I already have a page for things I find that intrigue me. This page is for things I find that stump and baffle me. There are plenty of such things around here. Here’s one to start with:
Frogspawn!
Further to the theme of oviduct products, here is an example of crab spawn rice balls
Crab spawn rice balls!
1 March- update: I flew back to Shanghai after a month back home in Canada, where I was unable to update this page because, well, I could identify pretty much everything I saw and ate. However, China Eastern Airlines gave me my first taste of incomprehension with their first in-flight meal. The main part of it consisted of mucilaginous noodles topped with chunks of mostly cooked eggplant (not bad) doused in a gooey sauce dotted with pork granules. I won’t post a picture of that because I was able to identify it. The side dish- the salad, as it were- was not so easy. It consisted of cold rice noodles (yay!) and some vinegared julienned carrots and cucumbers and whatnot, and was topped with something I could only guess as being, possibly, marinated slices of brain. Or something tougher and darker with the appearance of a cross section of brain.
Mmmmmm cross section of unidentifiable meat product!
27 March
These ones aren’t so much mysterious as they are fascinating. I have a very big weak spot for convenience store snack cakes in any country I find myself in. I don’t necessarily like them (though I did develop a taste for Eti Pop Keks and Dan Keks in Turkey) and often I find them gaggingly repulsive but I still compulsively buy them. I’ve found ones filled with sweet bean paste and others smeared with what I thought was icing but which turned out to be a thick layer of sweetened margarine. Today I bought three new cakes from the C shop (the one with the tomato logo): a triangle of chocolate layer cake, a haw fruit cheese cake and some sort of green tea flavoured sweet bread with either icing or margarine inside. I have yet to determine their edibility.
Look- you know it's cheesecake because of the swiss cheese cartoon!
ETA This was basically a soft pink mound of mildly red-fruit scented cake with no sign of cheese nor any indication of Haw fruit. It tasted like a cupcake served at a very girly 5 year old’s birthday party, minus the Duncan Hines frosting.
You know it is green tea flavoured 'cos it's green
ETA This one is still sitting on the kitchen table. I’m not quite ready to eat it. It looks like a green swiss roll pumped full of margarine. I’m afraid. I really am.
ETA Next day- I ate it. It tasted like grass, or maybe spirulina powder, baked into a spongey roll and filled with very very petroleum-product-based white icing. I can’t say I’d do it again.
