Take me out for "special" local food

[Motokid]

Is there some food really unique to the area you live in that you would like to have a visitor from this forum experience? Something that really only tastes good in your area? For some reason you've tried it someplace else and where really disappointed?

If you visited me I would take you to a little seafood place just 20-30 minutes away so you could have steamed Maryland Blue Crabs. We would belly up to a long table that's covered in plain brown paper. Order very cold beer. All along the table are rolls of paper towels, wooden mallets, and metal nutcrackers. The waitress/waitor would the place a large platter of whole steamed Maryland Blue Crabs on the table in front of us. I might have to teach you how to break them open and get to the good parts. The mallets and nutcrackers are for the legs and claws.

What makes these things so wonderful is the Old Bay Seasoning that completely encrusts the entire outside of the crab shell. These things are out of this world, and nothing goes better with beer. A true delight to eat, and you'll get pretty messy while eating but nobody cares cause the crab meat is so friggin' fantastic. You eat these things with your fingers and the Old Bay gets all over the place....yum yum.....don't wear formal clothes, this is strictly a t-shirt and shorts affair.

 

[Wabbit]

If I don't wear shirt or shoes will they still give me service?

Those crabs do sound very good! I miss one silly thing from America that I can't get here.... it's.... CORN DOGS! haha

Anyway, hmmmm... nothing really good here I guess I could take you for fish and chips. Not exactly "nice" but you would not be the same gotten from any other place.

 

[jenn]

moto, you are a foodie!!! i love it.
i haven't lived here in long enough to know those diamond spots. but if i could take you back in time.....my family owned a diner, and just sold it recently. we had all the typical greasy spoon fav's but our specialty was the hot chicken sandwich. a standard everywhere i am sure, but our gravy was the best and the turkey was so moist and crispy crinkle fries. with a coke it was unbeatable.
and when i lived in japan, my boyfriend, satoshi, owned a yakimanju shop. yakimanju is a local food, really only available in the gunma prefecture. it is a steamed bun, covered with a molasses like soy based sauce then grilled over a low open flame. it is hot and sweet and sticky and smokey and you eat it with oolong or green tea. YUM!!!!

 

[lies]

Fries. I've never found any decent fries outside of Belgium and even inside of Belgium you have to look for the good shops. Also chocolate, pies, bread and cheese (Those some Dutch and French cheeses are great too). This may sound stupid, but the thing I look forward to the most when I come home from a trip is a simple cheese sandwich.

 

[Wabbit]

I read recently that your country has over 2500 chocolate shops! Mmmmmmm belguim rules

 

[lies]

That's possible. I live in a smallish community myself, but we still have two chocolatiers.

 

[Motokid]

lies, can you explain the fries better? Cause here in America we have french fried potatoes everywhere. Are you talking about fried potato strips? With or without the skin still on the potato? Do you dip your fries in something, or coat them with something?

In America the common thing is dipping them in ketchup, but people also cover them in vinager (spelling?). I've heard some people like dipping them in mayonaise (yuck). Some of our fries are cooked in the Old Bay seasoning I mentioned for the crabs. Most are just sprinkled with salt and dipped in ketchup from what I know about french fried potatoes.

Home fries still have the potato skin on them. Also refered to as boardwalk fries in some places.

 

[Wabbit]

All I wanna say is "French" fries were invented in Belgium

Oh, and croissants isn't French either

 

[RitalinKid]

CORN DOGS!

Yeah, my girlfriend's roommate is a corndog lover, and I have to admit they're pretty tasty.

My food would be fried catfish and hushpuppies. I've tried catfish and hushpuppies in a lot of different places, but my home town has the best. The hushpuppies are huge fluffy rusty orange nuggets of pure fried goodness, and the catfish is somehow light and moist with just enough crunch. Everywhere else, hushpuppies are these little hard brown things, and catfish fillets are just dried up, shriveled morsels with more batter than meat. Pair the fillets up with tartar sauce, and now you're talkin'.

Where I live now has a great burger joint. It used to be a real seedy place. The floor was uneven, and it wasn't by any standard clean. Food was served with no gloves. You would see your food coming to you, and an ungloved thumb would be clamping your burger. For fries, they just dump the frier onto your plate, and they only had two friers, so the plates came out two at a time. The burgers were huge and just drenched in grease. I can proudly say that I ate the double with bacon and cheese and cleaned off the fries. What can I say? I had just worked out! Give me a break! The place is still open but in a new building with new management. It doesn't really matter because the quality is still great, the portions are still close to the same, and when you walk out after lunch, you still smell like grease for the rest of the day.

We also have three great barbeque places, and I think good barbeque is hard to find. One place is known nationally because everytime ESPN comes to town, Lee Corso talks about it. We have another place that the health department doesn't know about, and they make barbeque on Thursday through Sunday. Great place. Great barbeque. Nevermind the molding carpet or the indoor roasting area that is nothing more than cinder blocks surrounding some coals covered by a piece of what looks to be tin.

 

[novella]

Yes, Belgian chocolate is my favorite! On special occassions I get chocolate from Leonides chocolatier in NYC, which is flown in fresh from Belgium every day.

I live in a dairy-farming town, so that's what we're known for. Best quality ice creams, milk in bottles with the cream on top, local cheeses. Sheep, goat, and cow's milk.

A NY-area treat the uses milk is the chocolate egg cream, which has neither cream or eggs and is great. Fill a glass halfway with milk, add big squire of U-Bet Chocolate Syrup, stir, fill to rim with plain seltzer. Like an ice cream soda with none of the calories. It's one of those things that's way better than it sounds.

 

[lies]

lies, can you explain the fries better?

Well, I'll try.

Ideally, this is what fries should look like. They look a bit greasy in that picture, but the greasiness really depends on where you get them. Now before I go on, I have to warn you that there's a difference between the fries you'd eat at home and the fries you'd get at a shop. The fries you make yourself are a replacement for potatoes (mashed, regular or croquettes) and are served with steak or whatever meat that strikes your fancy. The fries you get at a shop are an entire meal (though some people get a burger, a saté, or whatever to go along with it) and can be served like this (that's our prime minister, by the way) or like this. As you can see in the last picture, you're free to choose whatever sauce you like to go with the fries: mayonaise, ketchup (curry or regular) or something called "tartare", are the most popular, but there are plenty of others: sauce andalouse, shaslicksauce, cocktail sauce, stewed meat sauce, etc. Usually they throw quite a bit of salt on there for good measure, before adding the sauce.

I'm a vegetarian myself, so my choices when going out for fries are rather limited (though some shops serve egg rolls or vegetarian burgers too nowadays), but I still love fries with a passion.

 

[Motokid]

jenn: I don’t know if I’m a “foodie”, but we all have to eat. Every one of us eats, and some regions are defined by their foods. New York City has some unbelievable reputation for it’s pizza (they say it’s in the water), but then there’s Chicago deep-dish pizza. I have a friend in San Francisco who raves about Dungenous Crabs (spelling?), Maine of coarse has it’s lobsters. I’m just wondering about other parts of the world since I’ve never really been outside America, and I’ve never really been too many places in America either.

If none of the “Philly” crowd speaks up soon I’ll enlighten you on a few more Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA specialties.

Ritalinkid: I'm on my way dude....I've been searchin for fried catfish for many years, and hushpuppies are freakin' awesome when done right. The best I've found where at The Sea Captains House in Myrtle Beach ,S.C.

 

[Wabbit]

Mmmm, yeah hushpuppies are good too

 

[novella]

If none of the “Philly” crowd speaks up soon I’ll enlighten you on a few more Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA specialties.

.

I had a boyfriend from Philly and he was always on about how he missed ice cream and pretzels (together) and cheese steak sandwiches. (When he wasn't on about the Phillies and the Eagles . . )

 

[direstraits]

Can you guys take spicy food? I mean really spicy stuff with chillies/curry? We're not talking small time chilli sauce in bottles here. If you can take it, then the whole new array of food is immediately open to you if ever you come here.

We've something here called nasi lemak, which basically rice cooked with coconut milk (making the rice really tasty), there's curry anchovies (this is cooked separately with onions as well), cucumber, peanuts (not the huge variety, just groundnuts), optionally with fried chicken drumstick, fried fish, whatever. All in one dish. And there's this guy very near where I live who makes the best nasi lemak in the world.

Guess I'll have to take you there and for you to experience it yourselves.

There are also loads of other stuff as well, but for something really really good that quick and fast, it's nasi lemak for me.

ds

 

[lies]

We've something here called nasi lemak, which basically rice cooked with coconut milk (making the rice really tasty)

Some foods need to be spicy, but sometimes too much is too much. I've noticed that coconut milk can neutralise that.

 

[novella]

ds,
Yes! I too love very spicy food. My English hub got me into Indian cooking years ago (go figure). His family also lived in Ceylon in the 50s (before he was born), so they pushed the envelope with spiciness at home. His mom makes great nasi goreng.

I so want to visit Kerala and eat their fish curries. My spice rack is fillied with different chilii powders, dried chillies, dried prawns, cardamom, fenugreek, cumin, turmeric, all those wonderful things. I used to shop in an Indian/Pakistani/Asian neighborhood in NYC called Jackson Heights where they have the most fantastic food.

Today I'm going to soak a whole, skinned chicken in spiced yogurt and roast it on high heat, a whole-chicken tandoori! With sambals and papadum and a veg curry. Now you made me hungry.

 

[Wabbit]

OK, I thought of something!

It's something silly but it's so yummy. In central London there is a small kiosk that serves various French savoury and sweet pastries. They do the BEST most WONDERFUL croissant there. It's filled with 2 different types of cheese and bacon

 

[direstraits]

lies - uh uh, you don't want to neutralize the spiciness, you want it hot! Trust me on this, while it doesn't reach the 'so-hot-I'll-drop' level of spiciness, you want to feel something while taking it. There are types of food here that I won't eat without chili or curry. Oh, and the coconut milk, called santan, used in making the nasi (which is rice in Malay, btw) doesn't help in abating the spiciness, I think.

novella, you said nasi goreng! We've got the chinese version of the nasi goreng, which is just fried rice, cooked with corn, green beans, slices of pork/chicken, prawns; and the malay nasi goreng, which is oftentimes cooked with chili. They are served differently, preferably with plenty of sambal (your sambal may not be my sambal, though). I've seen "nasi goreng" while I was in Geneva, and I didn't dare to try it. And I have a special place for nasi goreng too! I just hope it's still there.

And I have a place for Indian food too. The dish (if it can be called that) is called colloquially as Banana Leaf Rice (I'm not making this up), and it's so called because it's served on a banana leaf, no plates. You eat with your hands, and when you finish you fold the banana leaf upwards away from you. Plenty of curry chicken or curry mutton. Heaven.

ds

 

[jenn]

It's filled with 2 different types of cheese and bacon

bacon is an oft over looked condiment. just name a food that is not improved by bacon!!!!

moto you are a foodie. it's a good thing. you have an appreciation.