"eastern europe" news and stories

You thought today was going to filled with yummy, delicate posts about sweet treats and flowers, didn't you?

Think again.

Trifter.com has oh-so helpfully provided us with eight of the "most disgusting delicacies" - although we prefer to think of them not as disgusting, per se, but as ...daring. Different. Deconstructed.

Some of the more colorful examples? In Morocco, you can indulge in oil made from goat excrement. The goats climb the trees in search of food, and the resulting oil is though to have medicinal purposes. Or you could hop over to Italy and try some Casu Frazigu. Sound exotic? It's made when a fly lays its eggs on cheese, and maggots hatch and crawl throughout the cheese. So, essentially, it's rotten maggot cheese.

But that's just kids' stuff compared to what awaits you in Southeast Asia: balut, a fertilized duck egg, comes complete with a partially formed duck fetus inside - at no extra charge! Just season with salt and pepper, and dig in.

And for dessert, engage your senses with Sumatran coffee beans [ed. note - pictured]. Not adventurous enough for you? Well, they come fresh out of the digestive track of a civet, a small, cat-like creature. The civet eats the beans, and when they are excreted, they are scrubbed clean and brewed.

Happy Valentine's Day!

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You remember: she's the chewing gum fanatic in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who broke a world record by chewing one stick of gum for three months straight. And we're guaranteed that Maurizio Savini would be her hero.

Savini's chewing gum sculptures have getting a ton of press lately, probably less for artistic merit and more for pure gawking value. For the record, all of the gum he uses is un-chewed, and according to a bio on nonprofit art foundation Pastificio Cerere's site, Savini chose gum as a medium for its barrage on our senses and because it reminds him of childhood.

Check out more of his sculptures here, and then give us your opinion.

By now some readers of Midnight Snack have come to think of me as the food blogger who cried weird. But I'm pretty sure the product whose package you see here is one of the stranger things I've eaten at midnight or any other time. Sure It looks like a candy bar, but according to the incredibly tiny print on the back, it's actually a "Biologically Active Food Supplement <<Hematogenka Vitamin>>. The fact that it was "biologically active," came as a relief; the last few Russian food supplements I bought have been biologically inert. Actually that's a lie, I've never had a Russian food supplement before this one, and after tasting it, I don't think I'll be buying another one any time soon.

When I tore open the festive packaging, which featured an image of a mutant man-alligator, I saw five individually wrapped morsels. I unwrapped one of the dark brown chunks and popped it in my mouth. It had a slightly granular texture and supersweet taste that reminded me of my dear mother's oatmeal cookie dough before she added the oats. It all makes sense given that the bizarre bar's ingredients are: sugar, molasses, complete condensed milk with sugar, fat lecithin, salt, hemoglobin, mixture of vitamins (E-10 mg.,B11.4 mg., B6-2 mg., PP -18 mg., C-60mg.). Reading a little further I learned that "Hematogenka provides a reserve for feeding with iron." Against my better judgment I popped another chunk of the brown mystery bar into my mouth. Shortly thereafter I brushed my teeth and threw the rest of the nasty thing out.

When I read that my mystery bar contained hemoglobin, I began to think of it as a PowerBar for vampires who've awoken feeling peckish. However a quick web search revealed that such bizarre supplement-snacks are eaten by Russians. Has anyone out there ever heard of hemoglobin bars or had the pleasure of eating one?

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When my mom was pregnant with me, she craved borscht. She would buy the jars of Manishevitz brand borscht and drink it cold, straight from the container. It was a surprise to no one when I came into the world with an unreasonable love for beets. I like beets just about any way that they come, and borscht is one of my favorite ways to eat them. However, for someone who loves those red root vegetables as much as I do, you'd think that I'd then have a go-to recipe for the stuff. Sadly, you would be mistaken. I've tried many times and while I've always come up with something edible, I've never made it and then thought, "Gee, I love that."

However, on Sunday, Elise at Simply Recipes posted about borscht and included a recipe that she's adapted from Bon Appetit. It is based on beef broth and includes beets, carrots, potatoes and cabbage. It looks hearty, flavorful and deeply colored and is calling my name. I think I'll save this recipe for when I go to visit my parents in Oregon in a few weeks, to see if I can't shake my mother's attachment to the jarred version of this soup. With this recipe in hand, I don't think it should be hard.

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I feel like I need to apologize in advance for this because the kind people over at Reyka vodka were nice enough to send a bottle of their new vodka to me to try, and presumably, it flew all the way over here from Iceland! However, I can't promise that I have the nicest things to say about Reyka Vodka.

Reyka Vodka's bottle design is what struck me first -- there is absolutely nothing sexy about the packaging at all. Unlike so many of the new vodkas that are being marketed these days that are tall, sleek, and smooth, sometimes opaque to hide the elixir inside, Reyka is a rather short, squat bottle that has a slight bluish cast, like a soda bottle. The label is plain white paper that almost looks like stationary, with simple black block lettering. I suppose, in a way, it's a little bit refreshing to come across something so straightforward.