Before living in Asia, Spam was the most sinister food substance I had personally encountered but never eaten: hardened pink paste composed of (or decomposed of) decaying body parts from all your favorite barnyard animals and whatever rodents may have died on the slaughterhouse floor. In Asia, you get to see all the body parts, waving at you in the markets, on the menus and right on the plates of the people sitting next to you. You can witness the parts still twitching if you buy very fresh, barely alive birds at the morning, evening or somewhere in-between markets. You can’t imagine how many individual parts of a chicken are available. If you don’t want the actual chicken or its parts, go for the nicely packaged Essence of Chicken, a sort of spiritual Spam that gives you the energy to run around with your head cut off.

Let me assure you: Asian food is nothing less than fantastic. Assorted sea creatures, wiggling and whimpering, are presented for selection, then brought steaming to the beach as your chair sinks slowly into the sand and the sun slowly sinks into the sea. Upscale cafes serve fine food and down home stalls serve any food they can find. Mobs of mobile carts make Noodles Whatever, Pork Anything or Stir-fried Everything Else.

You don’t have to find the food, the food finds you: it’s shoved through the open windows of buses, trains and cars when you pause at a village, on the ferries, on the docks. Fresh familiar fruits and veggies, fresh odd foreign fruits and veggies or somewhere in-between, nuts upon nuts, and rice in every shape and form: steamed, fried, milk, flour, sticky, packed into bamboo sticks with black beans, thin/wide/curly/crispy/soft/glass noodles, translucent jelly-like, geometric-shaped, multi-colored sweet salty globs of rice goo candy: “Excuse me, can I have some rice gas please? It comes in every other form. You must have gas, too? Oh, I see. I get gas when I eat these?” Super sweet, little bananas, some as small as your thumb: like chips, you can’t eat just one. Juicy green oranges. (They’re very green on the outside and very, very orange on the inside, but they’re still called oranges, not greens.)
 
You don’t have to be at a country bus stop to step into a Culinary Never-Never Land. There are plenty of Oral Adventures in the big cities. And yes, they do eat dog, but in Hanoi, only during the last week of the month. There’s a whole string of restaurants in one area of the city that are open just one week per month. Ritual, culture or Simon Says why. Maybe the first three weeks is the Municipal Dog Harvest. Hearing about a dog delicacy was enough for me.
I love to walk the dog but it’s not spelled “wok the dog.”

One evening I venture into a tidy, traditional Viet restaurant on a sleepy street, across from ornate French banks and government buildings in the Hanoi’s Old Quarter. The Muzak Symphony plays Shindler’s List and other cheery movie themes. I order three dishes: “Quang Dong’s Fried Tofu,” “Steamed Eel with Banana and Soya Cake” and “Poor Food.” The Poor Food is 2000 dong = 13 cents. The waiter tries to explain it. I don't understand. I have to see it.

The Poor Food is not poor. It’s not poor, but passing. It’s absolutely inedible. Random, pickled green things, cold, flaccid, and bitter, not worth 13 cents. (I’m not going to order anymore green things unless they’re orange.) Quang Dong, however, is a genius. Tender, crispy, not greasy, tofu cubes. Rip one leaf off a sprig of lemon balm on the plate. Wrap it around cube. Dip it in Quang’s chili soy sauce. Mmm, succulent. The Steamed Eel Etcetera is inspiring. What do you do when you have some tiny bananas, a bag of tofu, a couple of carrots, a few eels and a stack of miscellaneous leaves in the fridge? Now you know! Combine everything, add a dash of several hundred Vietnamese spices and remember to leave the skins on the bananas when you slice them. 

Once again, entertainment for the meal is reading about all the dishes I didn’t dare order. I had no idea there were so many things I didn’t eat until I got to Asia, mainly because I had never really considered certain things could be food. Charred Rice with Fried Chest was in the same category as a fire hydrant. Or a Buick. Or insects, but that’s another story.

Here’s a list of entrees I did not order but plan to rush back during my next life
as a goat and try them all…

Russia's Broiled Meat
Assorted wild animals from Chernobyl, perhaps?

Undercook Veal With Lemon
“Gee whiz, thanks for undercooking the pork. I like my worms lightly warmed.”

Frog's Trotterclip In Flour Fried
Legs, maybe. Trotterclips, um, well, are these big frogs? Do they ride them in?

Desiccation Chicken
Desiccation is not a restaurant word. The Dried Up As A Result Of Removing Water Chicken
does not whip taste buds into a ravenous frenzy. Considering there are so many spelling
errors on the menus, they may have meant “Defecation Chicken.”

Baked Thick of Chicken
I’m thick of chicken. We had it jutht latht night and I’m tho theriothly thick of it.

Enterocoelous Of Chicken With Fried Baby Fresh New Corn
The word “enterocoelous” is not in my Vietnamese Phrase Book, nor was this dish
ever an option my mother gave me for a holiday dinner in North Dakota, although
Dessication Fish (Lutefisk) was. Do you think "baby fresh new" is repeatedly redundant
over and over and over again?

Stick A Lobster in Cistern
“Sir Waiter, do I have to eat it in the cistern or do you take it out for me?” Dictionary says…
Cistern: a container in which water is stored, esp. one connected to a toilet or in the roof
of a house. This could certainly have been Defecation Lobster. Although very clear regarding “cistern,” no online dictionaries mentioned “enterocoelous” or “trotterclip.”
They must be local words. Very local to this restaurant only.

Imagine getting up for a midnight snack, stumbling to the fridge or food freezer and encountering an endless array of carcasses. Shelves of stomachs, bins full of feet, crispers of chests. Cobras on the mantle leering at you from jars filled with clear, formaldahide-like liquid. [Snake Wine FAQ: Yes, it’s a real cobra. No, it’s not alive. Yes, you can drink it. No, I didn’t, although I did have many glasses of clear, potent “wine” where I didn’t get to see the bottle which tasted more like authentic Appalacian moonshine. Yes, those are lizards in the bottles to the right. No, I don’t know what forms of matter are in the far right bottles. Roots? Worms? Root worms? Root worm intestines? Just take the concept of the worm in the tequila bottle to another level. Okay, take it a hundred levels. And these wines will level you.]

Actually I’d rather not imagine any of that right now. It’s midnight. The air is tomb still. The full moon beats down on my jungle bungalow sticking to the hillside with stilts. The night is noisy with hooting, honking, squawking, squeaking, crunching and leaf rustling. The bad news: My dreams will be haunted by bags of body parts and vivid visions of what the night creatures around me may be. The good news: They’re undoubtedly all edible. ( Previous Page )

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