What's your culinary guilty pleasure?

[Underseer]

Vegemite
(strange I know)

Not strange. Lots of countries have regional dishes that the locals love and nearly everyone else thinks is disgusting.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'm working on my weight these days and have rediscovered the joys of popcorn. Bulk with crunch and low calories! That is my poison these days.

 

[DolphinDynasty]

Vegemite
(strange I know)

Not strange. Lots of countries have regional dishes that the locals love and nearly everyone else thinks is disgusting.

In the Netherlands, at least in 2001, I got tricked into eating cold cut horse meat, despite that family member knowing it was one thing at the time I would not try. I don't know if they still sell it, but they had at the time specific farms for old/retired draft, coal and pet horses that they used to slaughter, and then they'd ship the carcass to a butcher to be dressed and cut up.

It wasn't strange to them if they could still recall times when they starved as they had a penchant for large families 30 years ago, and quite a few are still around that recall slaughtering dogs during the war for food.

We like thinking that culturally we're "better" than those that would eat dog, horse or still subsistence hunt and fish in old ways, but there are people both in Europe here in the U.S. who scavenge road-kill and will get od cuts from a butcher to save money, like sheep's head they'd boil and eat.

 

[Underseer]

Vegemite
(strange I know)

Not strange. Lots of countries have regional dishes that the locals love and nearly everyone else thinks is disgusting.

In the Netherlands, at least in 2001, I got tricked into eating cold cut horse meat, despite that family member knowing it was one thing at the time I would not try. I don't know if they still sell it, but they had at the time specific farms for old/retired draft, coal and pet horses that they used to slaughter, and then they'd ship the carcass to a butcher to be dressed and cut up.

It wasn't strange to them if they could still recall times when they starved as they had a penchant for large families 30 years ago, and quite a few are still around that recall slaughtering dogs during the war for food.

We like thinking that culturally we're "better" than those that would eat dog, horse or still subsistence hunt and fish in old ways, but there are people both in Europe here in the U.S. who scavenge road-kill and will get od cuts from a butcher to save money, like sheep's head they'd boil and eat.

I'm half Japanese. Like a lot of people of Japanese descent, I grew up putting a raw egg and soy sauce on my rice, then stirring it all up until the whole thing becomes slimy and stringy. Trust me, if you didn't grow up eating it, you're almost certainly going to hate it, and one of these days I'm going to give myself salmonella doing this. I try to be careful when I do it. I buy the freshest eggs I can, then do the raw egg on rice with soy sauce thing only on that first day after buying the groceries. I'm still probably risking salmonella.

But it's got so much nostalgia. It's comfort food for me, dammit!

Also, most of the time I hate nattō, but every once in a blue moon, I actually get a hankering for it. It's supposed to be very healthy, but if you didn't grow up Japanese, I strongly recommend staying away from that stuff. It smells disgusting. From what I remember, most Japanese don't particularly care for it.

I'm also half Scandinavian. Theoretically, I should snack on pickled herring, but I can't stand the stuff. Bleah.

And yeah, the cultural biases for or against this or that meat are silly.

For example, Vietnamese will eat tendons and cartilage with their meat. To them it just adds variety to the texture. I tried it. I wanted to like it. I really did. I understood the concept behind it. It's not as if there is anything inherently disgusting about tendons and cartilage. It's just a stupid cultural bias and I couldn't overcome it. From what I understand, Japanese people also find it weird, so maybe my bias against cartilage and tendons comes as much from my Japanese side as my American side.

 

[DolphinDynasty]

In the Netherlands, at least in 2001, I got tricked into eating cold cut horse meat, despite that family member knowing it was one thing at the time I would not try. I don't know if they still sell it, but they had at the time specific farms for old/retired draft, coal and pet horses that they used to slaughter, and then they'd ship the carcass to a butcher to be dressed and cut up.

It wasn't strange to them if they could still recall times when they starved as they had a penchant for large families 30 years ago, and quite a few are still around that recall slaughtering dogs during the war for food.

We like thinking that culturally we're "better" than those that would eat dog, horse or still subsistence hunt and fish in old ways, but there are people both in Europe here in the U.S. who scavenge road-kill and will get od cuts from a butcher to save money, like sheep's head they'd boil and eat.

I'm half Japanese. Like a lot of people of Japanese descent, I grew up putting a raw egg and soy sauce on my rice, then stirring it all up until the whole thing becomes slimy and stringy. Trust me, if you didn't grow up eating it, you're almost certainly going to hate it, and one of these days I'm going to give myself salmonella doing this. I try to be careful when I do it. I buy the freshest eggs I can, then do the raw egg on rice with soy sauce thing only on that first day after buying the groceries. I'm still probably risking salmonella.

But it's got so much nostalgia. It's comfort food for me, dammit!

Also, most of the time I hate nattō, but every once in a blue moon, I actually get a hankering for it. It's supposed to be very healthy, but if you didn't grow up Japanese, I strongly recommend staying away from that stuff. It smells disgusting. From what I remember, most Japanese don't particularly care for it.

I'm also half Scandinavian. Theoretically, I should snack on pickled herring, but I can't stand the stuff. Bleah.

And yeah, the cultural biases for or against this or that meat are silly.

For example, Vietnamese will eat tendons and cartilage with their meat. To them it just adds variety to the texture. I tried it. I wanted to like it. I really did. I understood the concept behind it. It's not as if there is anything inherently disgusting about tendons and cartilage. It's just a stupid cultural bias and I couldn't overcome it. From what I understand, Japanese people also find it weird, so maybe my bias against cartilage and tendons comes as much from my Japanese side as my American side.

I once watched a Puerto Rican lady chew the marrow out of chicken bones while going um and ah like it was the best thing ever, yet marrow to me tastes weirdly metallic, I suppose cuz it's the base for red blood cells and hence has a lot of iron in it. Comfort food, to me, is heavy, like chicken soup with a cream base, or mashed potatoes and beef stew or oatmeal with milk and brown sugar on top.

But my German and Netherlander friends hate the stuff, prefer sausages and stiff bread, with less sugar than the French and Italian loaves I make here, for comfort food.

I miss the chocolate in Netherlands, and the pannekoeken hauses that literally just sell pancakes, of all assortments in toppings but the same thin large sheet on a Delft bleu plate that you can't find in most people's homes anymore cuz the owners sold the recipe for the glaze to somebody who fucked with it so what's left from after war is all there ever will be anymore in terms of the porcelain.

To my knowledge, there's one guy in Japan who knows how to make the thousand-folded steel for kitana, dai kitana and sho kitana, and he's getting old, don't think any of his sons want to learn it the hard, best way, with practice an your hands.

My Dad, my grandpa, for all they are not family, at least taught me drafting work by hand along with my shop teacher, so I'd know how to draw up plans for mechanics and wood work for the eventually when a computer either fails or shuts down.

I miss when people figured out if their parents can't drive them to the mall that they can take this bus, or use their bike as long as they got the map out t heck for the streets they needed.

But what really gets me is I miss not being an asshole for bringing up that learning from the ground up is better than just how to hit an icon tab on a screen, or using a drawing program versus actually knowing how to draw in order to be a cartoonist or graphic artist, cuz if anybody needs you to draw a real facsimile to a human face and you don't know anatomy and symmetry and geometrics you're fucked.

I have a bad fever so I took a few hours off work today and now just want homemade chicken soup I don't have, and a warm sweet bun or pannekoeken I can't make right now, and hot cocoa, but my stomach and head are icky and painful and my body sore so I just wanna lie down and feel better right now, damn it.

Side note: as long as it was humanely treated and killed first, and it's not human, I'll try it at least once, even dog meat if they kept it well and killed it quick and as easy as they could. The freaky bit about people is when they get the smiles on at the prospect of killing an animal, like my old roommate did whenever thy went deer hunting or when she killed a pig in Mexico for everybody's roast they were having, or when freaks get to laughing at how the pig, dog, or cow is screaming while they slow hang it. Eat meat, cuz that's fine, eat veg, that's cool too, just don't be an asshole to your food (Side, side note: I should make bumper stickers: Wanna argue your point, we'll tell ya the fallacy, Eat Meat, Eat Veg, just don't be an asshole to food, no, just cuz other people have the right to speak it doesn't mean they hate you, they just think you're wrong) lolz.)

Fever typing should be done more often, says future phd me, (only now I gotta go throw up, be back later).

 

[Underseer]

Your German and Dutch friends hate what?

I lived 3 years in Germany around the late 70s/early 80s, and from what I remember, once Europeans kill an animal, they use every part of the animal. I never tried brains, I'm squeamish about organs in general, but German blood sausage is quite tasty.

 

[DolphinDynasty]

Your German and Dutch friends hate what?

I lived 3 years in Germany around the late 70s/early 80s, and from what I remember, once Europeans kill an animal, they use every part of the animal. I never tried brains, I'm squeamish about organs in general, but German blood sausage is quite tasty.

They tend not to think of bone marrow as sustenance, or sweet foods as comfort foods, and don't like heavier foods. Some of them really dislike heavier bases to soups or sauces preferring leaving veg and fruit and oatmeal alone. That's what I meant by the things they tend to hate because to me a comfort food has to have heavier richness to taste or thickness to a sauce or sweetness to a topping.

Yes they do usually try to use every bit they can to a point, sometimes in some areas, as do some Puerto Ricans and some people from other Asian and European cultures. I was making the point that food taste/preferences/acceptances vary by not just culture and circumstance, but also by personal taste and preference/availability, rather than they do from people's moral modalities.

I would not eat a live, or tortured beforehand animal or human meat. But then somebody I know a few that told me once they weren't sure that if they were caught up in a situation like near freezing to death and miles from any shelter or food source that they might, if it came down to it, eat an already dead person. I'd not do so knowing how death works and being fine with it if it came between me surviving and also doing something like eating a tortured animal or human meat. Yet there are still tribes that, as long as the person is already dead and usually turned to ahs but not always, will eat their dead to absorb their "lifeforce" or abilities or memories, and to them this is considered acceptable, even laudable.

But the OP was on guilty food pleasures, and so I suppose this still fits as most societies would consider those tribes guilty of cannibalism and as such that they are abhorrent morally so. But I think if it is usable as food and they are starving or the person before dying gave consent, that it could be taken into account for others, just not for me because there's no way my brain can accept doing this.

 

[Underseer]

Another guilty pleasure. "Volcano Maki" from a local rotary sushi place:



It has cheesy puffs (Cheetos brand, I think) on top of them. It's the spicy kind. They say that you are never supposed to combine cheese with seafood. What combination of fish and cheese could be more horrifying than gas station spicy cheesy puffs on top of a gourmet seafood like sushi?

 

[WAB]

Well, U, I'm afraid I've got nothing but guilty pleasures when it comes to food:

I like eating cold soups and Chef Boyardee out of the can. I eat pork rinds and potato chips, oreo cookies, blocks of cheese, hot dogs and bologna sandwiches with tons of mustard, ketchup, and my beloved mayonnaise. I have been caught upending those plastic mayonnaise bottles and shooting globs of mayo into my mouth. I also love canned cheese: open mouth, insert cheese: instant happiness.

Though I've worked as a cook for most of my life, being at one time a chef's assistant at the Ramada hotel, I don't ever cook at home. I've developed a jaded and indifferent attitude towards food, and consider 'fine dining" to be a fussy first world fetish more than anything else: a form of self indulgence the rich allow themselves. I detest that arrogant and foul-mouthed Chef Ramsay, and tried to tell him, when he was at Reddit for a while, that I'd rather eat cold Chef Boyardee out of the can with a plastic spoon than eat his fussy, self-indulgent delicacies. I got no response.

His television programs were the height of egotistic, self-important, classist snootiness. Also very contrived. I'd love for that blowhard to have entered any of the kitchens I worked at. I'd have put my work shoe up his can and kicked him out.

ETA: Well, okay, I know he did have a legitimate concern about food handling and safety. But it's a statistical fact, or so I've been told by several RD's and sanitarians, that most food-borne illnesses are incurred at more high level restaurants than in hospitals, nursing homes, or assisted living facilities, because restaurants only have to deal with county inspectors, while the institutional facilities have to endure RD inspections, State surveys (which last up to five days), and sometimes Federal surveys, so they have to be extremely careful. The ironic shame is that cooks in restaurants are paid far more than institutional cooks. And institutional cooks have to be far more skilled in a wide variety of therapeutic diets: diabetic and hepatic diets, renal diets, 2 & 4 gram diets, as well as mechanically altered diets, like pureed diets. Ever tried to puree twenty puree plates at Thankgiving, with all the plate items as well as those pesky "fixins", in about twenty minutes? And all for about two clams above minimum wage? Give it a try...

No fair!

 

[DBT]

Italian potatoes, lately, diced potato, whole garlic cloves, rosemary, chives, lashings of olive oil, baked till tender and coated with melted cheese.....

 

[gmbteach]

Hot chips and gravy. Add a meat pie to that and I am in heaven.


Or a good lasagna.

 

[WAB]

Hot chips and gravy. Add a meat pie to that and I am in heaven.


Or a good lasagna.

Invite me over one day, gmbteach, and I'll make you the best lasagna (traditional or Tex-Mex) you ever ate. And, for some extra cash, I'll wash the dishes, and even vacuum your carpet. Wages negotiable.

Ah crap...you'll have to provide the plane ticket...

 

[fromderinside]

Ah crap...you'll have to provide the plane ticket...

rat-tat-bumpf ...... twang

 

[WAB]

Ah crap...you'll have to provide the plane ticket...

rat-tat-bumpf ...... twang

You're going on ignore too. You and the other troll, UM.

Objective scientist...


Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

You don't give a rat's ass about pollution, and you are a so-called Progressive! You are so full of shit, your eyes are brown.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Hot chips and gravy. Add a meat pie to that and I am in heaven.


Or a good lasagna.

For the most recent Super Bowl I made a Alfredo Lasagna, which to the best of my knowledge, is illegal in 14 states. It is a lasagna with Alfredo sauce and lots of cheese. It was incredible!

 

[DolphinDynasty]

Hot chips and gravy. Add a meat pie to that and I am in heaven.


Or a good lasagna.

For the most recent Super Bowl I made a Alfredo Lasagna, which to the best of my knowledge, is illegal in 14 states. It is a lasagna with Alfredo sauce and lots of cheese. It was incredible!

Aw, I want both of these now, but only have chips and canned gravy, so I'll wait till I get the rest together for an alfredo lasagna. never thought about ding it that way, but the tomato sauce in reg lasagna puts me off now, from acid reflux, so I could try it with the white sauce, an extra cheeses cuz more cheese is always good.

 

[WAB]

I am back to being (arguably) the most beautiful and also pathetic face ever put on canvas, Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni. Please note this portrait was taken while the poor girl was awaiting execution [by having her head chopped off] for taking part in the murder of her monster of a father, who raped her over and over as a very young girl, along with many other crimes.

This portrait is world-famous. It inspired Shelley to write a play, The Cenci, Nathaniel Hawthorne, which mentions the painting in his amazing novel, The Marble Faun, Keats, all the Romantics, plus a long list of other geniuses in the plastic arts, music, and literature.

 

[ZiprHead]

I am back to being (arguably) the most beautiful and also pathetic face ever put on canvas, Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni. Please note this portrait was taken while the poor girl was awaiting execution [by having her head chopped off] for taking part in the murder of her monster of a father, who raped her over and over as a very young girl, along with many other crimes.

This portrait is world-famous. It inspired Shelley to write a play, The Cenci, Nathaniel Hawthorne, which mentions the painting in his amazing novel, The Marble Faun, Keats, all the Romantics, plus a long list of other geniuses in the plastic arts, music, and literature.

So, what? Did they eat her after they executed her?

 

[WAB]

I am back to being (arguably) the most beautiful and also pathetic face ever put on canvas, Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni. Please note this portrait was taken while the poor girl was awaiting execution [by having her head chopped off] for taking part in the murder of her monster of a father, who raped her over and over as a very young girl, along with many other crimes.

This portrait is world-famous. It inspired Shelley to write a play, The Cenci, Nathaniel Hawthorne, which mentions the painting in his amazing novel, The Marble Faun, Keats, all the Romantics, plus a long list of other geniuses in the plastic arts, music, and literature.

So, what? Did they eat her after they executed her?

Big heart you got their Zip. What is it with you people? The nicer I am, the more you shit all over me.

I realize my post was off topic, but WTF?

Your smart-assed comment (no doubt only to get repped) exposes a deep sickness.

Answer please?

Actually, never mind. This place is a sewer. Ban me. Or don't. Who gives a fuck?

 

[gmbteach]

Vegemite
(strange I know)

On very fresh bread with butter!