I’ll start: pesto as a bagel topping.
Toasted Cinnamon Raisin bagel with peanut butter, cheddar cheese, and bananas. - the cheese + bananas is what gets me looks.
People put mayo on cheese sandwiches and banana sandwiches, so why not?
My favourite pizza topping is pepperoni and flaked tuna, the good stuff too so it’s meaty oily tuna.
Love it but so many people think I’m odd for it. The meaty flavours compliment each other!!!
I’m not even sure I need to read the rest of the thread after this comment. You win by default! I guess it makes as much sense as anchovies on pizza though.
Raw garlic, just once in a while, as a little treat. Sometimes I’ll mash it up in some bread but most often… plain, raw garlic.
I have also not met a single thing I won’t try to pickle at least once, and for some reason people around me think that it is Terrifying hahaha. Personally, I find pickling to be a fantastic way to rescue produce that’s otherwise about to go off. Instead of making food waste, I’m making delicious snacks and toppings. Pickle everything!
I’m assuming you’ve had pickled garlic, then? I just picked up 2 jars of it recently. I have to stop myself from eating too much sometimes. Raw garlic is great for me when I have a bad cold and need to clear out my sinuses.
I have, and I’m with you - pickled garlic is so good. I also love that it’s super easy to toss in a few (or more than a few) cloves of garlic alongside whatever else is going in the pickle jar, or to put them in some leftover brine after the original batch of pickles is finished.
Since you mentioned liking raw garlic for your sinuses when you have a cold, have you ever tried saving the brine from your pickled garlic for similar purposes? If not, I’d highly recommend it. I’ve found that sipping or gargling pickle brine works wonders when I need some relief from a sore throat, and if the vinegar is strong enough I’ve found it helps my sinuses as well.
I happen to be suffering from a sore throat right now from horrible allergies, so I’ll have to remember to try this as soon as I get home.
As far as other pickled things, I ironically hate pickled cucumbers, but I love pickled eggs and pickled garlic and have been curious to try some other unconventional pickled foods.
I hope that the brine helped you with your sore throat!
For other non-cucumber pickles, a great way to dip your toes in might be pickled onion (I like red onion best for this, but that’s my personal preference), or pickled carrots. Both of these make excellent toppings for sandwiches of all kinds, tacos, poke, basically anything that could use a little acid or some extra crunch
I’m also quite partial to pickled cauliflower and pickled beets for general snacking
Pickle everything! I’ve come up with some pretty interesting pickles, and also ferments. Worst outcome is food that was going to go bad is bad. Best outcome is delicious surprise!
Ooh, experiments in fermentation are high on my list but I haven’t tried yet. Do you have any good tips for translating one’s pickling skills to fermentation? Or any fermentation tips in general - I’d love to know more about your process if you feel like sharing!
I feel like they’re related in technique but have fundamentally different results. Pickling can enhance and sharpen flavours but fermentation, at least the salt anerobic kind, tends to mellow flavours. I found it helped to start with some pretty simple stuff. Just a single ingredient and salt (and water). It’s Alive, the old Bon Apetit (booo!) show, has some really helpful starting recipies. Noma’s guide to fermentation really emboldened my fermentation choices.
I got one of those fermentation kits of Amazon that has a couple of jar lids with a one-way valve, some glass fermentation weights, and a large syringe to pull air from the jar. I was much less worried about turning something poison with the added help from those tools.
My process is usually when something is going to go bad I put it in a jar I know the weight of, add a spice or something that may taste good then add water. Then weight it and calculate 2.5% salt of the item+spice+water. You can go lower than 2.5% but that’s a pretty safe number. Then I’ll look at it and taste it a couple weeks in, decide if it needs more time and keep going. Some things have a tipping point where all of a sudden they taste really different. Other things have a more linear progression.
Experiment and have fun!
Seems like fermentation takes a little more care than I expected, but not in a bad way! I hadn’t realized there were fermentation kits out there and I’m so glad to have gotten that information before I got excited one day and decided to just wing it. It’s also good to know I should probably be thinking of this more like baking than like cooking, since I’m gathering from your description that more precise measurements are called for to get the right result.
Thank you - I really appreciate you taking the time to write out this great advice!
My wife would say: Kipper Snacks
Stinky fish is delicious.
I actually consume kiwis without peeling them, because I find it much more tasteful.
The hair is initially tough to get over, but I also eat kiwis this way. There’s a tanginess just under the skin that otherwise gets cut off.
Also, mealworms. Fried ones. I bought them for my pet rats and ended up gorging on them sometimes.
You win.
Why though? Mealworms are part of a human diet since the dawn of time. It’s just meat.
When you’ve been terribly poor, you get creative.
I once got tired of packet ramen and put some free milk I pilfered from a hotel into the broth to make it more like a creamy sauce. Black pepper and peanut butter can also do wonders. It’s not 5 star dining, but it was better than you’d think. Especially after the 8th day in a row eating Raman and stolen fruit.
Ive done it again on the rare occasion, even now that I don’t have to. My partner goes green when she sees it.
There’s nothing weird about those. Ramen may not lend itself to creamy sauces as Italian noodle dishes, but it’s not like it would change the flavor immensely. As for peanut butter and pepper, spicy peanut sauces (e.g. satay) are pretty common in Asian cuisine. You’re doing nothing unusual, just improving instant ramen.
Finally, vindication after all these years.
Octopus salad; it’s a go to in our house since we are Mediterranean mutts - most people I tell (or who have seen me eat this) think its too gross to bear, lol.
Peanut butter + mayo + pickles on bread.
It’s apparently a Depression era recipe, but I crave it once every two months or so
In a similar vein, muffaletta as a bagel topping.
Muffaletta is a whole ass sandwich. Do you mean tapenade?
Your not wrong lol! But they sell the preserved veggie stuff that goes on the sandwich in grocery stores, and for some reason that’s ALSO called Muffaletta? It’s basically giardiniera but diced finer.
If I find a good bell pepper, I will eat it whole like an apple.
When I get a beverage/food garnished with an herb like a sprig of mint or rosemary, I like to nibble on them. My friends and girlfriend sort of lost their minds when I took a bit out of a cinnamon stick from a cocktail.
Probably the most tame one in here, but I love to mix mayo with a little mustard to dip my french fries in. Baked potatoes with butter, sour cream, seasoning salt, and malt vinegar are also really good.
One of my regular breakfast rotations is toast with creamcheese topped with either canned sardines or canned smoked oysters. Quick and tasty, but admittedly kinda weird.
Shredded cheese crisped up in a skillet.
According to my ex, who politely asked me to stop doing that, it makes the entire house smell like particularly foul body odor.
Nah that’s delicious. Ex made “keto nachos”- pork rinds and cheese in toaster oven, now that smells nasty
I know, for fact, that’s delicious. Mmmmmmm.
Bean dip on pizza. It sounds super weird, and it is, but it’s also delicious 🤤
I love eating a raw potato like an apple, for whatever reason. Any time I’m cooking a dish with potatoes, I’ll wash and peel one for me to eat. My boyfriend looked like I had grown a third arm the first time he saw me do it.
It’s the perfect mix of crunchy and juicy, but not sweet.
Raw potatoes are like semi toxic. Do you not get any GI upset from doing that?
No, never. AFAIK they aren’t toxic, just that the starch is poorly digested. Either way, I’ve never gotten sick from it, so 🤷
It’s odd because I have had digestive issues off and on through the years, but the potatoes have never precipitated it. (It’s mostly anything spicy, which sucks as I love spicy food-- it’s a price I pay willingly sometimes)
Solanine is a glycoalkaloid poison found in species of the nightshade family within the genus Solanum, such as the potato, the tomato, and the eggplant
Raw potatoes certainly are mildly toxic, it’s not just undigestible starches.
Most home processing methods like boiling, cooking, and frying potatoes have been shown to have minimal effects on solanine levels. For example, boiling potatoes reduces the α-chaconine and α-solanine levels by only 3.5% and 1.2% respectively, but microwaving potatoes reduces the alkaloid content by 15%. Deep frying at 150 °C (302 °F) also does not result in any measurable change.
They’re no more toxic than cooked potatoes, unless you only eat microwaved ones.
