I get to watch a lot of TV. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine. I particularly enjoy shows where I get to learn stuff, so you can imagine I watch a lot of HGTV, Discovery Channel, TLC, and the Travel Channel. Inspired by shows such as No Reservations and Bizaare Foods, I decided to call up a small group of my most adventurous friends to have a “Weird” Food Dinner Party at my house. I’ve toyed with the idea for a number of weeks, bouncing the idea between friends, when I finally put a stake in the ground and said we’re holding this today!
As we called our friends to invite them over, Sammy and I had to set a few ground rules:
- One dish per person, minimum. Bring the “weirdest” thing you can think of.
- You had to at least try everything.
- You couldn’t say what you brought until after we ate it and talked about it a little bit.
With those simple ground rules, the stage was set and all we had to do was wait until the players showed up to play their parts. That being said, here are a series of photos from that night with my own thoughts regarding the dishes. I must warn you that some of these foods are truly for the adventurous. Try not to puke on your keyboards.
Pork Pulutan
This dish was brought over by my buddy Joey. He didn’t remember what the dish was actually called so I’m just naming it Pork Pulutan. It’s a Filipino dish and as the name would suggest, it’s made from pork. Pulutan is tagalog and is loosely translated as “picked up”. Basically, this is finger food; you eat it with your hands. Not necessarily a main dish, this is more in the vien of tapas, if you will and meant to be consumed when drinking.
Since I don’t know exactly what this dish is called, I can only guesstimate how it’s prepared, but I’m pretty sure this is just pork skin pulled off of a lechon, chopped into little bits and tossed with a sauce made from liver. This is an extremely flavorful dish, super high in fat and cholesterol, that has a very chewy sort of texture that may be off putting to a lot of folks. I thought this dish was pretty damn good but you just can’t eat a lot of it if you want to live a long and prosperous life.
Picked Pork Skin Salad (I don’t remember the real name)
This dis was one of three that Jason and Crystal brought over. It’s a Mexican dish that they sort of described as like a ceviche.
The pork skin is basically taken from the pig right after slaughter and pickled, there’s no cooking involved. Crystal was saying that in Mexico, it’s not uncommon to be served this dish and find the bristle still attached to the skin. Gives it a little added texture, I suppose.
They served this pickled pig skin is tossed with diced tomatoes, onion, garlic and peppers and served on a tortilla chip and garnished with sour cream and Tapatilo (hot sauce), if you so desired but I believe the “authentic” way to serve this dish is on a tostada. The pickled pig skin has the look, texture and flavor of jelly fish. I’m not into pickled food but this was tasty and fresh.
Chicharrón Prensado (I don’t remember the name but I think this is it)
This is a pretty simple dish made from chicharrón, or deep-fried, seasoned pork rind. Normally, chicharrón are light and crunchy (the rind type, anyway) but in this dish, they are much, much softer and probably closer to their original texture.
From what I remember, Jason said her prepared this dish using chicharrón and cooking it with a green chili sauce, or salsa verde. This is another soft and chewy dish where the texture may be very uncomfortable with people. The flavor is rich but tempered by the green chili sauce. I believe this is supposed to be served in a hot gordita. If you are able to get past the extremely chewy and soft texture, this is a very good dish. My mom makes something similar but uses Filipino spices and adds bittermelon as well.
Nopales
Nopales is a dish made from the pads of a cactus. As with the chicharrón prensado, it’s a stew. The cactus is cut up into smaller strips and then stewed with onions and other spices. This happens to be a specialty of Jason’s so he didn’t divulge all his secrets. That’s a good thing as if he taught me how to cook this, I’d never have to invite him to the house again.
The flavor is slightly tart but their texture varies greatly depending on how you cook them. They can be slightly crisp or soft and runny like snot, like okra. This is actually a very good dish, flavorful and spicy, but some people can’t get past the texture of the cactus. Too bad, more for me!
Deep-fried Stuffed Intestine
This was the dish my wife brought to the table. She didn’t actually cook it, it’s take out. Still, it qualifies as “weird” food so we’ll allow it.
I believe the intestines used are cow intestines and they are stuffed with a stalk of green onion before they are deep fried. While simplistic in execution, the prep time for this dish may be lengthy as you will need to thoroughly clean out the intestine of it’s original contents before stuffing it and frying it.
This dish is has a crunchy exterior and a chewy interior that is punctuated by the mild bite from the green onion. It is savory, fatty and oh-so-good. Many of the people at the table compared the flavor to duck. Sammy’s nephew loves this dish but only because he thinks it’s duck. If we told him what it actually was, he’d never eat it again.
Pinapaitan
This was the dish I contributed to the dinner. It’s a traditional, north Filipino dish called pinapaitan (aka papaitan). This loosely translates to “make bitter”. This is a dish that I grew up eating and I love it. It’s a rich and savory dish that can be face-crushingly bitter (depending on who makes it) but I made this dish more balanced.
This is poor people food. People used whatever meat they could get their hands on, most often water buffalo or goat. In my version, I used lean beef, pork liver, and beef stomach seasoned with diced onions, garlic and ginger. As I mentioned earlier, this is a bitter soup and the bittering agent I used is bile. Bile is an incredibly bitter substance our bodies make and secret into out intestines to emulsify and aid in the absorbtion of fats. It’s natural color is green. In fact, if you are ever sick to the point where you’ve thrown up so much your stomach is empty yet when you puke but your vomit is all green and bitter tasting? The green and bitter tasting is bile. Learn to love it. Embrace it.
To balance out the dish, I use vinegar. Two things surprised me the most when making this dish. First, it was waaay easier than I though. Second, the sourness of the vinegar, when juxtaposed against the gamey, stomach-churning aroma and bitter flavor of bile, brings out a sweetness to the soup.
David, one of our guests, thought the soup tasted so good and just inhaled the contents of his bowl. His view quickly changed though after I told him what the secret ingredient was. Crystal, Jason’s wife, is not a huge fan of bile but tried the dish anyway.
Blood Pizza (The folks who brought this couldn’t accurately translate the Vietnamese name of this dish into english and Blood Pizza was the closest thing they could find)
In my opinion, this was the most adventurous dish we had at the table. Many would argue the Pinapaitan was but just based on look and texture alone, this tops the cake.
Blood Pizza, as it was called, is actually a thin layer of coagulated duck’s blood spread over your serving dish. This is garnished with a mint, some peanuts and a sesame cracker and served with additional spices you can add to flavor. From how it was explained to me, this is another “drinking dish” to be picked at while downing a few brewskis with the homies.
What surprised all of us was just how red the blood was. It was a seriously bright red. If I didn’t tell you what it was and you just looked at the picture, you might think it was some sort of vegetable pureé. David didn’t tell us how it was prepared but know that the blood was not cooked. Not. Cooked.
As horrific as the dish looked, it wasn’t half bad. I expected this dish to be tinny, iron-like but the flavor was very mild and difficult to describe. The texure varied from gelatinous to straight runny. Definitely not for the faint of heart.
Bun bo Hue
Bun Bo Hue is a Vietnamese noodle soup that is as similar to the ubiquitous Pho as the night is to day. Bun Bo Hue is a more similar to Thai and Cambodian soups in the use of lemongrass and spices. The level of spiciness of the base soup has much more heat, I believe, and more often than not, this dish is served with more questionable meats such as oxtail and pig knuckles.
One of the special ingredients I like most about this soup are the blocks of pig’s blood that have been coagulated into a cake looking thing. The blood is a very dark purple-ish brown in color, has a texture similar to a soft, yet crumbly liver and tastes… well, tastes like cooked blood.
By far, the best Bun Bo Hue place in San Jose is located in this little strip mall where a Taco Bell was once the “anchor” business. The Taco Bell is still there but there are much better restaurants to eat at now. While not listed as a traditional meat, ox penis (yes, I did just write ox penis) is often used and is featured at this restaurant that specializes only in this dish. In the above photo, you can see a bit of ox penis being held in the chopsticks. Ox penis has a flavor and texure very simlar to tendon, only slightly more crunchy.
This is a great soup and you can order it from many places sans penis. Although I recommend the “schlonged” version as the more authentic version.
Rambutan
For dessert, my wife brought out some fruit. This particular fruit is called rambutan and is related to lychee and longan. They look like hairy balls, luckily they don’t taste like it. While popular in Asian countries, rambutan are expensive here because they all have to be imported. Our climate isn’t suite for growing the unless you go all hydroponic.
Like many fruits, you do not eat the skin. The spiny, “hairy” skin can easily be broken open to get to the fruit within. The actual part you eat is grey-ish white in color and has a soft texture. Depending on when you harvest the fruit, they can be really sweet to only mildly sweet. The texture is soft to the touch but a little slimy in the mouth.
So there you go, a rundown of all the dishes we ate at the inaugural instance of the “Weird” Food Dinner Party. What better way to celebrate the Inauguration of a new President than through an inauguration event of our own? Everyone who showed up for dinner tried everything, even if only a little bit. We’re all looking forward to the next session and I have a few more dishes up my sleeve. If we’re going to expand this by inviting more people, I suggest the following rules:
- Everyone should bring a dish. Bring something you genuinely like to eat and not something just for shock value.
- Everyone must try everything on the table. No exceptions, unless you’re deathly allergic. The whole point is to try new things and share thing with other people. If you’re not down to eat everything then you probably shouldn’t show up.
- No one can reveal anything about the dishes until the very end. We should all sample the dishes on their own merits before we let our personal preferences and filters change the way we viewed the dishes.
If we follow those simple rules, I think we’ll be fine. So who’s in?
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