Regional Foods and You - Hate, Love, and Pain

[Piscian]

Grits. Im from kentucky and for some reason it's demanded of me to cherish that hot garbage. Raw fucking cornmeal is not good. You eat it when youre like a poor farmer in the 1920 and corn is the only thing that would grow. Gimme some goddamn oatmeal at least. At least that's closer to becoming real food.

Kentucky Hot Brown. Not even gonna try and explain it. If you go to Kentucky people are going to try to convince to to try to eat a kentucky Hot Brown and drink Mint Julips. Don't to do it. They're just trying to make up Kentucky things. Both are gross trash.

Bourbon, meh. Idk Bourbon in like a desert drink I'm ok with but generally I just end up getting sick. Im more of a Vodka person.

 

[Asita]

I spent a good chunk of my life in the Southeast United States, and you know what's popular there? Sweet Tea.

...Blech. I can't stand the stuff. The flavor itself isn't great but it's not terrible in small doses...but the aftertaste just makes me want to retch. Give me a lemonade over that swill any day of the week!

 

[EvilRoy]

I tried a local "Special Egg Foo Yung" that turned out to be some kind of beef based Egg Foo Yung mixed with those spicy sausage crumbles you get on pizza, and a healthy ladle of what tasted like DQ style gravy on top.

I thought it would be funny to try to do reviews of the food that is happening to me on this trip but I might just eat Subway for the next two weeks rather than risk gaining 50 kg or getting an ulcer.

I'm curious, does the UK do any justice to Chinese? Because pretty much nowhere in the US seems to that I've tried. I had some in Malaysia and HK and it's vastly different then US "Chinese" food and I realized what I was missing all this time. And now the US version is kinda ruined for me. I apologize I don't know the regional differences as far as Chinese Cuisine is concerned.

Speaking of. I've always been fascinated with trying "Chinese" food whenever I'm travelling. I know the real stuff tastes pretty good, but in Canada Chinese immigration in the early days of the country/precountry was not ideal and resulted in a lot of spread, so Chinese family restaurants vary wildly in terms of recipes as you go from small town to small town. I've always wanted to know what its like to eat "Chinese" in the US or the UK where immigration didn't follow the same pattern.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

I hate sweet meat. Filipino food is a big blend of traditional, Spanish, and Chinese cuisine, except they really focus on certain tastes. Very sweet desserts, very sour fruits, very salty meat, etc. Usually I'm okay with that, except when it comes to sweet meat. I can understand the appeal of sweet and sour or sweet and salty combinations, but not with fucking meat. Imagine having a beautiful lechon, a whole slow roasted pig with crispy skin and juicy tender herbed meat, then recycling the leftovers into some disgusting sweet stew called lechon paksiw. Blegh. Happens to be my mom's favorite too.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, adobo. Of the dozens of variations I've tried, I haven't found one yet I didn't like. The way the vinegar keeps the pork (or chicken, or beef, sometimes even fish) tender even on cheap cuts is great. And they last forever too, somehow as leftovers they get even better. Plenty of potential for recycling too, frying up some adobo flakes is heaven.

Pain is most definitely fish. As an island nation, we have lots of fish. Fuck fish. I don't even particularly hate the taste, I love well cooked salmon or raw tuna in Japanese cuisine. But here we only really just fry or grill our fish, which means we always have overcooked fish. And even if it isn't overcooked, you have to deal with the hassle of picking out the bones. As a child I spent a week with a fishbone in my throat and I hated life. That said, I do love boneless dried tuyo (which I think is herring) with fried rice and egg. The only local fish I look forward to.

 

[Zykon TheLich]

The Cornish pasty is a great on the go fast food. If a pasty is available there's no way I'd go for anything else. They've managed to break away from just the traditional steak and veg fillings as well so there's some good variety, harder to get bored with them.

Devonian pasties are worse than Hitler.

 

[Baffle]

UKers, apparently "jacket potatoes" are a thing over there that Americans have only recently discovered and are struggling to wrap their heads around. Well, lo and behold, I've been making them for YEARS, and didn't know it. For me a "normal" baked potato has always been basically a blank canvas, butter and cheese serving as mere primer paints, upon which I created works of art using damn-near everything in the fridge; I don't know what my fellow Americans don't get about that.

We had a whole fastfood/restaurant chain around the idea (Spudulike).

 

[Gordon_4]

We had a whole fastfood/restaurant chain around the idea (Spudulike).

And now that joke in Drop the Dead Donkey has more context than it did yesterday.

 

[Zykon TheLich]

We had a whole fastfood/restaurant chain around the idea (Spudulike).

There is still a spudulike in Plymouth. I have not sampled it's wares

 

[09philj]

Up where I live in the north east of England, you can get a rather nice round and chewy loaf of bread called a stottie cake. Makes very good sandwiches. Pease pudding, a spread made from boiled yellow peas, is a common sandwich filling usually paired with ham, but I'm not a huge fan of the taste. Dickson's, a bakery in Newcastle city centre, is notable for producing the saveloy dip, a saveloy, stuffing, pease pudding, mustard, and gravy sandwich. Saveloys are a kind of smoked sausage you usually get in fish and chip shops, either boiled or deep fried.