I’m a pretty unadventurous baker/cook/diner. I like normal dishes with normal-sounding ingredients. (Which doesn’t exclude Chinese, Thai, Mexican and Italian cooking. It’s just that even in those recipes, I like ingredients that I can pronounce and find and identify.) Like today’s recipe – plain and simple ingredients for a nicely baked casserole. I still remember making a salad with Jicama in it (about 15 years ago, before Jicama was considered a normal ingredient). I asked the produce manager where the Jicama might be. (pronounced J, as in jeepers and jingle and Julia.) He politely pointed and said that the Jicama (pronounced H, as in hello, and hanky, and Harold) was over in the corner. Like I said, I like ingredients that I can find and pronounce.
Today’s recipe is a new one that I tried when we were on Spring Break. It received a thumbs up from my family, so I hope you and your family like it, too!
Chicken and Ham Bake
1 pck. cornbread stuffing mix (6 oz)
2 cans cream of chicken soup
2 cups milk
4 chicken breasts, cooked and cubed
1/2 lb. deli ham, sliced into thin strips
1 cup Swiss cheese
2 cups Cheddar Cheese
Layer chicken in the bottom of a greased 9 x 13 pan. Mix one can of soup with 1 cup of milk and pour over the top. Layer on the ham , swiss cheese, and 1 cup of cheddar cheese. Mix the other can of soup with 1 cup of milk and pour over the ham and swiss.
Prepare the stuffing mix according to package directions. Layer this on top and sprinkle 1 cup of Cheddar Cheese on top.
Cover and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake 10 minutes longer (or until cheese melts).
This month’s blog contest question is easy – what’s the most unusual ingredient you have ever eaten or cooked/baked with? (And if it’s not all that unusual, that’s just fine. I can relate.) Leave your answer in the comments below and I’ll draw the winners next week. The prize? A special edition color of Wollmeise.
Note regarding in-person shopping hours next week (4/19-23): While the website is always open, 24/7/365, we will be closed to IN-person shoppers here all next week. We have Spring Flingers coming in and they’re all we can handle at one time! (And our Fire Marshall agrees….)
Sheri headingtoaweddinginIndianathisweekend.Hopetheweathercooperates!
I live in Turkey (the country, not the town) and here they like to stuff EVERYTHING! Including some parts of a sheep that I’m not really sure what they are. Nothing goes to waste and they love sheep intestines stuffed with rice called shirdon.
Hot Dog Soup!
Sounds weird, tastes great and is simple to make.
My mother made this for us when we were kids and now I make it for my kids.
The most unusual I’ve ever eaten was durian. It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t good, either.
The most unusual thing I’ve ever cooked would have to be calamari. I purchased the squid whole and had to clean them, remove the insides, the ink sacks, the beaks… they were good but a lot of work. Calamari is best eaten in a restaurant!
Well I don’t know is this qualifies or not, but one of the most unusual things that I have eaten is sea urchin, is a type of shusi. Even though I love sushi, that is the one thing that I do not like and the first thing that came to my mind when you mention unusual things.
Well, probably too late to the party, but the most unusual food I have eaten is fried pickles. Just not my thing!
It is so much fun reading all the unusual things people have eaten. I suppose the most unusual for me was alligator. Thank goodness it was not too weird tasting. I’m really not all that adventurous.
Sadly, the weirdest “thing” I ever ate was “dog” – it was in Haiti….I didn’t know what it was or I probably wouldn’t have eaten it. But, I guess if you are poor and hungry – like the Haitians – you will eat anything! 🙂
It’s not unusual persay, but I made poppy seed muffins for church yesterday and actually *used* the poppy seeds in my spice drawer from when we lived in Michigan — 5! Years ago! Not an unusual ingredient, but unusual for me to use it!
I don’t cook with many weird ingredients – especially now that I’m cooking for a couple of picky kids. But I have tried frog legs – long ago. And I do like escargot, with lots of butter and wine.
I work in a restaurant with an adventurous chef, so the weirdest thing I have eaten are tiny octopi that still had heads. They were kind of cute and we referred to them as “wigglies”
I’ve eaten a jelly made of sheep brain. As long as I kept my mind focused on something else, it went all right. (I also need to add that since then I’ve changed my diet and gone almost vegetarian – I’m wondering if, deep down, these two facts are related.)
It’s not the most unusual ingredient on its own…but in a cookie recipe potato chips were unusual. I made Potato Chip Cookies half-dipped in chocolate for a cookie exchange. The next year I did a red chile, chocolate cookie. yum!
Hm, weirdest thing, weirdest thing. How about coca leaf creme brulee, in a fancy restaurant in Peru?
Baking Ammonia. It is used in an old Peppermint cookie recipe. I had these as a child (40s-50s) and have the recipe in a church cookbook from my grandparent’s church. By the way, the cookies are delicious.
ok — for me its Asian fish sause. I never eat anything fish and the thought of it really grossed me out but believe it or not without it, the dish I was making was totally bland. (curry) It is like a magic ingredient or something.
I think it would have to be cows eyes. Didn’t stay down long but it was part of a cooking group get together and someone made a mexican dish out of a cows head. I also would say that the next weirdest was crickets.
I once used fennel; it is an anise or licorice flavored bulb. It reinforced fact that I hate black licorice.
It’s not really “cooking”, but I do enjoy a good peanut butter and Cheeto sandwich 😉
Mine is eating. On an ambassador trip to South Korea in 2006 I was served Sea Slug and RAW Sea Urchin. As an ambassador I couldn’t turn them down. YUCK! It was like eating eraser and boogers. A couple bites was enough to be polite. (and about all I could get down without really being impolite and throwing it all back up…)
It’s not that unusual, but I bought tahini for the first time this past week to make hummus.
As it is spring in NE and the plants are popping up my family has been eating a lot of wild weeds- Dandelions, wild leeks, fiddleheads, violet leaves and chives. It isn’t unusual for us but I know it is for others. The most unusual thing I have eaten was placenta. I had little pieces fried up after each of my children. Hope that isn’t too shocking. I love your blog and these contests. Happy Spring!
While my mother’s family is from Greece, many things I ate for many people might be considered “unusual”, I visited a friends home once in college, where I was served beef tongue for dinner. First and last time I ate that!
I remember when I was a kid in the 1970s, growing up in Ohio, and my mom coming home with a bag of soybeans which she boiled in salted water and gave to us for a snack.
Nowadays, they’re called “edamame” and served at upscale restaurants and everyone knows what they are, but back then, it was quite exotic!
Durian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian
I had durian the first time when I was kicking around Southeast Asia in 1994. Yes it smells like….raw sewage. But it tastes yummy! It’s very rich so I can only eat a little bit at a time.
The “strangest” thing culturally that I’ve ever eaten were horse tacos. The Hispanic chefs at the restaurant I worked at made them one Sunday, though I have no idea where they got the meat from. They were very good, and it wasn’t as creepy as I’d expected.
As for the strangest ingredient I’ve ever used… it’s always weird to me when a pound cake recipe calls for mayonnaise. It just doesn’t feel right!
For me, it’s not so much strange ingredients as strange combinations: my sister loves a sweet loaf she makes with a can of pork & beans in it, and my own favourite loaf has an entire orange (peel and all) blended inside. To top it all off, my roommate is a chef, and he keeps talking about making some bacon ice cream, a la Heston Blumenthal.
Amazingly, they are all really delicious!
p.s. I love jicama, just sliced and eaten raw — so good!
Escargot, eaten at a very high-end restaurant when I was dating a guy who grew up in Belgium. I was not about to be seen as provincial, so I ate it. Tasted like a rubber eraser soaked in garlic butter. OK, been there, done that, don’t need to do that again.
We ate this growing up, so I don’t find it weird at all – but my husband thinks it’s weird (too sweet for a meal, he says), and one ex-boyfriend actually accused me of trying to poison him with this:
Pierogies filled with lekvar.
Lekvar is prune butter. When I was little, my mom told me it was raisins, since I wouldn’t eat prunes and thought they were yucky! And I’m not kidding about the ex-boyfriend; he pitched such a fit, he made me take him to an Arby’s for a sandwich (to shut him up). Any wonder he’s an ex-boyfriend? No picky kid ever had a reaction to match his.
I am not an adventurous cook/baker but I am a VERY adventurous diner!!
I love kumquats (who even knows what they are?). I’ve eaten fried seaweed in London, and vowed in my late 20’s as a faced a divorce and the beginning of a new non-boring life that I would try any and everything I had the chance to try.
With that said, I haven’t been in the position to try too much.
I take advantage of the weird produce at the market and when at a restaurant I try the weirdest thing on the menu. It’s paid off! I found out that I LOVE fried pickles that way!
Oysters are the weirdest thing I’ve ever eaten. I had them at a party. Not bad, but would never eat them again, or cook them either! They are by far the ugliest food I’ve ever seen!!
Whoops, forgot the czarnina – that’s Polish duck blood soup. Had it once; it’s a serious cultural thing. It’s sort of like sweet & sour – it usually has vinegar and some kind of fruit in it. If you can get past the blood part, not really bad.
I have had whole roasted rabbit, which was quite nice, although there’s not a whole lot of meat on those little guys.
I can’t think of anything that I’ve ever baked that’s that adventurous, but the weirdest thing I’ve ever eaten would probably be raw whale. It didn’t have much taste, really, but it looked like raw beef, so that was kind of interesting. (This was in Japan.)
Also alligator, which I’ve had a couple of times. Mmm, alligator. Crawfish are just bizarre, though. Not untasty, but — my university just had Crawfest, which is pretty much devoted to eating thousands of boiled crawfish, which means that the quad smelled like crawfish and tequila until it rained a couple of days ago. But, you know, Louisiana.
Tried to cook Aritchoke once; it was not easy; I need more practice. I love artichokes, but need to learn to cook them. I tried Eggplant, but did not like it. Sweet potatoes can be hard to cut. I haven’t really tried anything odder than this. Not too odd. I’ve grown to like zucchini and yellow squash a lot and know a few ways to cook it.
NO fascinating story. As part of a sorority initiation, one of the things we were served was roasted grasshopper. Tasted like salted peanuts.
I guess the most adventurous item I have eaten is alligator. Actually it tastes a bit like chicken and was well prepared so it was not tough. There is a hometown restaurant near us that specializes in exotic foods so of course the men in my life had to try it. Snake was on the menu but I refused to sit at the same table with anyone eating snake. Ugh!
Back in college (many moons ago), I dated a guy who’s mother loved to serve venison. At her annual Christmas open house one year, she served venison meatballs. To her utter horror, her son’s friends immediately dubbed them “Bambi” balls. The name stuck, and I haven’t been able to eat venison since! (They really were pretty good though, once you got past the mental imagery.)
Maybe not weird, but new to me as a regular menu item, is flowers. I recently attended a lovely garden symposium and they were served and honored as an ingredient. Consequently, I will now try to race the deer to the garden when assembling my salads! Seriously, try them this season!
Ok, the most unusual thing I have ever cooked with is duck’s blood to make blood soup with my grandmother years and years ago (and never since).
In and of itself, “duck’s blood” is not odd, but I think it was the fact that the blood had to be fresh, and thus, that I had to help slaughter the live duck and drain the blood to use in the soup that was the really strange thing. That very visceral link between what I killed, harvested, cooked, and then ate left an indelible impression on me. The soup was alright, but the experience made a series of connections for me that I never want to forget.
Wickles Pickles (Bread & Butter Pickles with chili peppers) mixed into Chicken or Egg salad.
Wow–there are some great responses! i am not adventurous in comparison but i do so love to eat. I do love Mexican food and finding various dried chili peppers to make sauces with.
yum.
My mother in law had a recipe for chocolate cake using mayonnaise. Sounds weird but was a very good, moist cake.
I think the weirdest thing I’ve ever eaten was a conch-fritter when my family visited the Bahamas. It’s the little sea-slug/snail critter that lives in those pretty conch shells you can hear the ocean in if you hold them to your ear. But it’s a pretty close tie with the jellyfish a friend made me try in college (ew, not a fan)!
after reading some of these, I have to mention that I have also eaten Partridge, shot and killed on Thanksgiving Day, Moose stew and Fiddleheads due to my extended family being from Maine.
I also once made a chocolate cake that had tomato sauce in it…..the recipe is in the back of the book “Thunder Cake” which I read with my 17yr old when she was little because she was very scared of thunder after having lived in Georgia the first couple of years of her life and experiencing me freak out whenever a tornado came near our house.
I regularly eat all sorts of sushi, capers, and a bunch of other stuff mentioned. But some of the stuff that has been mentioned reminds me of the old show “Fear Factor”, especially the 1000 year old egg.
So… well I’m making rabbit in mustard sauce for dinner…
Strangest thing I’ve eaten? Hmmm that’s really really hard. Ah – I cook a lot of Asian food, we really like it – with full loads of Nam Pla (fish sauce) but there is one ingredient that is very very tasty in small quantities but it looks horrible and smells worse – shrimp paste. It’s fermented shrimp and smells – well, uh… not nice until it’s cooked. It’s one of the only ingredients I cringe at when I add it. Even asofoetida doesn’t make me step back from the pan in the same way…
This sounds really weird, but it’s actually VERY tasty! I make a peanut butter curry dish with chunky peanut butter, soy sauce, honey, a bit of cayenne pepper (more or less or none depending upon who’s eating it), and yellow mustard. Yes, yellow mustard. As it turns out, plain ol’ yellow mustard (not deli mustard, honey mustard, Grey Poupon, etc- must be yellow mustard) has a number of spices in it that are commonly found in curry dishes. It even gets it’s yellow color from turmeric; a spice that’s a bit on the expensive side, but key to curry dishes. So this is a tasty, economical way to make curry. Whenever I make this recipe, people always ask for copies of the recipe and line up for seconds. It’s pretty easy to make too. Chop up a bunch of vegetables, and saute with onions, ginger, and garlic. Add cooked chopped chicken if you like too. Then make the sauce & mix it in with all the veggies & chicken and serve over a bed of brown rice or (if you’re carb- conscious) over a bed of shredded lettuce. Then I like to top each plate off with an even mixture of chopped green onions and cilantro. It’s delicious!
Using yellow mustard (in what I think) in innovative ways maybe isn’t what you’re looking for though? In terms of most unusual thinng I’ve ever eaten…. That’s tough- I’m a pretty adventurous eater. Although I haven’t necessarily enjoyed each thing I’ve tried, my momma raised me to be polite and try everything that was ever served to me. I’ve eaten chinese black eggs in a soup (black because they’ve become so rotten that they’re black- I wasn’t a fan. Sad to say, I had a tough time trying to swallow them down.) I’ve eaten sheep intestines, calf’s brain (both in stews), & herring-sized fish with their heads on…. My great aunt from Germany used to make the most delicious bread and it was only when she passed away that we saw that she used bacon grease in the recipe.
Wow, this is a hard one. I tend to be really open about food I eat except for meats. I am a basic chicken, pork, and beef eater. I refuse to eat lamb. I can’t eat something so cute. We’ve been to one of those restaurants that serve all sorts of meat like ostrich and alligator and so on and I stuck to the basics. For me it just seems wrong and I think one day I may give up meat altogether.
One food that I love that many people think is disgusting are gizzards. Growing up we thought of them as treats like other kids think of candy as a treat. Love em!
I am a very adverturous eater and cooker. There are definitely things I like and things I don’t like, but few things that I won’t try at least once.
Right now, I’ve just discovered xanthan gum. I’ve been playing around with it as a thickener. Not as gummy as flour, not as gelatinous as cornstarch.
I love sushi and tempeh, unusual cheeses, and almost anything with cilantro in it.
Hmmm…I’ve eaten some pretty weird things, but don’t cook weird things. I think most of what I’ve eaten has been listed, too. I’m from Florida, so I’ve had alligator and rattlesnake, as well as ostrich and buffalo. My husband thinks it’s pretty weird that I’ve also eaten quite a bit of chicken-fried squirrel (which tastes like chicken-fried chicken) and frogs legs.
Probably the strangest ingredient I have used in cooking was asafoetida. It smells truly horrible on its own — like something died in the jar. When it cooks in, though, it turns into one of those “je ne sais quoi” ingredients that adds flavor complexity to the food. The problem for me was figuring out how to store the jar! I had it in a double plastic bag inside a container inside the freezer, and it still stank so much that I had to throw it out. Blech! Decided to live without it after that.
Hmmm. I’m pretty adventurous. And I love ethnic food, so I guess I’ve eaten/cooked with lots of adventurous items. I think, though not adventurous in and of itself, one of the most unusual (here in the US) dishes I’ve made recently was a curry with hard boiled eggs. I think it’s a pretty typical peasant/home cooking dish in regions of India, but I’ve never seen it in the US on an Indian restaurant menu…