Favourite food and traditional dishes

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Again, it's almost all in the topic.
Tell us which are your favourite dishes and describe some of the typical one from your region.
For what I am concerned, the two things tally quite completely; I'm italian, and as you can imagine, I eat a lot of pasta (once per day, usually), which is a food deep-rooted in our culinary traditionts. What's incredible about pasta it's that you can put on it almost any non-sweet food you can imagine, creating very tasty combinations (one of my favourites is with prawns, courgettes and fresh tomatoes...yumm!).
Since my mother is french, there are also many french dishes that I really like, first of all salted crepes (with mushrooms and ham, for example), but also sweet ones are good.
In case you are wondering: yes, my mother is a VERY good cook!

 

I'm from Switzeland and I am very in for traditional Swiss-Food:

Rösti (made out of potatotes)
züri-gschnätzeltes (special sauce and flesh, I love it together with Rösti)
Fondue chinoise (Cheese possible with flesh)
Fondue bourguignon (Cheese possible with flesh but very different from the former one)
Raclette (Cheese and Flesh, but very different from the former ones)
Marroni (Chestnuts ??? don't know how that's translated).

Appreciated Food from other countries:

Spaghetti Bolognese
Pizza (I personally love Prosciutto and Calzone, I hate frutti di mare)
Kebab (love that)
Mah-Meh

 

The summer is near:
Dutch New Herrings! Love them. Just herrings with onions. Say 'Hhhhhi'!

I love Italian food. Anything. Especially Frutti di Mare.
And I like Boullabesse (sp?), Mediteran fish-soup.
And Casoulet. Meat with Chorizo, beans gherkins (?) and lots of stuff.

But nothing, nothing is better than a sandwich with our country's favored cheese!

 

My favorite dish is "Quark mit Pellkartoffeln" (Curd Cheese with potatos), a traditional brandenburg/berliner dish. It's really simple. You boil the potatos within their skin until they are soft. The cheese stays cold (naturally). Mix some an onion and some spices in it (dill, chives, lovage, pepper and salt), and there you go. With a bit lineseed oil it is very, very delicious.

[ May 18, 2003, 21:09: Message edited by: Fabius Maximus ]

 

Sorry people, this is not to be nasty. It just sounds awful to read.

Yago. I think you mean special sauce and meat? for the züri-gschnätzeltes.

Fabius. I think you mean that you boil the potatoes in the skin not the hull, because ships have those. (Or did you mean chips? )

As for me. One of my favourites is from Jordan. Mensef. It is seasoned rice with a mixture of almonds that is eaten with a yoghurt and lamb soup which is very thick and creamy.

Also another rice dish called Makloobah. It is rice with fried chicken, cauliflower and eggplant mixed in.

Since I am a "rice-aholic" I never pass up the Indian Biryani or the Persian style Pulao. In fact rice from anywhere in any style is great! (Except with a fish curry....bleh)

Warm Meditteranean dolma, stuffed grape-vine leaves with some green olives or the ultimate Greek kalamata olives.

Lebanese style kibbeh, crushed bourghul wheat mixed with mince meat. They even eat it raw, which sounds awful, but is in fact quite good.

Bourghul mixed with olive oil, tomata, lemon juice and eaten with grape vine leaves as if it was lettuce is also really trendy.

I really wish I knew more about Netherlands and Deutsch cheeses (in fact any cheeses). Hit me with your best suggestions. Please give me the great names so that I can get them. I am also quite partial to cheeses (except the blue vein types) and so are my kids!

 

Ilove food. I'll try just about anything once, and chances are good I'll go back for more. Believe it or not, I'm NOT grossly overweight - just 10 pounds or so!

Favorites: Italian pasta of just about any kind, gyros, pastitio, Mongolian beef, potstickers, lo mein, chow fun, mattar paneer, biryani, falafel, steamed mussels in white wine with garlic, enchiladas, burritos, huevos con chorizo, pierogies, sushi... need I go on? What I get hungry for depends on a lot of different things. I like having a variety to choose from!

As for regional specialities, cooking in the Philadelphia region has been heavily influenced by two disparate groups of immigrants: Italians and the Amish. I've never had a meatball sandwich or hoagie as good as you can get around here, and there are two processed pork products (scrapple and pork roll) that I've never seen outside of the region. Snapper soup is another local thing I love. The only other distinctly American - but not necessarily Philadelphian - food I really crave on a regular basis is CHILI.

 

Kazraj and Rallymama: You like Greek food? That makes me feel proud of my country.

I like fish, especially the small ones and from the Mediteranean sea, almost any Greek food(beans, yemista(tomatoes filled with rise), gyros, dolma etc), fried potatoes, spaghetti, pizza. My food is ALWAYS accompanied with bread, salad(tomatoes, cabbage, lettuce) and ,of course, GREEK FETA(kind of cheese but it's tougher, white, more salty, and delicious). Fresh mediteranean fruits for dessert.

What is this "fruti di mare"(I know it means "fruits of the sea")?

 

@Alexander: yes, the translation for "frutti di mare" is actually "sea's fruits", but it's a way to call a mixed dish of molluscs and crustaceans of any kind. Nice with pasta, pizza, soup or just in a fresh salad!

 

I love certain Mexican dishes...like cheese enchiladas (sp), and Carne Asada. Yum! But my all time favorite food has to be has to be the chicken flavored Ramen Noodle Soup!!! It's the perfect thing to eat when time is limited. But for an "everyday" meal, I like beef stroganoff...not sure where that dish origanates from, but it's good.

 

Anything That my Grandma cooks. Humm, you don't know what your missing if you never had my Grandma's home made Italian Meals.

 

Alexander. How could I not like Greek food? There are close to a million Greek origin people here!

PS. I thought dolma was turkish ... (joking)

 

I love anything spicy! But here are some of my favorites:

crawfish etouffee (By the way, what ever happened to Crawl?)

General Tso's Chicken (I had it for the first time 3 years ago...now I am addicted!)

Pizza (Favorite toppings: Mushrooms, Pepperoni, sausage, meatballs, onions)

Jambalaya

Pierogies

chocolate pudding

cous-cous

Curry anything

Now I'm hungry!

 

I like spicy food. Thai and Indonesian food can be nice, with some rice and fish or chicken. I also like Italian food. Something with tagliatelli is nice, but nothing beats my father's lasagna. A good steak, which is still red on the inside, is also a fine meal.

And for desert: vanilla ice-cream.

 

Yorkshire Pudding, of course! To both questions

 

A traditional Maroi (New Zealand) meal I would be really surprised if anyone had heard of is the Hungi (translated in to ground oven I think). A fire is lite in a big hole for a few hours, in which rocks and a dozen and one other things are put. After about 2 hours of the fire burning, it is put out using water. Food (mains kumra (or sweetpotato for u foriners(spelling)) patatoes, fish, and meat) is then put in and the hole covered up. This is left for a few hours (as in about 5) and the results is amazing. The food taste wonderful!!!
Its an unusal taste like nothing else I've tasted before. I guess its like a fatless roast with a lot of flavour from the ground and ...yeah.
Something every one who visits New Zealand should try!

 

My favourite meal would have to be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with roasted potatoes.

My favourite dessert is a layer cake made with layers of crepes with a coffee and chocolate icing between them.

In terms of Canadian food, um is there such a thing? Oh wait, how about a breakfast of pemeal bacon and pancakes smothered in a nice Quebec maple syrup.

 

Italian food: risotto, parmigiana, scamps (sp?), pasta, pizza...
Chinese food: anything but bitter-sweet dishes.
Japanese food: sushi, sashimi, tepaniaki...
Pretty much anything with curry in it.
French food: (translating that would take me hours) gratin dauphinois,fondue bourgignonne, magret de canard landais, foie gras avec confiture d'oignon, soupe à l'oignon, cuisses de grenouille, escargots à la provençale, stoemp(that's a Belgian dish), I could go on.
I even enjoy a burger every once in a while.

 

I love greek food and the most favorite of all is greek mousaka (slices of eggplants, potatoes, marrows, minced meat and besamel on top in oven and here we go). I love fishes, i like bean soup i adore greek salad with feta cheese and naturally with every meal must be bread (village style it's called choriatiko)and i like greek fish soup and kakavia if it is well made (fish soup with small fishes very difficult to make because of the bones).
From others cuisines i like pasta, pizza, falafel.
Man i simple love food especially good food

 

Bacon

[ May 24, 2003, 11:33: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

 

Here's something about Filipino Foods. This article was written by a British national and was published in a local newspaper probably in the late 90's. I really enjoyed it, and I think some of you might... and also, it's a peek of what we Filipinos eat. BTW, words in italics are anotations I placed to help you understand it better.

MATTER OF TASTE
by Matthew Sutherland

I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider myself in most respects well-assimilated. However, there is one key step on the road to full assimilation which I have yet to take, and that's to eat BALUT. The day any of you sees me eating balut, please call immigration and ask them to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there will be no turning back. BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys (Pinoy, a slang we call ourseleves, just like Britons to the British) out there, is a fertilized duck egg. It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of newspaper, much like English fish and chips, by street vendors usually after dark, presumably so you can't see how gross it is. It's meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can't imagine anything more likely to dispel sexual desire than crunching on a partially-formed baby duck swimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the egg comes in varying stages of development, but basically it is not considered macho to eat one without fully discernible feathers, beak, and claws. Some say these crunchy bits are the best. Others prefer just to drink the so-called 'soup', the vile, pungent liquid that surrounds the aforementioned feathery fetus...excuse me, I have to go and throw up now. I'll be back in a minute.

Food dominates the life of the Filipino. People here just love to eat. They eat at least eight times a day. These eight official meals are called, in order: breakfast, snacks, lunch, merienda, pica-pica, pulutan, dinner, and no-one-saw-me-take-that-cookie-from-the-fridge-so-it-doesn't-count. The short gaps in between these mealtimes are spent eating Sky Flakes (a popular brand of cracker) from the open packet that sits on every desktop. You're never far from food in the Philippines. If you doubt this, next time you're driving home from work, try this game. See how long you can drive without seeing food and I don't mean a distant restaurant, or a picture of food. I mean a man on the sidewalk frying fish balls, or a man walking through the traffic selling nuts or candy. I bet it's less than one minute. Here are some other things I've noticed about food in the Philippines. Firstly, a meal is not a meal without rice - even breakfast. In the UK, I could go a whole year without eating rice. Second, it's impossible to drink without eating. A bottle of San Miguel (best Filipino beer, also considered one of the best beers in Asia) just isn't the same without gambas (sizzling chili-shrimp) or beef tapa (strips of beef). Third, no one ventures more than two paces from their house without "baon" and a container of something cold to drink. You might as well ask a Filipino to leave home without his pants on. And lastly, where I come from, you eat with a knife and fork. Here, you eat with a spoon and fork. You try eating rice swimming in fish sauce with a knife.

One really nice thing about Filipino food culture is that people always ask you to SHARE their food. In my office, if you catch anyone attacking their baon, they will always go, "Sir! KAIN TAYO!" ("Let's eat!"). This confused me, until I realized that they didn't actually expect me to sit down and start munching on their boneless bangus (milkfish). In fact, the polite response is something like, "No thanks, I just ate." But the principle is sound - if you have food on your plate, you are expected to share it, however hungry you are, with those who may be even hungrier. I think that's great. In fact, this is frequently even taken one step further. Many Filipinos use "Have you eaten yet?" ("KUMAIN KA NA?") as a general greeting, irrespective of time of day or location.

Some foreigners think Filipino food is fairly dull compared to other Asian cuisines. Actually lots of it is very good: Spicy dishes like Bicol Express (strange, a dish named after a train); anything cooked with coconut milk; anything KINILAW; and anything ADOBO. And it's hard to beat the sheer wanton, cholesterholic frenzy of a good old-fashioned LECHON de leche feast (roasted suckling pig). Dig a pit, light a fire, add 50 pounds of animal fat on a stick, and cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm... you can actually feel your arteries constricting with each successive mouthful. I also share one key Pinoy trait ---a sweet tooth. I am thus the only foreigner I know who does not complain about sweet bread, sweet burgers, sweet spaghetti, sweet banana ketchup, and so on. I am a man who likes to put jam on his pizza. Try it! It's the weird food you want to avoid. In addition to duck fetus in the half-shell, items to avoid in the Philippines include pig's blood soup (DINUGUAN); bull's testicle soup, the strangely-named "SOUP NUMBER FIVE" (I dread to think what numbers one through four are); and the ubiquitous, stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and it's equally stinky sister, PATIS (fish sauce). Filipinos are so addicted to these latter items that they will even risk arrest or deportation trying to smuggle them into countries like Australia and the USA, which wisely ban the importation of items you can smell from more than 100 paces. Then there's the small matter of the blue ice cream. I have never been able to get my brain around eating blue food; the ubiquitous UBE leaves me cold. And lastly on the subject of weird food, beware: that KALDERETANG KAMBING (goat) could well be KALDERETANG ASO (dog)... The Filipino, of course, has a well-developed sense of food.

Here's a typical Pinoy food joke: "I'm on a seafood diet. "What's a seafood diet?" "When I see food, I eat it!" Filipinos also eat strange bits of animals --- the feet, the head, the guts, etc., usually barbecued on a stick. These have been given witty names, like "ADIDAS" (chicken's feet); "KURBATA" (either just chicken's neck, or "neck and thigh" as in "neck-tie"); "WALKMAN" (pigs ears); "PAL" (chicken wings) (PAL - Philippine Air Lines); "HELMET" (chicken head); "IUD" (chicken intestines), and BETAMAX" (video-cassette-like blocks of animal blood).

Yum, yum. Bon appetit.


BTW, I have tasted everything he mentioned except for the dog meat and Soup #5... didn't had the chance to.