By that point, I figured that if I'd already tried it and liked it, that made it good eats, regardless of what it was before it became food. (This is what happens when you spend part of your youth as a global nomad.)

Departing from my usual Irish diet, my adventurous eating included alligator (tastes a little like chicken) and pigeon (didn't know before I ate it, tasted a lot like chicken). Great question!

Escargo, was ok, tasted like clams or muscles.
Calamari, delicious fried
I would love to try sea urchin, I see them making it on iron chef.

Great question, I love trying any new foods.

Kitfo (Ethiopian beef tartare), sushi, eel, octopus, squid, escargot, goat, shark, alligator, turtle, raccoon, possum, squirrel, rabbit, caviar, hijiki (seaweed salad), nori (another species of seaweed), mountain oysters (fried bull testicles), grenouilles (frog legs), tripe (beef stomach), haggis, barbacoa (meat from the head of the steer) - liked it all

Roe is another name for caviar and I love it. Especially salmon. I had a whole tiny octopus at a sushi restaurant. It was just okay -- glad I tried it, but nothing to make me want it again.
Oh, and reindeer meat brought over from Finland.

Snails, caviar, octopus, urchin, Zeke's Bait fish eggs, alligator, elk, mutton, deer ...

Blood sausage (yeah, won't tell you what's in it. Old German tradition thing, but I love it!), grit sausage (another Old German tradition thing; I like this as well), chicken liver pate (love this, especially at Xmas time), calamari (squid, I think? Sort of rubbery tasting; didn't really care for, but deep fried and with dipping sauces, it wasn't too bad. Wouldn't have it again, though), pig's feet (my mom would make them like ribs--okay), oyster sauce (too salty for me), octopus sauce (didn't like the flavor at all), Caviar (too salty).

I had a lot of friends in college who were international students, so I tried a lot of different foods. And my father hunts, so growing up we've had a lot of different types of meat.

Love ostrich, wild boar, elk, venison/deer, caribou, moose, wild goose, rabbit, squirrel, partridge, pheasant (love!), wild duck (too greasy/rich for me). I'm usually up to trying something unusual at least once.

Had a friend who was stuck on a deserted island in the Caribbean during WWII when he served. He was forced to cook an iguana over the fire and eat it before he was rescued. Said it tasted like chicken.

Rattlesnake - at the Rattlesnake Round up in Texas. Tasted like chicken.

Not too adventurous here...maybe oysters, I guess.

Alligator - yum! I just couldn't quite get past the "idea" of what I was eating so I only had a bite.