SPAM and other foods - any hate? :)

[Janne]

I have checked out a couple of receipes for the Milk Sauce.
I think it originates in the past, when people were poor and butter was unavailable or expensive.

For a 'roux' you need fat, so they used the melted fat from when they fried the preserved pork ( bacon).
As a benefit, it tasted nice, maybe nicer than the white sauce made with butter based roux!

Oh yes, Russians got loads and loads of Spam. The food ( and industrial) production went sharply down after the Revolution, and even more down once they got involved in WW2.
First the know-how got shot as traitors of the proletariat, then the workers got shot either by the German side or by own Kommissars / Politruks.


US shipped HUGE amounts of basically everything to them. UK too, despite.

Quite a few Hurricanes and Spits are wrecked in Russia.


I love the history behind our dishes.

 

[RE8ELD0G]

Mmm fried spam.
I love the stuff..... Especially the spicy spam.

Absolutely hate hate hate corned beef........

 

[Broch]

Absolutely hate hate hate corned beef........

Come on, not even Corned Beef Hash - that staple scouting meal?

 

[RE8ELD0G]

Nope first 2 thing in my ration pack that went up for trade was coffee and any corned beef hash.
It's like moist dog biscuits in gravy.
Absolutely minging.

 

[Robson Valley]

To hell with it! Always pack really excellent tasty foods.
Winter camping is a head game, too. Excellent foody things will keep your head running.

Spam was meant for week 3 after you have run out of all possible ways to cook fish.
The gulls are looking attractive and the shotgun is back at home.

Then Ralph produces a .22cal revolver and takes off to "harvest" some birds.

 

[sunndog]

Across the Pacific Ocean, it is not an issue of who can afford what.
It's refrigeration. All meat has to be eaten fresh. That's why the chickens and pigs run all over the place.
We will kill a couple of chickens for supper and hope the rain quits and it cools off to 90F for the night.
There's no lengthy twilight in the evening. BANG! It's night/dark. The Colemans are lit.

Even in summer weather so special as to require spam. Lmao

 

[Janne]

Sunsets are quick here too. Which we like, as the most vicious Mosquito bites for 20 minutes before and 20 minutes after the sunset.
It would be no fun if the sunsets were as long as in northern Europe or Canada.....

The best cure is to sit in the pool, with just the head showing, and one hand, the one holding the beer, above the water.

 

[Robson Valley]

Sunsets in Fiji were like the sun had a kill-switch. It just shut off.
Especially with the long days and the mountain range in the west, my evening summer twilight lasts for hours
and I'm only at 53N. Family in Dawson City, YT get 6 weeks of sunshine and also 6 weeks of dark in the winter.

 

[Janne]

We have one mountain here. Mt Trashmore we call it. The highest point on Grand Cayman.
The dump.

Full of Spam cans. As we have lots of Filipino workers here, Spam Tocino.
The Jamaican people here do not touch Spam. They cook the best food on Island!

 

[Robson Valley]

Yeah, Jamaicans can cook with the best of them.
Was a spot a block from my D2's place in Vancouver.
The Jerk chicken was the usual signature. Eat enough for a serious gut-ache.
Commercial Drive is a street of 50% restaurants and the rest is deli and bakery.

Must be districts like that in every big city in the UK.

Batch of kefthedes Greek meatballs then some elk burgers for supper.
The Spam will have to wait another day in my kitchen. I won't even eat
it for the memories of bush work all those years ago.

 

[santaman2000]

I'm still trying to figure out the people making claims that Spam only gets eaten because it's cheap. Where are y'all finding cheap spam? It's near $3 a can here. Over that benchmark in some stores.

 

[Robson Valley]

Spam gets eaten because it requires no refrigeration, it's clean and not fly-blown and it isn't fish.

 

[santaman2000]

Spam gets eaten because it requires no refrigeration, it's clean and not fly-blown and it isn't fish.

Actually we eat it because it's fantastic. It's not even close to healthy, It's not close to cheap. But it tastes great. The perfect unhealthy blend of meat, fat, and salt. Best ways to eat it?
-Sliced and fried plain
-Sliced and fried with melted cheese over it
-Sliced and raw
-diced and in baked beans
-Dice and in an omelet or scramble
-Diced and in mac & cheese
-Raw in a sandwich (very thickly sliced)

 

[bigboned]

Actually we eat it because it's fantastic. It's not even close to healthy, It's not close to cheap. But it tastes great. The perfect unhealthy blend of meat, fat, and salt. Best ways to eat it?
-Sliced and fried plain
-Sliced and fried with melted cheese over it
-Sliced and raw
-diced and in baked beans
-Dice and in an omelet or scramble
-Diced and in mac & cheese
-Raw in a sandwich (very thickly sliced)

All of them!!

Lidl have a version which is 1/2 the price of the real thing and very similar nutritional content- perhaps the wrong choice of wording but I mean has the same salt levels etc ( rather than even higher)

 

[Janne]

The whole idea of this thread is tell us food stuff you would only eat if you was starving. Not only Spam ( my hate food)

Spam with melted cheese and three max strength Statins on the side?

To be frank the nutritional level is not bad. Fat, protein, salt. Sugar.
If the protein comes from Spam or a Fillet Mignon does nutritionally not matter.

 

[Robson Valley]

Most Brassicaceae like cauliflower, Brussels Sprouts, Kale and so on belong in the compost pile.
If you want to be an agro-terrorist, plant those at night in the neighbor's garden along with horse radish.
They are not an excuse to ruin a good cheese sauce.

 

[Janne]

I dislike Nescafe and all of the other brands of instant coffee. Powdered, bitter acid.

One instant "coffee analog' is instant cikoria 'coffee'. Caro is a good brand. Very tasty.

 

[Broch]

I dislike Nescafe and all of the other brands of instant coffee. Powdered, bitter acid.

One instant "coffee analog' is instant cikoria 'coffee'. Caro is a good brand. Very tasty.

With you there; for some reason the smell of instant coffee (of any manufacturer) makes me want to retch
And yet I love the smell of a dark roast Italian blend 100% Arabica

 

[Janne]

I have always wondered why the food engineers (?) technicians (?) are unable to formulate a tasty instant coffee.
And why they are so acidic.

I do drink Nespresso coffee, have a machine, but prefer to steep a Swedish coffee called Zoega Skane rost ( Zoega Scania roast)

 

[Robson Valley]

Nescafe' in the 280 cup tall cans is not the same as in the smaller jars. Have soaked in it for decades.
Taster's Choice is a freeze-dried instant which is OK but a lot more expensive.

There are maybe 30+ species of Coffea sp. which can be roasted and called coffee.
C. arabica came out of the mountains of Ethiopia and was first traded in bulk in the Arabian city of Mocha.
Much more drought tolerant is C. robusta. Most instant coffees are made from this one. Acidic, bitter as you say.
My taste buds are so hacked, it takes that much to ring my bell.

The Dutch figured they had a SE Asian monopoly on coffee (before Sri Lanka switched to tea.).
So, those dummies brough back some small trees and planted them in some Dutch botanic garden. . . . and told everybody about it.
The Spanish and the Portugese regularly hopped the fence and stole the seeds which they planted in South and Central America.

Not the beans from Juan Valdez' donkey in the coffee adverts on TV.
The actor is actually the CEO of the advert company promoting the coffee!

Our staff germinated raw seeds and we had a bunch of coffee bushes growing in the back of a couple of labs at work.
No big deal.