By the time you read this, I will probably have eaten a perfectly ordinary, deliciously normal meal with my food frakking deputy Julia. It will be nothing that I can blog about. But go ahead and enjoy all the other oddities I have put in my mouth recently.
While passing by a carniceria I bought a single flap of thinly sliced and pre-breaded milanesa.
I also got a couple of sweets. The one on the left is a roll of hawthorn gum wrapped around a salted plum and doused with plenty of chili powder. The other is a watermelon hard candy lollipop with more salt and chili than you can really imagine easily.
Julia asked me, "Do you actually like this stuff?" Which was a very interesting question that I hadn’t really thought about. The best answer is that I like the vivid experience of this food.
From La Casita, a breakfast dish with plenty of fried tortilla strips floating in a sea of salsa verde and topped with fried eggs.
Let’s talk Asian meat products. Here’s a salted herring fillet that tasted exactly like canned kipper snacks.
Here’s a spread featuring pork and cucumber dumplings. The directions recommended dunking the dumplings in ice water to bring out their crisp and unique flavor. But here I served them with oyster sauce and ramen.
Here is some kamaboko. It’s essentially the same thing as fake crab meat, a rubbery fish-smelling protein tube. Only it’s packaged with its own wood cutting board, which seems pretty classy to me.
Here’s a serving suggestion:
This pork loaf is pretty similar to the kamaboko above. It comes wrapped in banana leaves, aluminum foil, and twine to give the impression that it’s rustic, instead of the Thai version of Oscar Mayer bologna.
A little farther down the Asian processed meat ladder are these fried fish cakes. They fried up crisp on the outside and lightly spongy on the inside.
At the very bottom of the processed meat pile is this cream style pickled gouramy (or gourami). You may remember a previous gourami experience that was pretty successful. The pickled gourami bears no resemblance to that.
Basically, it looks and smells like something you would scrape off the bottom of a fishmonger’s dumpster. Which is similar to how it’s made. Typically pickled gourami is gourami fillets packed in rice flour and salt and buried until it ferments into a nasty sludge. The result is then pureed. But for all it’s disgusting smell and texture, you boil it into some hot water and it becomes a subtly nuanced and flavorful broth.
Let’s round this off with some Asian sweets. I took this rice cake desert to a party and it was devoured by the guests, who compared it favorably with a Little Debbie Zebra Cake.
Curiously, they didn’t mention the bean paste filling.
These custard dumplings are filled with pudding. Imagine a pudding cup with a bun instead of plastic.
Pure brilliance.
