Whether it’s pig faces, crocodile penises, or coffee beans pooped out by a cat, I’ll try it, plus many more

Gruids (n.): The only bits of an animal left after even the people who make sausage rolls have been at it.
— The Deeper Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams & John Lloyd

When I was growing up in rural Australia in the 80s and 90s, there weren’t a lot of chances to really try something new when it came to eating. We always ate at home, my mother cooking every night, and besides the occasions when we ate spaghetti bolognese after the dish swept Aussie households in the mid-1980s, it was almost always meat and two or three vegetables or salad in the summer when dad took over the barbecue. We’d eat fish when he had caught some, but mum was allergic to seafood so we didn’t really venture into it much further, plus I hated the smell of fish markets, not to mention I once got locked in one as a small child, so I probably would’ve refused to eat it anyway. I also hated mushrooms due to the smell of them cooking and we never ate chili or anything spicy at all. Even if we were to eat out, besides McDonalds, KFC, and Pizza Hut, the only restaurant choices in my home town of Traralgon at the time were essentially just serving slightly more well-plated versions of what we were getting at home anyway. There was a Chinese restaurant that we never went to (although I loved getting Chinese food in shopping centre food courts when we visited the city), but you would never find sushi stores, or restaurants serving curry, tapas, or pho there at the time, the first two were just weird things we saw foreigners eating on TV to stereotypically comedic effect, the latter we had no idea even existed.

Fast forward to the late 90s, I had found a job and moved to Melbourne and for the first time in my life I was inundated with food choices from many different countries and cultures. During my lunch break in the city I could go get Japanese or Greek or Vietnamese or anything I wanted really, but it hadn’t been that long prior that the most exotic it had got for me was a dodgy kebab in front of the pub at a taxi stand at 5:00am. A few years later I found myself living with a Cambodian family there and dinner for them wasn’t remotely like what it was for me growing up; my job was to make the rice each night, but they would be eating a lot of soups and noodles, plus they also managed to make seafood and mushrooms taste really good, and they used a lot of chili so I became a lot more adventurous when I ate.
I met Anna in winter 2003 and I was introduced to Malaysian and Singaporean cuisine so when I made my first venture overseas the following year to those countries I tried everything while I was there; laksa, roti prata, fish head noodles, durian (one dish Andrew Zimmern, the host of Bizarre Foods, couldn’t even stomach) and despite one majorly embarrassing bout of extreme food poisoning that had me sitting with my legs stretched out on a squat toilet and then jogging back to my now in-laws place so I didn’t shit myself in their car, I loved all of it, particularly the stuff I had hated as a kid.

It was then that I decided to make my mind up on a dish after I had tried it and would give anything a go. In 2007 I moved to a small city in South Korea, then to Singapore in 2008, and since then we have traveled extensively around the globe, both of us trying what the locals eat, as well as attempting to find the more grotesque delights, and here are just some of them and where I’ve eaten or drunk them, I will try to include photos where possible as well:

Kangaroo and Emu — Australia
These two aren’t all that odd now in Australia, but we had something unique going on when I worked in the kitchen with my mate Owen at the Metropolitan Hotel in North Melbourne. Australia is probably the only country where it’s legal to eat the coat of arms, one consisting of a kangaroo and an emu flanking a shield, those two apparently a symbol of progress due to being the most recognisable native animals that are unable to walk backwards, thus we had the Coat of Arms Burger; a burger consisting of the usual lettuce, tomato, ketchup, and mayonnaise, plus a kangaroo steak and an emu steak to boot.

Snake Soup — Hong Kong
Like the Coat of Arms Burger, I tried the snake soup in Hong Kong years before I had started writing this blog, but I managed to recall it in a later post:

I guess the main highlight for me there was that I got to try snake soup. Snake is a bit like a chewier version of crocodile, but it’s still nice. If you haven’t had crocodile, imagine the offspring of a chicken and a fish.

I guess the iPhone hadn’t be invented back then and I didn’t have a tendency to carry a camera around in those days so I never managed to capture the moment.

Dog Soup — South Korea
Another one for which I have no photographic evidence, but as I mentioned earlier I moved to Daejeon, South Korea, a small city about 170 km (105 mi) south of Seoul, in mid-2007. This was my first time living overseas and I knew next to nothing about Korea so I did extensive research before I moved and discovered that dog soup, known locally as bosintang, was on the menu. Although not as common now as it was almost 17 years ago when I relocated there, there was a common belief that it made you feel cooler in the scorching summer heat among other claims so I decided to give it a try on my first day in town and it just tasted like really fatty beef. To be fair, the dogs used for the soup were ethically farmed, although in recent years there has been a campaign to stop the practice as a whole, particularly on moral grounds, but I think the main reason there could be an issue is that we don’t tend to eat carnivorous mammals. Others argue that eating dog meat is a part of Korean culture and should stay so who knows how this one will pan out in the future.

Snails — Southeast Asia, Europe And South America
Escargot isn’t really that extreme, I can buy them frozen in a store about a five-minute walk from our apartment, but that’s not the same as actually having them in France so that’s one of the first things we ate on our inaugural trip to Paris. In fact every time we’re in France we have escargot multiple times, including our most recent trip two years ago, and we both are always left wanting more of the chewy, buttery little things. What we didn’t realise is that sea snails are quite common in seafood restaurants in Belgium too, but they’re served completely differently, just in a watery sauce with some onion, leaks, carrots, and bit of parsley for garnish. They’re fantastic there as well, but chewier and you have to try to detach the little bit that I think seals the animal inside while underwater, which can sometimes be a little more difficult than it sounds. The sea snails we had in Barcelona, Spain, were just served with some oil and red wine vinegar and then when we were on the other side of the globe there were the river snails we ate in Lima, Peru, which were absolutely enormous and covered in chorizo and oil! In northern Vietnam it seems that snails must be rampant because in Hanoi we had them a few different ways including boiled, but also grilled in soup and there are discarded snail shells everywhere around those stalls! When it comes to Cambodia, we just bought a bag full of cooked ones and ate them on the go.
A variety of snails and ways of eating them:

Pig’s Face Stew — Guatemala
Before our stay in Guatemala back in 2016 we didn’t know much about the food there besides coffee, chocolate, and tamales, but one occurring theme when you travel to parts of the world where many people aren’t particularly well to do is that the food is fantastic! Often referred to as ‘peasant food‘, this is what you’re looking at:

Peasant foods are dishes eaten by peasants, made from accessible and inexpensive ingredients.

In many historical periods, peasant foods have been stigmatised.

They may use ingredients, such as offal and less-tender cuts of meat, which are not as marketable as a cash crop. One-dish meals are common.

When you’ve got to make the most of what you have, you need to find a way to make it taste good and when there have been endless generations trying to do so, they’re eventually going to succeed so we always make an effort to try one or two of these dishes every chance we get. On this particular occasion we found a restaurant in Antigua, with an almost unending queue, always a good sign, and they were selling a selection of soups and stews. If you’re a pig farmer and you’ve already sold off the legs and ribs, there’s not a lot of the animal left so when I enquired about one of the stews that looked really good, the response from the store owner was simple, “It is made from a pig’s face”. It seemed like that was what I’d be having for lunch that day and it was pork and potatoes, all thick and gelatinous from all of the ligaments and other gooey parts of the porcine smiley bits:

Insects, Bugs, Grubs, And Arachnids — Asia, USA, and Africa
It’s quite common to find people eating bugs all around Asia and we’ve even found them in Washington DC when we were in the US (naturally those ones were cheese and bacon flavoured). Our honeymoon was in Cambodia and fried tarantulas were on the menu in Phnom Penh, and many different bugs have been available in Yangon, Myanmar when we’ve visited, but cicadas are generally the most popular there. When my friend visited from Australia we went over to Bangkok, Thailand and ended up hanging out and drinking with a bunch of tourists from all over the globe, one of whom kept buying fried beetles, scorpions, and grasshoppers to eat with me in order to disgust her friends. It’s a well known fact that almost everything is eaten in China so when we were in Hangzhou we weren’t the least bit surprised to find almost every insect, arachnid, and even lizards on skewers in a local market, but I’ll get to what I opted for on that trip a little later. As for Africa, There we munched on grubs in Zimbabwe:

Hot Jellied Eels — England
Another one that might not seem all that strange, especially if you’re from the UK, however, there are quite a few people there that find them disgusting. On this particular occasion we were in London for Anna’s cousin’s wedding and were having a bit of a stroll around the city before the ceremony itself began. I’m a huge fan of The Mighty Boosh and I stumbled upon a pie and mash shop that was over 130 years old that also sold eels, instantly triggering a flashback to an episode of the show called Eels:

Naboo and Bollo go away to go to Dennis the Head Shaman’s stag party, leaving Howard and Vince in charge of Nabootique. The two challenge one another to a sales contest, each trying to sell their latest fads; Elbow Patches and The Indie Celebrity Radar, respectively. Later, while Vince is out to tag Pete Neon for his Celebradar, Howard is paid a visit by The Hitcher, who frightens Howard with eels into a protection racket. Howard proceeds to prostitute himself to a transvestite called Eleanor for the required €1,000, but when the Hitcher comes to collect the money, he decides to kill Vince and Howard anyway. Before being able to do so, he is shot by Eleanor. The Hitcher awakens, having been saved by the Survival Elbow Patch he had stolen from Howard earlier. Feeling dejected, he turns to leave, before being stopped by Vince and Howard, who convince him to perform a song about eels with them in the New Rave style.

Yes, all of that sounds a little odd, but that’s just The Mighty Boosh for you. Anyway, when I stumbled upon this store I immediately knew what we would be having, triggering Anna and myself to both sing this in unison (if you can’t be bothered with the full scene, skip to about 1:40 for the song):

We ordered two plates of pie and mash and had the choice of cold or hot jellied eels, we opted for the hot ones and it’s an understatement to say that they gave me the most rancid breath that even mint chewing gum couldn’t overpower:

Roasted Guinea Pig — Peru
Finding guinea pig, or cuy as the locals call it, while we were in Cuzco wasn’t difficult at all, it’s in most of the restaurants in the city. In fact, it’s eaten so much that people just have them roaming around on the floor of their homes, ready to be popped into the oven. We found a restaurant that specialises in guinea pig so I ordered a roasted one, as well as some alpaca skewers. Guinea pig just tastes similar to rabbit, although it’s served whole with the head still attached (I’m not sure if that’s the standard presentation), but alpaca is quite gamey, however, both went down well:

Offal — Everywhere
Liver is a common dish the world over, steak and kidney pie is a favourite, and most people have heard of haggis, but I’ve never been to Scotland so I haven’t tried it… yet. However, I have eaten an array of guts in many other places; here in Singapore there are many dishes that are made up of offal, such as beef noodle soup, the one I get coming with beef tendons and tripe in it amongst the brisket and beef balls (no, not those type of balls, but I’ll get to those later) and if you go to a chicken rice stall you can usually get chicken hearts and gizzards, labeled ‘viscera’ at our local store, the hearts being kind of chewy. Chicken heart and gizzard skewers are popular in Japan too. Pig’s organs are very common around South-East Asia, one dish in Singapore being kwai chap, a soup noodle dish that contains essentially all parts of the pig including the ears. In fact, there was a time when we were walking home and an old man in white gumboots said hello to me in the street so when Anna got a little curious and asked me who he was, she burst out laughing when I told her it was the guy from the kwai chap store at the local market. I guess I had been ordering that a fair bit. If you ever head to Myanmar when it’s a bit safer you can get Shan noodles, which are usually served with tomato, chilli, fermented beancurd and a generous serving of pig offal with curdled blood cake. A chicken variety is also an option. You’ll see in a photo later of a bowl of braised tripe we had in South Africa and in Brazil we got feijoada, a bowl of black beans with assorted pork parts, including feet, ears, tail, and tongue, although it’s a really heavy and salty dish, so you just end up feeling sluggish and thirsty afterwards, however, I definitely recommend the fried pig’s ears you get in Laos, don’t knock them until you try them:

Decomposing Leaves — Sweden
To be fair, the leaves were only the base for some smoked and dried reindeer broth, however that was just a drop in the ocean of interesting food we ate at Fäviken, Magnus Nilsson‘s former restaurant and one which at the time held the #41 ranking in the World’s Top 50 Restaurants, while we were in Sweden. I might as well post a picture of the menu itself too, which was only presented to us after we had tried each and every dish, and let you decide what you would be willing to or wouldn’t try (pictures of each dish are in the link for that getaway):

Tobacco-Flavoured Ice Cream — Hungary
We always knew about the salamis there being pretty good, but what we discovered in Hungary was just how many varieties there are and how often they are eaten so we had our fair share while we were in Budapest, but most people have eaten salami before so it’s not all that odd. What was a tad abnormal, however, was when we he had lunch at Bock Bisztró, a place that for dessert had what even they described as their “Bizarre Ice Cream Selection”, consisting of flavours such as sausage, cottage cheese, and tobacco. Surprisingly, it was the tobacco ice cream that we both liked the best and neither of us smoke:

Chicken Feet — Asia And South Africa
One thing that happens when you marry into a racially Chinese family is that it almost seems like their family and friends try to challenge you to eat whatever they believe will gross you out, but as you may have noticed, that’s not going to work with me. Some members of Anna’s family are still convinced that I don’t like durian, because the stereotype is that white people hate it due to the smell and they seem to take a great amount of pride in that, however, I have no problem with durian, but I just can’t eat too much of it, otherwise I get a stomachache. Anna’s parents on the other hand know that I’ll try anything and this makes my father-in-law quite proud when he has visitors around, treating me like a kind of culinary jukebox of sorts, people asking him if I eat this or that and the one that constantly comes up, mostly at his provocation, is chicken feet. In Singapore they are often served sautéed or in soup and he loves telling people, “He even eats chicken feet!” while putting one on my plate to demonstrate to the local guests to their amazement, me spitting out the tiny bones as I suck the gelatinous skin and meat off. Here’s one from my soup in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, when we were taking a friend from the US around South-East Asia (he wouldn’t try one, though), as well as bowl of braised ones we had in Cape Town, as well as that tripe I mentioned:

Deep-Fried Starfish — China
In the section about bugs I mentioned I’d eaten something a little strange in a market in Hangzhou, China and here it is; starfish. There were plenty of skewer options, such as lizards and seahorses, but I opted for a deep-fried starfish and instantly came to the conclusion that these must only be eaten for either sustenance or just because you can, because no person would buy these for the flavour, there simply isn’t any. If you’re curious about what eating a deep-fried starfish is like, just leave a piece of corrugated cardboard out in the sun for a little while and then have a bite, it will have almost the exact same taste and texture. Later that evening after finishing my dry skewer we went to a bar with live music where you could scan a QR code and put a message up on the stage behind the performers so that’s naturally what we did:

Frog —  France And Southeast Asia
The stereotype is that only the French eat frogs and yes, they do and they are fantastic, like the fried frog legs we had in a market in Lyon, but so do many other parts of the world. Here in Singapore it’s quite commonly served with ginger and onions, and fresh frogs are served pan-fried in Vietnam

Weasel Shit Coffee — Vietnam
This one is a bit of a misnomer, most likely because translating “palm civet” from Vietnamese to English is a tad more difficult than just using “weasel”, but if you want possibly the strongest cup of coffee you may ever have in your life, just head up to the north of Vietnam like we did. Vietnam is the world’s second-largest coffee producer, but unlike places like Brazil and Ethiopia, they don’t send that stuff to Starbucks, Vietnam makes their own unique coffee-based beverage, ca phe chon, from the same beans known as kopi luwak in Indonesia. Civet cats for some reason know good coffee so they dig out and eat the best beans which then ferment while their proteins break down as they pass through the cat’s intestines, their poop then being harvested to produce one of the world’s most expensive cups, one which is supposed to taste rich and smokey with a slight hint of chocolate. I’m not sure if I detected those notes on my palate, but I definitely didn’t feel tired any time soon after drinking it:

Braised Pig’s Trotters — South-East Asia And China
We all know that you can get almost any part of a pig served to you in Bavarian countries, but it’s also an option in most parts of Asia too. As I mentioned earlier, in this part of the world they probably fell under the banner of ‘peasant food’ and although I’ve eaten them in several places including here in Singapore, it’s in China where I actually have pictures of them. Neither myself nor Anna could read the menu so I can’t see from the photos what type I had when I got her to order them, although my guess is soy sauce, but when they arrive you just chuck on some gloves and start gnawing away, chewing through the meat and gelatinous sinew and tendons until you reach the bone, trying to get off as much that is edible as possible while avoiding the hoof. They taste great, but they are such a burden to eat, getting into all of the nooks and crannies that are a part of an animal’s foot:

Chili Buffalo Spine — Thailand
To be fair, the animal of origin for this one is more of an educated guess, as I bought it from a street stall that said it was selling chili ribs, but first we need to take this story back a few hours. A few hours prior to this particular dish while on a trip to Bangkok I had ordered a mala crocodile skewer from a stall in the Ratchada Night Market (don’t worry, there’ll be more crocodile soon) and for those that don’t know what mala is, it is an extremely spicy Chinese sauce made from Sichuan peppercorns and chili that is insanely hot, but the peppercorns also numb your mouth, and historically some believe it to be a hallucinogen. I have a high tolerance for chili and I’ve eaten mala a ton of times, but usually in an air-conditioned restaurant, not outside in a crowded, humid market in 32°C (90°F) heat, so on this particular occasion I was sweating profusely with dilated pupils, but that was just a snack.
The main course, however, would be when we saw people eating what appeared to be the backbones of some animal balanced in a tripod and covered in green chilies and it was being sold near a stall that stated it was serving ribs. We decided to order a smaller serving and it came in a bowl drenched in sauce and absolutely covered in the peppers that we soon discovered were chili padi, also known as bird’s eye chilis and measure at around 50,000 – 100,000 Scoville units, making them pretty damn hot, especially after my mala skewer. The meat wasn’t white so we definitely weren’t eating pork, which would lead us to believe that in this part of the world we were more than likely eating buffalo. I once more donned the gloves and again they were too small for my massive hands, but that didn’t stop me despite tearing one as I put in on. Besides getting it stuck in my teeth once again, one small error on part was that I accidentally inhaled a piece of chili that went up the back of my sinuses, causing a prolonged sneezing fit, the end result leaving me covered in sweat, grease, and snot. Still, next time I’m in Bangkok, if we end up at Ratchada Night Market again, I’m going to find those “ribs” once more, I loved them, I’ll just try harder in the future not to make a chili go up the back of my nose:

Crocodile Penis And Claw — Singapore
Our plan for Anna’s 40th birthday in 2020 was to go on our safari in Africa, but due to Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdowns, that would have to wait until a later date. Instead, while we were stuck at home I did a little research to find somewhere unique and interesting to take her, as things had slowly been opening up again in Singapore and that’s why when the day finally came I took her to The Dragon’s Chamber. While sounding kind of like a standard Chinese restaurant, this one had a little bit of a twist. To begin with it was a speakeasy where you had to enter through the door of a beer fridge in a food court and once inside they had some of the local standards, but their signature dish was the Dragon’s Claw, a whole braised crocodile foot served surrounded by fire. Obviously we had to get the signature dish, plus the foie gras slabs, but something else on the menu caught our collective eye as well; D*** Soup. We both knew it wasn’t going to be duck, and we were correct, it was a soup made from chicken and pork stock with chopped up crocodile penis in it and although it was Anna’s special day, I felt the need to order the soup just so I could say I had tried it. It’s fairly common to get crocodile meat in Australia so I had had it before and sometimes it can be quite tough if it’s not cooked properly, but the fiery foot was really nice, with all of the tendons becoming tender and sticky. As for the soup, crocodile penis is a lot like sea cucumber, but with a urethra and also kind of gelatinous, but no real flavour of its own so I guess that’s why it’s in the soup. To top it all off, I managed to buy a cap there that got a few second-looks when I wore it:

Calf’s Head — France
I’ve already mentioned the pig’s face stew in Guatemala, now it’s time for some calf’s head, this time in Lyon, France. The only reason we ended up at this particular cafe was that its name was my surname, Abel, so we decided to give it a go for what turned out to be a rather filling lunch a day prior to New Year’s Eve in 2021 on our first trip when we could finally travel internationally again. Abel had all of the good stuff I like and obviously we couldn’t order everything, but we did have to get the calf’s head. One thing I definitely wasn’t expecting was for calves to have really fatty scalps so the meat was encompassed with a huge layer of fat. It might not be fatty in the wagyu sense, but this beef was great, although a long walk and only a light dinner were necessary after that lunch:

A Bladder Full Of Chicken — France
If we’re going to have calf’s head one day, why not get a little decadent and try and top that the next at one of the world’s finest restaurants on the final day of the year on our first venture onto foreign soil in close to two years no less? We opted for another big lunch at Paul Bocuse’s restaurant, what was for 55 years a three Michellin star restaurant, but we would also need to eat quickly, because we had to be on the only direct train that day from Lyon to Nice. We ordered some starters and two mains, one being ‘Bresse chicken truffled cooked in a bladder “à la Mère Fillioux”‘, a whole chicken with truffle sauce cooked inside the bladder of an unspecified animal. It was about the size of a volleyball when it arrived and we didn’t have long to consume an entire chicken before our train departed, plus you don’t actually get to eat the bladder itself, they just somehow stuff the chicken inside there to cook it. We managed to finish most of it, but we were a little sheepish when the staff at possibly the most famous restaurant in France put the rest, as well as some chocolates, in a doggy bag to eat on the train. They also stashed our luggage for us while we ate too:

Balut — Philippines
Some people tend to think that this one is a bit of an urban legend, but I can tell you that balut is very, very real and I know this because I ate two of them in Dumaguete in the Philippines. For the uninitiated, balut is a boiled, fertilised duck egg, still with what was the developing embryo inside and they are sold based on how old they are, usually in a range from 14 to 21 days old. Our options when we bought them were 16-day, 18-day, and 20-day old eggs, but we were warned by the stall-owner that the 20-day old embryos were “a bit hairy”. Yup, those pre-ducklings were already sprouting feathers. We figured we’d go a couple of days earlier and opt for the 18-day old eggs, but they had run out so we went for the bald 16-day old option served on a plate with some salt and vinegar sauce, priced at a whopping ₱20 (US$0.38) each. Anna was a little apprehensive so I went first and after hitting it on the table a couple of times I was able to peel my egg, the viewing of the process almost making Anna physically ill and as a result I had to eat hers as well. This was after a pretty large dinner and duck eggs aren’t small either. Anna filmed me eating both, but due to her gagging as I peeled the first one, we only have decent footage of me eating balut number two. They actually aren’t bad, just imagine a boiled egg with a piece of calamari in it, but they don’t look pretty, that’s for sure:

Testicles — Jordan And The Netherlands
On our trip to the Middle East at the end of 2022 we were with some friends, one of whom knows her way around the regional dishes so we generally let her do the bulk of the decision making when it came to ordering, however, I wasn’t going to let her skip the stewed goat testicles in Jordan. To be fair, I think they’re generally only consumed for their soft, springy texture that is similar to eating the fishballs you find in Asia, because they really don’t have a whole lot of taste. We also unintentionally had testicles, this time lamb in dumpling form, when we were in Amsterdam recently as part of a tasting menu at an establishment called Kaagman en Kortekaas, a nose-to-tail restaurant that bills itself as ‘courageous cuisine’. We had a tasting menu there, what we ate wasn’t revealed to us until after we finished, and served among some far tamer dishes were those sheep ball dumplings:

Turtle Soup — USA
New Orleans unexpectedly turned out to be one of our favourite US cities when we were there last year. We know there’s been some great music coming from that town forever and my favourite band just happened to be playing there at the time, but people also keep talking about the food, however, when it comes to what many in the US tend to refer to as “great food”, I usually take it with a grain of salt, no pun intended. If you like whatever you are eating either overly sweet or overly salty, deep-fried, covered in what legally passes for cheese, and in a single serving that could in reality feed a family of three, then take any and all recommendations there. That’s not to say that there isn’t good food in the US, of course there is, but the standard fare generally doesn’t fall into that category, unless you’re eating the Cajun stuff in Louisiana. Turtle soup is a local specialty in New Orleans and so we went to Brennan’s, where everyone said was the best place to get it and we loved our spicy bowl with crab-like chunks in it, I’d happily return to New Orleans just for some of that again:

Raw Whale Heart — Norway
This was on the island of Svalbard, one of the world’s northernmost landmasses and a territory of Norway, when we went on our cruise around the Arctic last year. The dish was listed on the menu as ‘Whale Heart Carpaccio’, but generally carpaccio is minced raw meat (usually beef) with egg and spices mixed in, however, this was just slices of raw whale heart arranged nicely on a plate. I guess they could’ve gone with ‘Whale Heart Sashimi’, but that doesn’t really work either when you factor in that whales are mammals. Still it tasted good, as did everything else we ordered for dinner that night in one of the few restaurants in the small community of Longyearbyen, but either it was a tiny whale or a miniscule portion of the heart, because the slices were about the same diameter as a slice of salami:

Red Ant Egg Omelette — Thailand
Each year around the time of Anna’s birthday we try to plan a pretty epic overseas adventure. In 2022 it was our safari in Africa and last year it was our Arctic cruise, however, that took place a few weeks after Anna’s birthday, but there just happened to be a public holiday near the day itself so we hopped over to Chiang Mai, Thailand, for a short birthday getaway prior to the big trip. We had been to Chiang Mai before, but on that occasion it was for a conference and then I returned to Singapore while Anna had a girl’s weekend with her friends so I hadn’t really seen a whole lot of the city itself. I’ve already written about eating insects, but now it’s time for dishes containing their eggs and on this most recent visit we found ourselves eating in a place where there was an entire page of the menu dedicated to dishes containing red ant eggs:

Red ant eggs are white and of two types: ones which are small like a grain of rice, and larger ones which burst into a creamy, sweet taste in the mouth. These eggs are washed to remove the starch and then they are suitable for use in cooking. Popular Thai dishes that incorporate red ant eggs, include omelets, salads, soups, and curries, or they are roasted and eaten alone.

We opted for the red ant egg omelette and no, it’s not an omelette made solely out of ant eggs, because that would be either tiny or require a ridiculous amount of eggs that would probably leave the insects endangered. It’s just a regular omelette with some red ant eggs thrown in for good measure:

Well, that about wraps it up for the weirder and more exotic meals that I’ve had in my life, there are probably some others that I can’t recall as well, but there will always be more strange dishes in future posts as we continue our adventures. We have several trips this year to countries we’ve never visited before, plus venturing out into new areas of places we already have, some of them quite remote so I’m sure there’s going to be many peculiar items on the menu that I’ll be more than a little tempted to try.