Back to the pages ago discussion about deep frying various foods, my husband came home from a conference the other day and said he found a way to make ribs even worse for you: deep fry them. They ate lunch at Shorty Small's, where you can apparently get deep-fried barbecued ribs. I don't know why -- or how you eat them, exactly.

A Pastie (pronunced Parstee) is not a pie. It is meat and vegetables, in folded pastry. It comes originally from cornwall in the South of England and I have heard it was created as a lunch for miners who needed a convenient way to eat their meat and veg while down the mines.

Regional foods are so interesting. I've heard of pasties from reading the whodunit series (can't think of the author's name right this minute) where all the book titles start with "The Cat Who," but have never actually encountered one.

There's a weird squash-y kind of thing here in southern Louisiana called a mirleton, which looks kind of like a green pear but can't be eaten raw, is generally cooked either stuffed (like a green pepper) or cut up into a casserole or stew (like squash or, more often down here, okra). It took us quite a while to figure out why at a certain time every spring signs pop in yards, "Homegrown mirletons for sale." We figured they were food, but even after we bought one couldn't figure out what to do with it till we ran into it at a couple of restaurants.

Anybody else have any interesting foods that are pretty much local to their area? I'm trying to get some kind of conversation going here; I'm home recuperating from a cold this holiday weekend, VERY bored, and feeling pretty much all alone here online!! Talk to me, people!

Local to my grandmother's kitchen and loved by generations past (up until my own) were the famous peanut butter and tomato sandwiches. Second only in popularity were the family classic, ketchup sandwiches.

That's all I've got - I hope it didn't make you sicker.

Well, it's better than what my mom reports a boy used to bring to school for lunch back in the stone ages when she was a kid during the Depression, lard sandwiches. I understand people were poor, but.....ewww. Just.....ewwww.

Hey, MamaT, I'll play. (and sorry about your cold, btw. Summer colds suck)

Although these two items are not completely exclusive to the northwest Missouri of my birth, I've encountered a lot of people who haven't heard of black walnuts and black raspberries. Black walnuts have a deeper, sharper flavor than regular English walnuts - my husband hates them. But they grow all over the place in my hometown, including on my grandparents' farm. They were the default nut of choice when my Mom baked. And I was in college before I figured out that raspberries came in other colors besides black! I found a u-pick place in Connecticut last summer that had black raspberries, and while they are a pain to pick (more thorns) and deal with (more perishable), they tasted wonderful.

Black walnuts I've heard of, but I've never heard of black raspberries. They sound yummy!

And speaking of black berries, I remember when I was in sixth grade, we lived in Seattle for a year in an older neighborhood, and there was a vacant lot up the street (long gone, I'm sure) that was ten feet deep in wild blackberry vines. We'd go up there and pick all the fresh, huge blackberries we could eat. Darn, I'm making myself hungry just remembering them!

My dad used to go on and on about black raspberries. (He was born and raised in Ohio.) His favorite jam was black raspberry jam and we could never find it in Texas. I used to wonder if it was some sort of thing his faulty memory had made up. (He had brain damage from an aneurysm he suffered in his early 30s.) I finally found some of that Jam when I was on a trip once. My goodness, I finally understood why his mouth would water just at the thought of it.

Oh! Oh! Oh! I've got a better regional food question that I've needed help with for years.

Growing up amidst peanut butter and tomato sandwiches, I was also exposed to dewberries. Please, someone out there, tell me why I never heard anyone else outside my family speak of them! They were dark purplish-black, very very thorny and I want to say even quite bitter. The family loved them in pies. And for geographical reference, this was in South-Central Texas, between Austin and Houston.

Any takers on this one?

Black raspberries? oh, yum. I've got a whole thicket of them outside the side door. The thorns are mucho nasty though--the scratches I get harvesting almost always get infected, but the pain is worth it.

invisiblegirl, I first met dewberries in Alabama. I really don't remember much about them. I seem to recall that there they were hedgerow plants--nobody bothered to plant them, but if the plants appeared, the folks didn't try to hard to get rid of them. I'd never heard of them in Illinois.

Regional specialties, Mama Tiger? How about raisin pie? Standard short piecrust, filling is raisins that have been cooked and sweetned. Sometimes with sour cream stirred in, sometimes not. Lovely, but heavy in flavor, mouth-feel, and stomach-feel.

Dewberries? I've heard of them! From my childhood, I think, from my grandmother in Fort Worth. Can't say I've ever eaten them, but I've heard of them!

In fact -- I love Google! -- here's some info on them:

http://urbantaex.tamu.edu/Harris/Horticult...dewberries.html

and even more officially:

http://www.ams.usda.gov/standards/dew-blkb.pdf

and here's some dewberry poetry:

http://libweb.sfasu.edu/real/vol27/dewberries.htm

and last but not least, instructions on how to pick them without getting poked by the thorns:

http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf762577.tip.html

Maybe they're no longer called dewberries, but are called boysenberries today? Or else you just need to go out to country roadside stands and see if anybody sells them!!

Not local to me, but a friend was telling me about eating "chip buddies" as cheap college food -- essentially french fry sandwiches, with some brown gravy as a spread. Now, I like fries, but that seems a cruel thing to do to them. What can I say -- she's British.

When I lived in Oregon, they had marionberries. I've never found them anywhere else. In college (northern Illinois), we had Beer Nuggets....tiny squares of pizza dough that you could dip into pizza sauce or cheese. Again, I've never found them anywhere else. Pizza Villa had a truck that would drive around in the evening to all the dorms and you could buy a bag of Beer Nuggets off of the truck...you didn't have to pre-order them for delivery, although that was also an option.

Ahhh, food , my favourite subject. Weird foods, I've got plenty. I once dated a guy who's family topped hamburgers with peanut butter. The weird thing is I tried and it and was actually pretty good. My husband's family used to take a can of Habitant Pea soup and Habitant Chicken noodle and mix those. That I will not try!
My family was big into mayonnaise sandwiches. My brother in law loves Onion ring poutine, which is onion rings topped with cheese curds and gravy. For all my ottawa counterparts the craziest (and best poutines) can be had at the Elgin street diner, my favorite is the one with bacon and onions on top. Although, I had a fajita chicken poutine at the South Mountain fair last year that was really good.
See I told you I love food.
How sad is it that this morning I woke up and my first thought was "only four days till TAR teams, and oh yeah, the new Harry Potter!"

So much for that Memorial Day cookout today! I think I've officially lost my appetite. For the entire week.

What can I say, but hey, when you're family is poor you can't really be picky can you, oh except for the poutine stuff, that is drunken Sat. night food.

Food story: Yesterday, The Zzard and I decided to go hiking at a state park about 1 hour from here (here being the VA suburbs of DC) in hunt country -- lots of rich folks with horses and 800-acre spreads, etc. The hike was deemed "quite difficult" by the book I have, and we're looking for good training hikes for our 9.5-each-way hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (and back up!) 10 1/2 months from now. So we get there, and the park is hosting a strawberry festival. The altered plan became hike (and likely sweat through the shirts we wore in), buy t-shirts from festival folks, change shirts back at car, do strawberry festival activities.

Well, the hike was indeed quite difficult, so once we were back at the festival in our new t-shirts, we hit the food. There was a lot going on -- vendors, people's dogs, bagpipes, zydeco music, juggling, etc. -- and just as we got to the tent where they were actually selling strawberries, The Zzard said that he hadn't noticed any local strawberries for sale yet, and he bet these came from Watsonville, CA. Watsonville is the strawberry capitol of the country -- miles and miles of strawberry fields. If you ever drive from San Francisco down to Monterrey, you're likely to drive through or near Watsonville. This spring, all the strawberries I've had (and I'm eating lots of them this year) have come from Watsonville, including the strawberries I've bought at health food stores. So we got up to the tent and asked, and yeah, the strawberries came from Watsonville.

Some years, I go to a pick-your-own farm. That may be the only way I see non-Watsonville strawberries this year. It's a bit frightening. They have to be picking billions of strawberries there.

While at the festival, I bought a jar of mango/habanero pepper jelly. I'm still not sure how I'm going to use it. There was also strawberry/habanero pepper jelly, but I took a pass on that one.

I've seen actual straight habanero pepper jelly for sale here in Louisiana. A horrifying prospect indeed!

I remember when I was a kid and we moved to Walla Walla, Washington, my mom was mystified because all the stores advertised "Klicker berries!" and yet they looked like strawberries to her. Turns out a family named Klicker grew all the berries around there, hence the name. Wonderful berries, too, as I recall!

I remember one road trip to New Orleans, we stopped for the night in Memphis, and had a bit too much to drink. After travelling a little while the next day, we were really feeling the hang-over, so we stopped at a diner. Normally we get poutine to cure the hang-over, but since we were in the South it wasn't on the menu.

So my friend asks the waitress if he could have a plate of fries with cheese and gravy. She looks at him funny, and asks him a few times if he's sure that's what he wants. He assumes her yes, it's great, don't worry. She disappears into the kitchen, and after a few minutes the cook walks out, and checks out the order, just to make sure the waitress didn't write it wrong. He assures the cook, that fries, cheese, and gravy is exactly what he wants, and it's going to be great.

The food comes out, and my friends face just drops. There in front of him is a plate of fries with processed cheese slices on top and chicken gravy. It was horrible, but he ate it. We just laughed about it the entie way to New Orleans.


Unfortunately that's not my most disgusting poutine story, but this is polite company, so I'm going to skip it

Daria, I've seen varieties of pepper jelly used as dressings and spreads before. Mix your new mango jelly with some sour cream, cilantro, and lime juice (maybe even pineapple juice?) on a low temp in a saucepan and drizzle it over a tropical salad.

I've also seen a raspberry/pepper jelly loosely stirred with a brick of cream cheese and used as a nice spread over crackers.

Are black rasperries different from blackberries? mmmm.
Would you pay $50 for this?

I don't know why I got so curious about berries, but I went looking for pictures and black raspberries, dewberries and blackberries all look the same, to me. Now I need to taste them all, obviously.

Thanks for the suggestions on what to do with my hot pepper jelly. Cyndi appeared to be in her 50s, and we were speculating on what kind of living one could make from selling specialty foods as a solo operator. She'd driven about 3 hours to be at the festival, and we figured she probably sold 50-100 jars each of the two days. So then there's on-line sales, maybe sales to non-chain grocery stores . . . but it seems tough to do that as the only source of household income, and I'm assuming that's not the case. But I always wonder about vendors at crafts fairs and the like.

I had a college roommate whose father did the festival circuit, selling craft items that he made in the off-season. He had worked in the corporate world of finance for about 30 years and then retired. He was divorced, and pretty much just lived off the grid at that point. Plus, his daughter (my roommate) was supported by her mother and stepfather, and she attended school on a scholarship. He traveled from city to city in his motor home and collected income on the weekends at these fairs. As a very well-educated man in the world of finance, it's safe to say that he had a firm grasp on the cost-benefits of the situation. They were just much lower day-to-day costs than I think the rest of the world was accustomed to seeing in a man in his mid-50s.

But then again, gas prices in the early 90s weren't near what they are now, especially for a motor homes' tankfull!

Yes. Black raspberries are usually a little smaller than red raspberries, and they have a more "winey" flavor. Difficult to describe. They don't taste like blackberries to me, either. A little more subtle. Last year, I used most of my black raspberries to make black raspberry-sour cherry pie. Between pitting all the cherries and getting scratched by the black raspberry thorns, (and making the piecrust from scratch too), the pie really was a labor of love. If my dinner guests hadn't emitted cries of rapture, I would have been frustrated. Luckily, they did.

On the subject of strawberries, has anyone read Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness? (the same guy who wrote Fast Food Nation) Part of the former is about migrant labor in the strawberry fields.

What I hate is that even the local u-pick strawberries tasted like the Watsonville strawberries last year (that is, huge but with less flavor and cottony in the middle) U.S. consumers are starting to expect big berries as a matter of course, but I think the trade-off is taste.

What The Anglican said, about the difference between black raspberries and blackberries. Our black raspberries are tiny--the biggest ones are barely the size of my little fingertip. Even fully ripe, they're sharper in flavor than blackberries. As for boysenberries, if they're really the same as dewberries, then I've known about them all my life, and never thought much about them. I prefer mulberries to boysenberries.

I remember when I was a little kid, we had a strawberry patch in one corner of the yard--wild strawberries. Tiny little things, and more round than strawberry shape, but oh, so wonderful in flavor. The big store-bought ones weren't even in the same game, nevermind in the same league.

And another suggestion for the pepper jelly Daria, (although I don't know how well it will work with a mango-pepper blend,) is to spread it over a block of cream cheese, then nip off bits with semi-savory crackers (Wheat Thins are my favorite, with Triscuits running a distant second,) so that you get some jelly and some cheese with each cracker.

I agree, I prefer smaller ones that aren't so white in the middle. I've found that the organic strawberries taste somewhat better than the "regular" berries, but it's getting to be one of those foods that's lost flavor in the face of mass production.

Rabrab, I've got wild strawberries growing in my back yard, but I've been leaving them for the birds and squirrels because they're so tiny. Now I may have to try them myself.

Wild strawberries are the best for sweetness, followed closely by U Pick local berries. It's funny, growing up we never ate strawberries unless they were in season--my brothers and sister and I all worked on a small local farm picking berries (and corn and beans and etc in season) to send to the wholesale market in Boston. So when I go to a strawberry festival, I jolly well expect local berries. I ran into the same situation as Daria did when down visiting my sister in western Maryland the first weekend in May. It must be a Maryland thing, but I did not approve. The strawberry shortcake didn't even have real fresh berries on it, just that vile strawberry/jellylike topping instead. Bah.

Black raspberries are very different from blackberries--we pick them both. In fact as kids, black raspberries were far more common--that's what the local ice cream stand served, black raspberry icecream. (It also served--and still does--a strange local flavor called frozen pudding.)
We also, as children, had yellow raspberries growing wild in our backyard, and we also had a mulberry tree. Those are some yummy berries, if you ever run into said tree.
Local Food Oddities: Well, I live in the home of the Fried Clam, which some people might consider odd. I consider it soul food. The strangest thing, however, is a very regional dish called Corned Fish Dinner. It consists of cod thats been 'corned,' or lightly salted for a couple three hours, boiled and served with boiled potatoes, onions and beets. You chop the whole thing up until it's a bright pink hash, and then sprinkle rasher of fried salt pork over, and some melted salt pork fat syrup.
I know it sounds vile, but I promise you, it's delicious.

Wow! Moving to be near Hubby's folks in Central Pennsylvania lets me comment on three different topics in this thread at once.

Weird Food: Shortly after we moved here, Mom-In-Law is taking me and Hubby out to dinner. The restaurant lists as one of its specials "Turkey Waffles." "What in the world is that?" I say. Mom-In-Law gives me a blank look and replies, "They're just like chicken waffles, but made with turkey." Turns out that people around here take a nice innocent regular waffle and, instead of drowing it in syrup and berries, cover it with meat and gravy. It just looks so wrong. They have another dish called, in front of children, Shit on a Shingle. I can't even describe it.

Black Rasberries: Every year, Hubby says "Why can't you find us some black rasberries this year." I, having looked diligently for them every year, try to convince him that black raspberries are a just fantasy or inflated childhood memory and how could they be any different than regular rasberries anyway. He's going to be quite pleased to find out that he's been proven right.

Bad produce: We're very lucky, since there are lots of small farmers around here, many of whom are organic. We've bought a share of the produce in a local farm. They give us a bunch of local fruit and veggies every week. The difference between that and what I find at the supermarket is astonishing. For example, I never knew that celery had a taste. I first discovered this difference (local & organic v. grown only for looks) actually when living in DC and we started buying our stuff at local farmers markets, esp. the Sunday one in Takoma Park.

P.S. I love pepper jelly! My favorite way to eat it is the cream cheese method, but its really good on hot biscuts with butter, too.

I managed to get nearly two weeks behind on the boards (hiking trip, work stuff, not enough time to read through the posts before the black arrows disappear), so bear with me as I catch up. I also managed to break my ankle on the above-mentioned hiking trip, so I've been looking forward to a TAR-board fix to take my mind off of the suckiness of crutch-hopping (because unless stair-hopping is added to the Olympic schedule, there's no benefit to perfecting a technique to hop up the flights of stairs to my third floor apartment without killing myself...)

Loraxe, I haven't been to Kakabeka since I was a kid (driving through), but friends have gone and I think thought well of it and it's right on the highway, so it's not out of your way.

deva, apparantly I'm Pantsless Smurf with my screen name and Ichabod Smurf with my real name.

The 80s - I went from Cabbage Patch Kids to over-permed hair (what was I thinking?!?) in one decade. Forget the French Roll - I remember the 'cool older girls' in elementary school pinning their jeans along the seam with a whole row of safety pins to make them as tight as possible. Memories like that make me consider that maybe it was a good thing I wasn't cool...

food: One of the frozen yogourt places (Yogen Fruz, I think) used to have marionberries - they were good! If dewberries are the same thing as boysenberries, I'm a fan - one of my current favourite desserts is a boysenberry soy 'ice cream'.

The camp at which I worked had tons of chokecherry bushes/trees. I don't know if they're specific to the Praries or more widespread, but they're good, and a convenient snack while out on a trail ride with a bunch of clueless kids. They have a bitter/tangy taste, and make great jelly, although it takes a while to pick enough since they're small berries.

The waffle thing is new to me, nck, (and incredibly disgusting), but we have "shit on a shingle" here in Michigan too. It's basically just variations of creamed chipped beef on toast, yes? My aunt who loves up north says it's really common up there, and I remember my dad talking about having that for dinner when he was younger and they were poor.

It's funny, the area where I live has so many 1st-generation Yankees (I'm one) and displaced Southerners that you find a lot of traditionally Southern food both in restaurants and in the stores. You can get Moon Pies in some of the convenience stores and places like that here, and I've never seen that anywhere else I've lived except the actual South. I find Moon Pies disgusting but my husband and stepson can go through a box of 12 in about 36 hours.

My grandmother had grape vines along her back fence when we were little (yes, in Michigan) and they produced these tiny dark purple grapes that we used to eat by the bucketful. I have never had grapes that tasted like those anywhere else.

ETA: Ooh, Kanuck!, my sympathies. I've been in ankle casts three times in the past two years, and there's just no way for it to be anything but sucky, I know. I suggest a long knitting needle for when the itchiness becomes to much to bear.

oh no, Kanuck!! (Wait, if your name as an exclamation point on the end, do I need to add one as a punctuation mark?) An ankle break sounds very painful. How long will you be on crutches? Good luck dealing with those stairs....

That reminds me of another food item, JenEx. Have you ever had the stuffed grape leaves (Dolmathes) at any of the restaurants in Greektown? I think the best ones are at Pegasus. That's probably the thing I miss most about Detroit. Oh yeah, and the fact that my family still lives there. (Guess I should mention them.)

And nck, Turkey and Chicken Waffles were something I had to get used to when I moved to Pennsylvania, too. Well, that and Potato Filling--although I've really gotten to love that. For those who may not know, potato filling is basically bread stuffing (the kind you would stuff a turkey with), but made with potatoes. It tastes like mashed potatoes with celery, spices, onions, etc. Everyone has their own recipe and insists that theirs is the best.

Oh, Kanuck!, I'm so sorry! Hideous question: at the beginning or end of the hiking trip as planned? I know the trip ended once you broke your ankle, but how far into it did you get? I hope you're taking whatever painkillers are appropriate.

What are turkey and chicken waffles? I envision waffles with chicken and gravy over them, which is kind of gross but essentially uses the waffles as a starch. Or is this something worse?

Bummer on the ankle, Kanuck! I had foot surgery and couldn't walk for two months, had to be on crutches or in a wheelchair, and even though my front door opens to street level, it was great fun trying to go up the stairs to my bedroom with 150 pounds of overenthusiastic golden retriever and labrador retriever "helping" me. I quickly learned what great dog-whackers crutches make. Trying to negotiate crutches with living on the third floor? Serious bummer! Don't break your neck going up and down! How long will you be in the cast?

And nck, we used to go to the Takoma Park farmer's market every week -- we got THE best bread there! We actually started going straight to the bakery to buy it. My favorite was the sunflower seed bread -- okay, I'm making myself sad just thinking about it and how I'm a thousand miles away from it now!

Yeah, JenEx, I'm pretty sure that's it; to be honest I haven't examined it too closely even though I've been served it for 11 years now. Hubby and all his family love it. Guess it must be a childhood imprinting thing. Of course I love okra and collard greens, so I really can't say anything.

The cheapo food that I grew up on was beans and rice w/peppers and random veggies, which I'll argue is objectively yummy.

When I was a kid, most of the melons sold locally were grown by a family named Tittsworth. I kid you not. I'm 34, and I still have a Beavis moment whenever I see "Tittsworth Melons" on a sign somewhere.

Oh no, kanuck! Best wishes for a speedy and itch-free recovery.

So I went to a lovely Memorial Day parade in my home town. The parade, like the town, is very tiny-- brownies, boy scouts, fire deptment, elementary school band and high school band and a bagpipe band, which I love the most. There are services at the graveyard and the scouts put flowers on the veterans' tombs, and there is a 9 gun salute and somebody plays taps on a trumpet and then somebody out in the woods plays taps again, as an echo. I used to be one of the scouts putting the flowers on the graves, and here I was explaining to Hildygirl about what Memorial Day means. I had a little sniffly moment, I must admit. But being in my home town means getting to go to Benson's Homemade Ice Cream, home of the best ice cream in the world. (Think higher butterfat content than Ben and Jerry's.)

Kanuck!, so sorry to hear about your ankle break. As someone who has broken each of her ankles (I am officially the biggest klutz in the Northern Hemisphere), I totally empathize with the crutch-hate.

On other subjects:

Regional weird foods - Up here in the NW besides the marionberries that I believe labral mentioned, we have gooseberries and cloudberries.
Also, although I know they're from California, the only place that I've ever seen Satsuma tangerines is here in Seattle. I love them!

And regarding chicken and waffles? One of my favorite places to go in LA is Roscoe's House of Chicken n' Waffles. It's extremely popular there.

We have satsumas here in south Louisiana by the zillion -- they're very popular. Papa Tiger was thrilled beyond belief when he discovered them since he lived in Japan for a number of years and satsumas are the closest thing to a fruit he used to get there, where they're known as mikans. He used to eat himself sick every year when mikans came into season. Now he does it with satumas.

So did your yogurt snort cocaine with prostitutes?

Bwah! Bitch set the yogurt up.

I have no idea what this Poutine is, but where I'm from (North Jersey) this is on the menu at every diner known as "Disco Fries." Only, the cheese must be mozarella and the gravy must be brown. Most people smother them in ketchup as well. I'm not a particularly big fan of them, only because the fries tend to get soggy, and I like my fries nice and crispy. Another popular diner food (well, drink) is an egg cream, which is made with milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer. (Or milk with chocolate Shasta, if you can find it.) Some old friends of mine had a running joke -- "How do you make an egg cream?" "You rub it!" Ugh, groan. I'd almost forgotten that until just now.

The Anglican,

WHAT do I have to do to get me some of that pie?

Kanuck!, I hope your ankle heals superhumanly fast. My friend had to leave his condo in a cast for a fire drill once. 21st floor.

Now this would have done. Poutine is fries, cheese curd, and Gravy (or poutine sauce at some places in Quebec). So Mozarella would have been an OK substitute. Kraft slices though...not so much

My grandpa grew green grapes in his backyard, and they were the best-tasting fruit I have ever had. (My grandpa was a genius with his garden--and this was Las Vegas, even. Too bad I didn't inherit his green thumb--I've even killed mint, and it's considered a weed in these parts!) Anyway, I can't even look at store grapes, much less eat them. They are so tasteless and...well, yucky!

My weird food story isn't really regional, but specific to my cousin. He used to take the littlest, sourest grapes from Grandpa's vines, spread mayo on bread, embed the grapes, and eat it as a sandwich.

And I hope you get better soon, Mama Tiger, and you, too, Kanuck!. Having your ankle break on a hiking trip? I can't even imagine it. Good luck getting healed quick!

BWAHAHAHAHA!!! That's AWESOME, piper and mac. I think one of the only things I really miss about living in DC is the way I would always puff up with pride every time I thought about our esteemed Mayor. And the fact that we re-elected him POST-SCANDAL.

Oh wait-- that was nausea. Whoops.

And I luuuuuuuuuuuurve me some pepper jelly!!! In addition to the tried-and-true cream cheese approach, you can substitute it for mustard or oil/vinegar/Italian dressing on a sub or pretty much any other sandwich, and YUM. Just plain YUMMMMMM.

My new favorite thing, however, is horseradish jelly, which I discovered this weekend in Vermont while upstate visiting whereverthemom. It's like pepper jelly, except it's horseradish, and it is SO. FREAKING. GOOD. on crackers with cheese (in my case, Vermont garlic cheddar) or meat (we used pastrami). I had to pretty much arm wrestle wtm to decide who got to keep it when I left.

(Yeah, I lost. What? Woman's got GUNS.)

I can't think of any weird foods we have here (in Oklahoma), but since I grew up here, maybe they're just not weird to me. I love moon pies, for instance, but never thought of them as anything weird. Weird (and disgusting) is something described by the Estonian exchange student as meat Jell-O. I've fortunately never been served this or any blood stuff (pancakes, pudding, sausage). Those sound pretty yuck, too.

Cheap food served when I was growing up and we didn't have money I can talk about (although I didn't know we were poor at the time -- I thought we vacationed in state parks because we liked it, not because Dad's newspaper exchanged advertising for free stays in state parks; I found that out when I started working for a newspaper that also had that deal). My mother used to make a casserole with macaroni, hamburger meat, tomato soup and cheese all mixed together (macaroni and hamburger cooked separately first), then topped with pieces of buttered bread. You cooked it until the cheese melted and the bread toasted. I love this, but can't fix it at my house because my husband says it makes him sick.

On an entirely different note, our power went out yesterday at work (squirrel on the line) and now our phones don't work. All incoming calls are going to one of four phones, and no calls are going to the appropriate area. Only two outside lines are available, and inside calls are going the wrong places because all the extensions are screwy. Also, the servers are going up and down, so we can't really work either. Do we need a newspaper today?

Squirrel on the line? What did the squirrel do on the line that made the phones go out? That must be one hell of a squirrel--definitely much more powerful than the skinny little gray squirrels we have around here. Please, I really think we need squirrel details. Hee!

By the way, the hamburger/macaroni dish you described sounds very much like one my mom used to make when I was a kid. It didn't have an official name, but we called it "ground beef and newts". Yeah, I know how gross that sounds, but "newts" was actually short for "noodles".

I am very disappointed at the lack of weird food in my life.

Mr. Blevins and I had some menu issues when we started living together, but none of the foods we introduced to each other was particularly weird, though you'd think coming from completely different heritages, we'd have had some. I did end up trying chopped liver (out of politeness) when eating with his family once, but that while IMHO vile is hardly weird.

I guess the oddest food combinations I like are grilled tomatoes with french toast (apparently a Swedish thing?) and french fries with honey mustard sauce and smoked cheddar cheese, a heart-attack-on-a-plate eaten while working in foodservice and attempting to assemble palatable meals from what nobody ordered.

One my my grandpa's friends had a farm and made, among other things, pepper jelly. I never tried any as a kid, though.

I don't know about chicken waffles, but I can tell you all about chicken and waffles. Imagine golden brown perfectly seasoned crispy fried chicken, with giant fluffy Belgian waffles. Its a mouthgasm. Best ever are in LA at Rosco's Chicken and Waffles, but growing up on the east coast there were always a bunch of soul food restaurants that served up this culinary delight. My favorite as a kid was McDonald's Dining Room (not to be confused with the golden arches). Chicken and Waffles for $3.50 at Sunday brunch. Of course, my hips no longer permit me to consume this on a regular basis. It is a special occasion food only.