2022, Food, Uncategorized

Weird Food

34 Comments

Over the past month, Husband and I cleaned out and reorganized our kitchen cupboards preparatory to ordering a fresh supply of the lentils, beans, and other kitchen staples we were getting low on. I am sorry to say there were things we found I had forgot about completely, and I have only vague ideas what I planned to do with some of them.

When we lived in Winnipeg, our Italian landlady would serve us preserved lupini beans whenever we came over to pay the rent. They were a real delicacy to her. This was a very formal occasion during which we would drink her and Emilio’s homemade red wine and eat the lupini beans she had done something to that made them savory and soft, sort of like olives. A couple of years ago I saw dried lupini beans on a website and ordered a pound, thinking that I could replicate those beans and those fond memories. I had no idea that lupini beans are toxic unless you soak, rinse, soak, rinse, soak rinse, ad nauseam. Well, they still are in the bag, unopened, as is the pound of fava beans that I ordered because I wasn’t quite sure if Angela used those or lupini beans. I didn’t figure it out until after they arrived and I actually looked at some recipes. Neither bean interests me now but I am too Dutch to toss them and I know no one around here who would use them.

More recently I bought a pound of red Italian rice, which seems to be different than Asian red rice, and is reportedly quite hard to digest if you eat too much at one sitting. I have looked for recipes but they are few and far between. I bought the rice because I was buying other things from the company and thought “why not” when I ran across it. I am determined that the rice will actually get used up. Maybe it goes well either lupini and fava beans . Husband wants to make salad out of it.

What weird foods lurk in your kitchen? What would you do with fava’s, lupini beans, and red Italian rice? Any good landlord stories?

34 thoughts on “Weird Food”

  1. Too many to admit to…or remember and would have to clean cupboards like you did to find them.  Cynthia “Life is a shifting carpet…learn to dance.”

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  2. At first I thought your pix was of Lima beans, which some people, such as Sandra marguerite, consider weird. But my system has lost the knack of digesting beans. Supposedly I can retrain it, but I will let it pass, pun intended it. I like lutefisk, which also now makes me sick, and I like liver and chicken giblets. Like horehound candy, which I have not seen in years. About as exotic as I get.
    OT update: I am now in the middle of a so far two day process of making the MRI appointment. Sweet young woman at Mayo is being very helpful but she discovered they have double booked the machine on some days. They only do sedated MRIs on Wednesdays. I have four people who can drive me but none of them can drive me on the one day in August she thinks I can get in. So it goes.

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  3. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    My weird food supply is down right now because 2 years ago I was preparing to have the kitchen remodeled. Therefore, all weird food was dealt with at that time. I found all kinds of old stuff and “why do I have this” stuff, none of which I can remember. When I looked in the pantry cupboard this morning, all I found was a drink mix that I have not ever tried, and which has lived there for over a year.

    Sunday afternoon we had a delightful visitor—my DIL and son’s 8 yo niece who is staying with them for a week. We went out to the garden where we picked several kinds of peppers and a kohlrabi. I had tomatoes in the house,so we made a bowl of fresh salsa which we then devoured. She loved it, as kids that age do.

    In my first apartment after getting married following college graduation, we had a very intrusive landlady, who felt driven to sneak into our apartment to snoop. We caught her several times. Her silent husband had ALS. She bossed him around relentlessly. One day she was watering something in the yard with a high pressure nozzle.. She dropped it and it flopped and writhed around like a snake. She was trying to catch it, accidentally stepped on it, then the nozzle let go and sprayed her in the crotch. The husband laughed so hard we thought we might need to call an ambulance. It was her just desserts. She was a pain.

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  6. I guess weird is in the eye of the beholder–tempeh and nutritional yeast are probably weird to a lot of people, but they’re very everyday to me. I have some tamarind paste for making curry, that might be a bit unusual. Renee’s story about beans makes me want gigantes plaki, if I could just find some dry gigantes that are fresh enough (the last ones I got from Bill’s Imported Foods never really got soft, presumably they had been sitting around a long time). Crunchy gigantes plaki are just so wrong…

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  7. If it were me, I think I would toss the lupini beans. If you want to reminisce about your landlady some time, get a jar of prepared ones and save yourself the hours of preparation. The fava beans will keep until cooler weather, when you can make some creamy beany recipe with them. The red rice sounds like it has properties similar to wild rice and would work in a salad much as wild rice does.
    Who’s to say what is a weird food? I do have some odds and ends that have been hanging around in the cupboards for awhile and underutilized. There’s a bag of bomba rice that I had to get online for use in a Valenciana paella that was less demanding than a traditional paella. It didn’t have the seafood that is, of course, characteristic of paella but also expensive if you are going to do it right. This was a paella variant—kind of a rustic everyday one—suitable for an everyday meal. I made it once, we were underwhelmed, and I haven’t made it since but there were elements to the recipe that made me believe it could be tweaked to advantage so I still have the rice.
    I have a tub of gochujong (sp?) I picked up when I was encountering some Korean recipes that sounded good but I haven’t tried any of them yet. Also a jar of harissa.
    If I were cooking only for myself I think I would be a little more experimental, not that Robin is fussy but I tend to rely on sure things.

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  8. I’m not sure I have anything weird in the kitchen. These days I’m not being very experimental because i’m mostly cooking for one, which I struggle with.

    I will say however that this morning we stopped at Starbucks on the way to the office (just two more days) and YA got a mango dragonfruit lemonade. The color of that concoction was a little alarming.

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  10. I have been trying to eat out my pantry more than usual lately. With prices having gone so high on some items, it seemed like a good idea to use some of the stuff I have around. This past week I made bean soup with some canned great northern beans, canned diced tomatoes, and canned sliced potatoes. I added some vegetable stock and a jar of ham baby food, seasoned with dried minced onion and granulated garlic, and threw in a little liquid smoke and olive oil.

    I used to buy the baby food for my cats, because they had digestive issues as they aged, and it was very easy for them to digest. Sammy was particularly fond of the ham, which got hard to find during the pandemic. I didn’t want to go store to store hunting for it, so I started getting it autoshipped from Amazon. The last case I bought around the time Sammy died I requested to return, and I got a refund for it, but Amazon decided I could keep it instead of sending it back. So now I’m using it as ham base.

    One thing I have that I should think of a use for is three or four cans of pineapple chunks. I think I wanted them for some recipe, but can’t remember what it was. Fruit salad of some sort?

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  12. Weird food is anything that seems to you unusual. I have a couple of small tubes (I think I got at Aldi?) called a “Stir-in Paste” – one Cilantro and one Lemongrass. They taste vaguely like what they’re labeled, but very salty… I keep forgetting to use them, and will let you know of they turn out to be wonderful.

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  13. Back in my college days, we rented an apartment in a big old dilapidated house from a local business owner with a very surly demeanor. He wasn’t downright unpleasant, but he rarely smiled and always pretty unhappy. I made it a point on my various errands around town on my bike, to swing by his business, a hardware store that also rented out various equipment, just to say Hi. At first he thought I came with some fresh complaint, or to report on something broken that needed to be fixed, but I deliberately swung by when things were just fine. I didn’t want him to associate me with bad news. Over a period of three years, he softened, and would occasionally call me if he had some odd job that needed taking care of. When we left Carbondale, he said he was sad to see us go, he had enjoyed having us as tenants.

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