So here we are, facing the shelves of the grocery store. What do we see on them? Usually, it’s what we always buy. We have a predefined ‘verified goal.’ A certain brand of milk, our favorite yogurt with the preferred filling, spices we constantly use — all of these items fall into our basket in no time. But then it hit us. We looked at each other. Why do we have Lay’s chips, Iberica olives, Heinz ketchup, and Nestle ice cream on our receipt? Can you tell we’re in Thailand just by this list of products? And then we decided to challenge ourselves: to buy something very unusual and strange every day. And there’s plenty of strange food here. It’s Asia after all!
And what came out of all this? It turned out to be wow!
It may seem trivial, but everyday life has become filled with more new emotions, which means more future memories. Every day, we eagerly await the evening when we can crack open a new crunchy package under a jar of cold mineral water with ice (okay, or Thai beer) — and… laugh, or marvel, or be surprised — and simply share a new experience with each other.
The easiest thing to start with is snacks. Because here it’s not scary to be disappointed or hungry) So, let’s begin!
Fried shrimp with crab curry flavor. These are shrimp chips, ground into crumbs, pressed, and fried in oil. You take one piece, and there are ten eyes staring at you, saying, ‘Eat me, eat me, poor tourist!’ This is the funniest snack we’ve tried. It smells like dried fish food, but because of this smell, it seems healthier than potato chips (probably deceiving). It’s interesting, especially the kids liked it — salty, looks funny, and crunchy. We’ll give it an 8 out of 10 and will buy more!
Now, this is probably a familiar product for many. Soy milk. Nobody in our family is lactose intolerant, so we usually take regular milk. But in one of the episodes on YouTube, we saw that the Chinese dip pastries in this milk and eat them for breakfast. We decided to try it too, in our case — with chocolate muffins. Verdict: less sweet than cow’s milk, thicker, but somehow… uninteresting overall. We’ll give it a 5 out of 10.
The same story happened with tofu cheese. It doesn’t taste like anything, no matter what spices you fry it with. We gave it several chances — no love. 4 out of 10. And a real wow discovery for us was a small jar… taken by mistake.
These are Chinese pickled olives. We grabbed them when we were making a Caesar salad, thinking, well — olives are olives. But when we opened and tasted them, we said, ‘eww! What nasty stuff did we pick up?’ They don’t resemble regular olives at all. They’re just soaked in salt to the point where the skin bursts, and the pit inside swells to unimaginable sizes. It’s very, very salty and slightly spicy. You know what it’s like? Like Marmite. We didn’t fall in love with it right away either.
But then it went like this. “Don’t throw it away.” And — “this is not bad.” And then — “I urgently need this again!” It’s really strange, but it’s a 10 out of 10. The kids give it a 0 because they refused to eat it.
Oh, and here’s another ‘ten’! Many have seen piles of some salty stuff at Thai markets, surrounded by a bunch of flies? This pickled cabbage is one of those heroines. We don’t know how we dared to try it, but it turned out to be great. Basically, it’s like crispy kimchi, but much saltier and without any pepper at all. We think it’s very healthy because it’s fermented. The kids refused to eat it again, giggling)
Oh, we’ve been looking at this for a long time. At first, we took pictures, then joked about it, and one day it ended up in our shopping basket instead of Lay’s chips.) It’s fried salmon skin. Crunchy. Smells like dry fish. Smells very strongly of dry fish.) Salty-sweet. Mmm, not bad! And even with a claim to be healthy — it says it contains Omega-3. We’ll take more and give it an 8 out of 10. We dared and also took pig skin for tonight. It’s time to get into all the tough stuff)
When we try it, we’ll definitely tell you how it goes. Oh, and there was also chicken skin) we need to taste that too. Hello, cholesterol!
Who knew that, right?)
As for this thing — eggs buried in the ground for a long time and then rotted there — we won’t try it for any amount of money in the world) They sell them everywhere. Despite the fabulous variety of vegetables and fruits, as if there’s nothing else to eat! Strange people)
And the last contender for tasting) We’re looking forward to this one because we just love mollusks. These are fried clam tongues with garlic flavor. Can’t wait to try it!
And we’re eagerly awaiting the continuation of our strange challenge because it… may not always be tasty, but it’s definitely always interesting!
