The Eggs with Legs

Today our balut arrived! I admit, I was half excited and half nervous as I was waiting for the postwoman to bring it. After the durian incident I wasn't so sure I trusted my own judgment and curiosity any longer. Before it arrived though, we went to an asian grocery in Chinatown called Welcome Foods. I heard they had Grass Jelly and some nifty drinks that I wanted to try so we thought we'd stop in and check it out. We ended up getting the grass jelly, and several drinks. The drinks included Basil Seed drink, tamarind juice, grass jelly drink, milk peanut, chrysanthemum tea, black soy milk, congee drink, white gourd juice, pennywort, and birds nest drink (yes with real birds nest). The balut arrived shortly after we got home, actually when we were pulling out of the driveway to go get batteries for the camera she came. I took the package with us to the store and amused myself with thoughts of what would happen if a thief stole the package from the car only to realize once they got home that it was balut eggs. When we came back home I boiled some water with a generous amount of salt. In the meantime we wanted to see what the inside of one looked like raw so we cracked one and put it in a pot in the backyard. Mason's cat came over to inspect and ended up eating the entire thing. I was relieved that the duck was much smaller than I had feared. Still, watching the cat slurp up and devour the fetus made me wonder if I would have the nerve to do it after all. Unfortunately this occured as I was putting the batteries into the camera so I don't have a picture of it for you. I decided to pop open one of my drinks to go with the balut. I chose the basil seed drink. I read the ingredients and it listed "basil seed, sugar, honey, banana flavor". It tasted a bit unusual at first, but not bad at all. The only strange part was the basil seeds floating in the drink. They were tiny seeds, but were in a thick, clear, chewy, jelly like bubble. When you took a sip dozens of them entered your mouth for you to chew up and swallow. Interesting. When the water was at a full boil I gently added the 19 remaining eggs (we could only buy in boxes of 20 and no less) to the water and set the timer for 15 minutes. Soon the timer dinged and Mason called out to let me know they were done. I turned the burner off, poured out the boiling water and gently cooled them with cool water. Mason noticed one was cracked already so we decided to peel it and see what we were dealing with. The first thing I noticed was there wasn't any "soup" inside. The soup is the liquid inside the egg you are supposed to slurp up after making a small hole in the top of the egg, before you peel it. This was as dry as a desert inside. I thought perhaps it was because it was cracked though and maybe the soup leaked out before we peeled it. Mason looked at me and questioned "will I be the first to try it?". I watched closely as he took his first bite. He went straight for the duck. He paused and chewed as I eagerly awaited his opinion. "It tastes like...a hard boiled egg". He popped the rest into his mouth, only to remember the warning about the inedible piece at the bottom. Out that came and was discarded with the peeling. It was my turn. I was the one who wanted to do this, right? Wasn't it my bright idea to try all sorts of strange and unusual food? I've eaten things way worse than eggs before. I can do this. I told Mason to bring the camera outside to photograph me eating my egg in the better natural lighting. I grabbed my egg, a bag to put my peeling in and all the courage I had inside me, and walked out the back door. As I peeled my egg I told Mason "this really isn't any different than eating duck and an egg at the same time, right?". He just gave me a strange look. What can I say? I am a Gemini, I am allowed to both want and be scared of something at the same time. I noticed that my egg also had no soup inside. I was looking forward to eating my balut the correct way, slurping the soup first, but alas mine had nothing to slurp. I took my first bite, going for the yolk instead of the duck at first to sort of ease my way into it. To my pleasure, it did indeed taste like a regular boiled egg. I added some salt on top, which I had forgotten until that point and went for another bite. "Oh eat the duck, sissy!" my husband called out. "I'm getting there!" I whined back at him, eyeballing the feathers now emerging from my egg. I took another bite. Nothing left but ducky now! Some foods are better eaten quickly and not stared at too much. I wish I had remember that saying when I stared down at the duck head in my hands below. I pulled off a bit, looked down and it was a tiny leg and foot. Oh well, here goes. It was surprisingly soft. I took the last bite into my mouth and chewed. Not so bad. I was expecting to feel the feathers tickling my tongue or the crunch of the beak, skull and bones on my teeth but no. It was just like eating an egg, only with more texture and a richer taste. Aside from the appearance, which would rate a 10 on the strange food scale, the taste and texture were not very weird at all. My daughter Miaoxin was with me and decided she wanted an egg too, so I went inside and grabbed her one. I peeled it for her and took a photo of her holding it, but once she got a good look she started saying "No, I don't like ducky egg! I don't want!" Girl, you ate durian with a smile and balut grosses you out? Have priorities! Mason took her egg and finished it off. I went inside and called out to all the kids "Who wants a hard boiled egg!?". Immediately my sons Jacob and QiQi came running. Jacob began to peel his then looked at me sideways. "What kind of eggs are these?" he asked. "Duck" I smiled. I wasn't lying. He took a bite and quickly realized there was a prize inside this egg. He paused for a moment, shrugged his shoulders and ate it anyways. Gage came downstairs in time to find out that it was balut before peeling one. He passed on eating one. QiQi happily grabbed an egg. It took him longer to peel his but once he did, he had no qualms about eating it whole. After the second bite or so I noticed the duck fetus go into his mouth. Knowing a good photo op when I see one I called out to him to open his mouth. Mason said "He doesn't even know what he's eating!". I showed Qi the little duck to him and he nodded knowingly. He gulped it down and asked for another. I obliged. Mason is planning to take a few of the remaining balut to work with him on friday to give to his co-workers (he plans to only tell them they are duck eggs and let them figure the rest out on their own). I have asked him to record it for me! I know it sounds mean, but his friends are always playing practical jokes on each other. This one should be the ultimate!

Balut on the way!

We ordered some balut yesterday and it should be here by Saturday. I will take pictures and update the blog so stay tuned!

The King of Fruits

Yesterday we had our youngest son with us as he had to get some immunizations so we kept him out of school. We thought it'd be nice to treat him to some real chinese food (he was adopted at age 8 from China) so we went to a restaurant in chinatown that serves authentic chinese food instead of the fried rice and egg roll stuff you get on every corner. I had double cooked sliced pork stomach and steamed green beans with ground pork. Mason got pork dumplings and crispy tofu. The kids got....fried rice. Yep, we went all the way to chinatown for authentic chinese and they got fried rice that you can get anywhere. Oh well, everything else was delish. Being as it was a chinese restaurant we all shared our meals anyways. After we left the restaurant I decided since we were in the area, I'd like to go to the big asian supermarket. We went up and down the aisles looking at what they had to offer, picking up a few things here and there. Chopsticks, bowls of noodle soup, lotus seed buns, a package of roasted seaweed, several packages of dried whole anchovies, pickled garlic, you know, the usual. Over in the meat section we found lots of goodies like pig ovaries and uterus, pig bung, cow hooves, blood cakes, and various innards. I didn't buy any of those at the time. I'll have to learn how to cook something like that first. My main goal was to find the egg section and see if they sold the fertilized duck eggs with near fully formed baby ducks inside called Balut. Unfortunately when I found the egg section, there were only regular chicken eggs, thousand year eggs and quail eggs. No balut to be found. Surely somewhere in Houston has to sell balut! What I did find though, was the section carrying durian, the king of fruits. This is a large, spiky, yellowish green fruit that has a reputation for being the smelliest of all fruit. I quickly told Mason that I wanted to purchase one to try. Only last week we bought Durian's cousin, Jackfruit, and it was to die for good. I thought perhaps if we got past the legendary smell, the meat of the durian would taste similar. We were just about to grab one of the prickly beasts when Mason spotted a little section of frozen pre-cut durian slices. We decided that, although not as impressive as buying, cutting and eating from a fresh, whole durian, we were better off trying the pre-cut frozen durian slices first. Durian is still durian, is it not? We came home and set the groceries down so that I could begin putting them away. I noticed a strange smell in the kitchen, but surely it couldn't be the durian. It was frozen solid, in a plastic container, securely closed and wrapped in plastic and bagged on the table. I put the rest of the food away and left the durian out to thaw. I joined Mason outside and brought the dried anchovies with me. We had eaten something very similar at a korean restaurant in downtown Houston a few weeks back, little dried whole fish, and so I knew what to expect. I am not sure what type of fish we had at the korean place, but they were crunchier and lighter tasting than the anchovies. Still good though. My cat apparently thought so too as she ripped open one of the bags and ate half the contents. Soon my older daughter walked out with the bag of pickled garlic and asked to try some. She's one of the more adventurous of all the kids, always being the first to ask if she can have a bug or piece of whatever odd thing it is we're eating. The pickled garlic was great though it tasted more like the pickling spice than of garlic. Finally Mason suggested we bring out the durian. It was still slightly frozen, but not solid. There was that odd smell again. I peeled off the wrapping and opened the plastic box it was in. Bravely I leaned down and took a big whiff. WOW! That's the stinkiest thing I've ever smell in my LIFE! I thought I was going to fall over where I stood! Mason, Jacob and Skyelar took turns smelling it. Yikes. Jacob thought it smelled fine, but then again he is one of those rare types who doesn't think the smell of skunk (or Heineken) is offensive. The rest of us all had second thoughts about putting something that smelled so rank into our mouths. Mason was the first to try it. He remarked that although it didn't taste anywhere near as bad as it smelled, and he didn't understand why Andrew Zimmern had such a negative reaction to it (gagging and spitting it out), it was by NO means good. I tried a bit. Definitely milder tasting than smelling, but this was not a fruit I would eat for fun. If the frozen pre-cut nicely packaged kind was this rank, how horrible would it have been freshly cut and room temperature? I can only imagine. I went inside to put up the garlic and anchovies and when I came out, Mason informed me that Skyelar was on her 4th piece. "It's not so bad" she told me. We told the rest of the kids to come out and give it a try. Jacob took a bite and said although the smell didn't bother him, it tasted like onions and he didn't like it. Gage spit his out. Qi took one look and ran the other way. Mia took a big bite and declared "mmmm!!! Mama thats goooooddd! Can I have?" Sure thing baby, it all yours! notice the look on my face. Hurry up and take the picture so I can swallow this and get it out from under my nose!

Turtle Soup and Black Bone Chicken Tea

I'm going to skip over a few things that happened and go out of order a tad because I don't have the photos to go along with them at the moment. The weekend before last I went to this chinese food restaurant that I hadn't previously heard about after I saw their amazing menu online. It was full of a bizarre foodies favorites like duck tongue and feet, goose webs, black boned chicken, sharks fin and birds nest soup, thousand year old eggs, jellyfish, duck chin, turtle soup, conch, live shrimp, geoduck, sea cucumber, ostrich, fried milk, frog, beef tripe, eel and lion fish. Can you imagine my excitement?? I tried to order the black boned chicken, (which if you don't know is a chicken with all white feathers, black meat, black skin, black insides, and black bones) with conch meat soup. The waitress said they were out of that, so I settled for "black boned chicken and ginger soup served in a tea pot". I didn't realize until it was brought to me that it was, indeed, in a tea pot and not a very big one at that. The waitress also gave me a tea cup. You drink the broth of the chicken and ginger in the tea cup and then eat the chicken pieces from out of the pot. Mason ordered a small bowl of turtle soup and some squid. My chicken tea didn't fill me up so i ended up eating some of Mason's food and some of my daughter's fried rice dish. The black boned chicken tasted like, yes, chicken. The turtle was good but fatty, though it may have just been the piece I got and not the whole thing. The tea tasted like chicken broth with ginger flavoring, which is pretty much what it was. I imagine it'd be good for a cold though. I can't wait to go back and try more things!

Japan

We had a long.......LONG....layover in Japan on the way home from China. We were just about 30 minutes too late to be allowed to leave and go to Tokyo or Narita so we had to hang out in the airport for hours and hours. We found a cool sushi bar in the airport that had some normal sushi items, plus these cool little whole fishies.

China 07 Guangzhou is adventurous eating paradise

The rest of our time in Beijing was fairly unadventurous as far as eating goes. We went to a restaurant with a good friend and there was bull penis soup and turtle on the menu, but she was paying and those dishes were quite pricey so I didn't order either, as much as I wanted to. We said good bye to Beijing and went on to Nanjing to meet our new son. Adventurous eating wasn't easy in Nanjing or Lianyungang (where my son is from) either. I know there must be a ton of places to eat new and exciting food there, but our guide kept pointing us to Burger King and KFC when we said we wanted to eat, even when we told her we were into foods that most westerners would find strange. The most exotic place she would tell us about was a hot pot restaurant not too far away. I love hot pot, but there wasn't anything too strange on the menu there. Just the usual beef, chicken, duck, goose, pork and all of their various insides. They did have rabbit and I believe owl or otter on the menu but when I excitedly inquired, they told me it was a misprint. Apparently someone who didn't speak english had thought the animal they were writing down was rabbit and owl or otter in english but were mistaken. Foiled again. At least I knew my friend was waiting in Guangzhou to show us all of the wonderfully strange things Canton had to offer. Upon arriving in Guangzhou we found our friend Susan was going to be a bit late joining us. We met up with our old friend Bob and asked him to take us out to try something delightfully unusual. He said he had not ever had people (he was our tour guide last year) who wanted to go and eat adventurously before or after us last year. He thought for a minute and said "we can go eat doggy" I thought at first he'd said donkey, so I reminded him he took us to eat that last year. He quickly corrected me. Doggy, woof woof, doggy. I wondered deep down if I was going to be crossing an imaginary line. Would people think I was a monster? Would they hate me? Would I lose friends? Certainly I would no longer be welcomed at a PETA meeting. I looked at Mason and he back at me and we both shrugged and said, sure. Mason asked about cat meat and Bob squinched his face and said "cat meat too tough, very sour. You wouldn't like". Thats a good thing to know next time I threaten my cats at home with a trip to the BBQ pit when they miss their litter box. We were supposed to meet Bob the next night to go out to our extremely taboo dinner, but instead we were stood up. He called later to tell us he'd come down with strep throat and had been in the emergency room all night. The poor dear's throat was so swollen he could barely whisper. We saw him a little later on and he wasn't joking. He looked rough. I had hoped that our new guide would take us to do something like Bob and Susan had the year before, but this year our guide barely gave us the time of day, much less gave us directions to somewhere fun to eat. We did find some great "odd" food on the menu at some of the restaurants around the island we were staying at. One restaurant had silkworms (which we had eaten last year), paddy insects (what the heck are paddy insects?) and taro cooked in yak's milk. YUMMO! We also found that the restaurant Cow and Bridge down from our hotel served a few oddities. We ordered some ostrich steak and birds nest soup. The birds nest soup we got was in a sweet milk, and tasted to me like some mini wheats in sweetened milk that had gotten just a tad soft, but still retained a bit of crunch. It was very good. The ostrich steak was one of the best things I've ever eaten in my life. Unfortunately I did not have my camera on me, as I didn't realize they had birds nest on the menu when we went to eat there. Finally on the last two days of our trip, my friend Susan made it to Guangzhou. We ended up going to the restaurant the year before that we ate the snake at, as it was close by and it was late. My son wanted to try the snake venom that Mason and Bob had drank last year and I figured you know, I will do it too. Can't hurt right? Its only venom. We walked in and as I was getting the younger ones settled in at the table, Mason and Jacob went to go pick out our snake. As a buddhist I have issue with an animal being killed for me or choosing an animal to die, but Mason doesn't have these qualms. I don't ask him to do it for me, but I will eat it if the animal is already dead and not killed for me. Yes, I have a lot of morals for someone who was going to eat dog. I know. Anyways, Mason comes back and tells me that the snake they selected was none other than a king cobra. He had asked them what type of snake it was, but they didn't know how to say it in english. He bent down to get a better look and it perked up, showing off its hood and markings. He stayed and watched them chop the snake's head off, skin it, and drain the blood. We ordered some chicken feet (which our new younger son LOVED and ate almost the entire plate of), snake soup, fish with the heads intact, and some other normal type stuff I can't recall. I ate the fish head, but as I was going to take the eye out to try it, it fell onto the floor. I'm not brave enough to eat off the floor in China. Yes, it really was an accident. Along with our snake soup came a cup of snake venom (from the cobra) as well as a cup of the drained cobra blood. Mason, Jacob and our friend James took a swig of the blood, but I am not a big blood fan so I passed. Next the glass of venom, with the snake's gall bladder crushed inside, made its rounds. Mason drank a tiny bit, then Jacob, then James and there was still some left for me. It tasted like alcohol. For a supertaster like myself, that wasn't a good taste. The next night was our last in China and we hoped to find somewhere to eat all the groovy things like camel, bees, bear, sand worms and etc Susan had talked about. Then the rain started. And it wouldn't let up. Finally we all decided to go out anyways, after all, how many more chances like this would we get? We took taxis, a bus, even the subway to get to where we were going. Finally Susan found a place that said served traditional food. We ended up with some fried intestine, dumplings, noodles, taro, some veggies and a soup made with chicken and scorpion called dragon and phoenix soup or something similar. These scorpions were not the small kind you just pop into your mouth, these bad boys were HUGE! We were struggling with how exactly to eat them, when my newly adopted son broke his open and shoved his chopstick into the pincers pushing the meat up. A-ha! They had basically been just boiled in the soup and were not very flavorful, but all in all not bad. Unfortunately this was our last night in China so I wasn't able to eat the other things my friend had suggested. Maybe in a few years I can get back to China and find some scrumptious bizarre delicacies to try then.

China 07 - Wangfujing street vendor bugs

Several posts down there are blog posts documenting our first trip to China in July of 06 and the beginning of our adventurous eating excursions. Just a little over a year later, in August of 07 we returned to China for the adoption of our son. We had planned to try many new strange foods, considering this would be our last trip to China for at least quite awhile. We had set it up with our friends and Susan and Bob, who were with us for the first trip, to find some great restaurants serving odd (to us) things and take us there when we arrived in Guangzhou. We talked about things like fried bees, camel, bear and sand worms being on the menu. I was very excited! First we landed in Beijing. Last year we walked up and down Wangfujing street but I hadn't found the little alley where they sold the bizarre foods that you always see on tv. This year I was determined to find it. On our second night in Beijing we set out to walk down Wangfujing again, further this time than we had the previous times. I found a little alley on the left where there was a street vendor selling food and decided to walk down it a bit even though I'd been warned to A) never go down dark side alleys and B) never eat from street vendors. I broke both of those rules almost immediately. As I walked further down I noticed that the vendors wares were becoming more and more unusual, from fried intestines and testicles to various insects and animals on skewers. I walked up to the man who seemed to have the best variety and purchased some odd looking little delights. I selected a stick of small golden colored scorpions, a little sea horse, some sort of insects on a skewer, and something that appeared to have wings and a tail. I asked the vendor in chinese what the two creatures I didn't recognize were and he said they were cicada and something I didn't understand. I asked "is it bird?" and he said no. I asked if it was bat and he smiled and said "yes, yes, bat. Is bat". I didn't realize bats had tails but what the hell do I know about bats? I shrugged and said okay, bat it is. Mason was not in the mood to stop and eat the little treasures there in the night market so I took my snacks with me back to the hotel room to munch on. There was a spice that the vendor added on top of the little creatures that was very spicy for me as a super taster. I would much have preferred a milder seasoning, but it was not too hot for my husband or my son (our oldest son came along this time as well, and has now become an adventurous eater himself!) so it was probably just me. I thought the scorpions were nice. With the smaller scorpions you can eat them shell and all. With the larger type the shell is harder so you have to get the meat out like you would a lobster or crab. The seahorse was dry and crunchy, a bit hard for my taste. The cicadas were good, a bit spicy from the seasoning though. And the "bat" was hard because of the bones and also not easy to eat. I later found out that it wasn't a bat at all (explaining why this "bat" had a tail) but a lizard that had a flap resembling wings on each side. Although it sounded a tad cooler to say I at a bat, lizard makes much more sense.