American Food

So many American foods to try, so many of them disgusting.

Hot dog from Skoobys in Hollywood

3lb breakfast burrito

Steak for me, ribs for Mr Beet

Blueberry pancakes

Meatloaf and mash

Cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory. I also sampled the highly-recommended cheesecake from Junior’s in New York. I still maintain that I make the world’s best cheesecake.

Reese’s pieces – bleurgh

Inspired by BeetFan – taco soup in an edible bowl

A triumvirate of retro-sounding American snacks. Pretty grim all round.

Barbecued chicken, corn, beans and potato salad. Consumed while listening to a country band on 4th July. As American as it gets.

More barbecue – pulled pork, beans, potato salad and corn bread. Corn bread is essentially sponge cake. I can’t understand why they think it goes well with pork.

Philly steak and cheese sandwich. Look at the calories on that.

Gumbo – but from the shores of Lake Michigan rather than New Orleans so of dubious authenticity.

Chicago deep-dish pizza. Basically, it’s not a pizza.

Huge NY deli sandwich – pastrami with a pickle. Its appearance delighted me more than its taste.

Frozen yoghurt. They charge by weight. That tub cost about $12.

Bagel with a shmear.

I should be on a big diet now, but there is so much nice British food to eat: Mum’s shepherd’s pie, full English breakfast, fish and chips, pie and mash, roast dinner. They’ve all been ticked off in the five days since my return.

Canadian Food

Hmmm….Canadian food…what’s Canadian? I know – maple syrup!

On a pancake:

In a doughnut:

In ice cream:

Peruvian Food

Peruvian food also adheres to the double-carb standard of South America. In fact, is this the most Peruvian meal possible? Alpaca, double-carb, Inca Kola on the side.

Mr Beet and the Peruvians agree on one thing – their love of roast chicken and chips. Apparently there is even a Roast Chicken Day in Peru.

Edible totara reed on a totara reed island on Lake Titicaca

Coca tea (with muna as well) – the Peruvian Panacea, it’s good for what ails you.

Al looking very smug with a pisco sour

Mr Beet and I didn’t want to try cuy aka guinea pig. Fortunately, we had a guinea pig-guinea pig, in the shape of Alastair. Unfortunately, Al couldn’t resist playing with his cooked guinea pig cadaver until we all felt thoroughly put off our dinners.

Chicharrones – fried pork ribs: salty, fatty and utterly delicious.

Bolivian Food

Bolivian food follows the “meat and potatoes” format that we encountered in Chile, except the potatoes are not considered sufficient carbohydrate and you will also get rice or pasta or yuka or starchy-plantain-type thing as well.

What may or may not have been llama meat, plus a good example of the Bolivian double-carb, see also;

While in La Paz, Mr Beet and I had our dinners cooked by our own private chef Ben, who took us under his wing and would always cook us something special. We tried tongue for the first time, which tasted quite nice but did look a little bit too much…well, like a tongue, for my liking. I covered it up with mince and peas so that I didn´t have to look at it.

Ben also suggested a good place to get tucumanas – another type of South American pasty.

We also tried trout from Lake Titicaca.

Chilean Food

Chilean food consists of:

Breakfast – bread

Lunch – meat and potatoes with more bread on the side

Onces – “afternoon tea” consisting of something savoury like a hot dog, or some cake (aka kuchen from the German immigrants)

Dinner – we never made it this far – always too full after lunch and onces.

Lomo a lo pobre – Mr Beet’s favourite dish: steak, chips and fried eggs.

The guide book kept banging on about delicious “arrollado” so I order some. It’s pork wrapped in pork fat. I’m not a fan.

Mr Beet celebrates eating five steaks in five days.

Churrasco palta – steak and avocado sandwich

Hot dog “completa” – tastes of nothing.

Apple strudel for onces. Was actually quite nice despite my expression.

An empanada. That which we call a pasty by any other name would taste as sweet (except they hide an olive in there to keep you on our toes)

You always get bread and a spicy dip on the side of your lunch. Often this is the nicest bit of the meal.

Swordfish at a restaurant that was rather too fancy for us.

Alfajor – a shortbread-type biscuit with dulce de leche sandwiched in the middle.

The most typical Chilean dish you could get. Meat and potatoes, and the meat was marinaded in pisco.

Huesillos pudding of fruit and barley in alcoholic syrup of some kind.

The biggest empanada in the world?

New Zealand Food

Hokey pokey ice cream (but the woman who sold it to me was French, so she called it ‘okey pokey)

Fush and chups (and a battered oyster and mussel on the side) with Lemon and Paeroa (marketed as “World famous in New Zealand”)

A lamb salad (from the “light bites” section of the menu! Look at the size of the thing!)

Lamb curry

Lamb pie

Lamb pizza

A “small” lamb shank, a steak, a man eating a steak

Lamb stirfry

Lamb a la Stair

A kiwi fruit

A feijoa drink. Mr Beet had to coach me in pronounciation before I ordered it.

A “Kiwi as” Chocolate Fish. Bloody horrible.

A feijoa – an acquired taste, but not unpleasant.

A lamington. I think they might actually originate from Australia, but the NZ version is bigger and pinker.

A Moro bar. It’s as if a Mars Bar has gone into the witness protection programme.

“Famous” Tuatapere sausages. Maybe we didn’t get the right ones, because they were cheap and nasty.

Venison and kumara (which I’m pretty sure is just sweet potato, but it sounds more Newzealandy to call it kumara)

Boysenberry juice. A boysenberry is apparently a cross between a raspberry, a blackberry and a loganberry, first grown by somebody called Mr Boysen. I can see why you would be tempted to name the food you just invented after yourself, but maybe not if your name sounds quite a lot like “poison”.

A drink infused with traditional Maori medicinal plant makomako.

“Pavlova”. Or at least, the menu called it pavlova, but it’s clearly just a meringue with berries on the side. But I was thrilled because it’s as close as I got in 6 weeks of pavlova-hunting. If you go into any NZ souvenir shop or tourist information centre, you can buy pavlova aprons, ornaments, tea cosies, recipe books etc etc. It’s the national pudding. But you can’t actually buy one anywhere. And believe me, I looked!

The Tim-Tam Slam

1. Get yourself a tim-tam* (the double-coat variety maintains structural integrity for longer) and a cup of tea.

2. Nibble opposite corners off the tim-tam to allow the tea access to its biscuity innards.

3. Put one exposed corner into tea and suck up tea through the opposite corner.

4. Once tea reaches your mouth, the inside of the tim-tam is saturated with tea. Quickly eat the whole thing before it collapses. Om nom nom nom….

*UK residents without ready access to tim-tams should experiment with clubs / penguins.

Australian Food

Ozzie delicacies sampled included:

A kangaroo burger (with beetroot - Ozzies love beetroot in burgers) and tim-tam shake (Tim-tams are a chocolate biscuit; the closest thing we have in the UK would be a penguin or a club. They are so delicious that they merit their own blog post)

A “tiger” pie, mash, mushy peas and gravy from Harry’s Cafe de Wheels.

Hong Kong and Macau Food

In Hong Kong we had barbecued pork

And I couldn’t decide whether to get dim sum, noodles or soup so I got all three in Mrs WIng’s prawn dumpling noodle soup

In Macau, Mr Beet had a Portuguese nata

For lunch we had some Portuguese-style rice with chorizo and salt cod. Mr Beet is making that face because he just realised he’d been eating my lunch.