I did not get to go fishing as much as I wanted to lately, and a recent winter flounder trip that despite amazing weather resulted in only one keeper fish is not a highlight of my fishing career. But the flounder sashimi that I made out of it was absolutely awesome.

Here's a picture of striped bass sashimi that I made a few years back. I'm told that the dark brown (looks red in the picture for some reason) meat should be removed from fillets. It was very tasty anyway.

Food safety is not something to be taken lightly, of course. A lot of people gasp - homemade sashimi? That's suicide! But if you ask me, food police, fear of lawsuits and American germophobia goes a little too far.

Over the years I ate a lot of potentially deadly stuff. Street vendor food, for example. Did you ever wonder how those guys go to the bathroom? Cafeteria food. Oh, and not only American street vendor food and cafeteria food. Soviet too. I ate a lot of sushi and sashimi. I've had raw Korean beef. A lot of oysters, some rare steaks (usually I order medium-rare). In Ukraine I liked to snack on raw chicken eggs. I ate fish that I caught in the uber-polluted Black Sea. I even ate raw mussels (and they concentrate all the bad sea crap) there.

And you know what? While long term health effects of my omnivorous eating are not known yet, I had a very mild case of food poisoning only once. From a reportedly unexpired can of Alaskan salmon.

Alleged time traveler John Titor wrote this about American food:

"What are people thinking? You willfully eat poisoned food. It's very hard for me to find food here. It all scares the Hell out of me. I am amazed at the risks people here are willing to take with processed food. All of the food I eat here is grown and prepared by my family or myself."

I am scared myself. Food here for the most part does not taste right. The large scale growing and processing does something to it. I highly suspect that it's one of the major contributing factors in the obesity epidemic.

In any case, I remember watching Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" where he sat in a French bistro and pointed out half a dozen things that would be completely illegal in an American restaurant, but actually make a eating in that bistro amazing.

As far as homemade sashimi is concerned, I hear a lot of talk about freezing fish overnight in a freezer to kill parasites before eating it. I've tried this, and it makes the texture of the fish mushy. I am not sure about this, but it seems to me that the only fish that gets that treatment is tuna - I've seen huge frozen carcasses in the Tsukiji fish market. In any case, raw fish that I caught myself if probably the freshest that it can be. The only way this sashimi could be any fresher is if I cut and eat the still alive fish right on the boat.

Spyware and construction contractors are very bad for my health. For instance, recently, the contractor who renovated my apartment asked for my help with cleaning out yet another spyware infestation. To express his gratitude he gave me a present that his sister brought with her from her trip to Ukraine. A piece of genuine Ukrainian salo.

Salo is an Eastern European staple that for some strange reason is virtually unknown in the West. Wikipedia describes it as salted slabs of pork underskin fat. It's not really bacon - salo mostly consist of unrendered fat (bacon has more meat) and can be eaten raw.

If you've never had salo, it's most similar to the taste and texture of little pieces of fat found in some harder kielbasas. In its fried form salo resembles bacon and pork rinds, except it's much tastier. Also, you really can't make exceptional borscht or fried sunflower seeds without high quality salo.

Here's a piece (Ukr. "shmatok") of salo on my official Jamie Oliver cutting board. I used my sashimi knife to cut it into thin slices - the best way to eat, in my opinion.

It's kind of hard to describe the taste and texture of Ukrainian salo. The texture of it is hard, yet it melts on your tongue. It's salty, fatty, garlicky. Your caveman instincts make your brain fire "wow, inhale this right now" messages, yet the little Surgeon General in your head tells you "wow, this will clog up your arteries good." They don't call salo "Ukrainian cocaine" for nothing.

The little Surgeon General in your head is wrong, though. Having come into possession of this authentic salo for the first time in years, I just had to kick it up a notch and make the _ultimate_ in unhealthy treif food. I had to make the legendary confection - "salo in chocolate".

This confection started as a joke playing on Ukrainians' fondness of salo. Then some Russian and Ukrainian restaurants started making it as an exotic delicacy. Then someone started to make a candy bar of that name. The Wikipedia article has more on that.

I tempered some good semi-bitter chocolate and dipped thin slices of salo into it.

The flavor is outstanding. Chocolate goes well with salty, fatty salo. It tastes as good as it is unhealthy. Overall, though, the quantity that I made is probably no worse than a movie theater popcorn or the bun of death from the vending machine at work. In fact, probably healthier.

If you are curious, you can find salo in most Russian food stores in New York. It will probably be lower quality Canadian salo, but it will give you a pretty good idea.

You can find more of my gastronomic adventures here.

Let me start with one of my favorite quotes from The Matrix:

"Tank: Here you go, buddy; "Breakfast of Champions."
Mouse: If you close your eyes, it almost feels like you're eating runny eggs.
Apoc: Yeah, or a bowl of snot.
Mouse: Do you know what it really reminds me of? Tasty Wheat. Did you ever eat Tasty Wheat?
Switch: No, but technically, neither did you.
Mouse: That's exactly my point. Exactly. Because you have to wonder: how do the machines know what Tasty Wheat tasted like? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like oatmeal, or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken, for example: maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything."

There are certain things that you should really taste at least once, but are usually hard to get a hold of to taste, like let's say top quality caviar, or kobe beef, Peter Luger's steaks . Other things, like oysters, haggis, Gray Papaya and Nathans hot dogs, high quality sashimi and other notable foods, that might be hard to obtain everywhere, but are still more or less affordable. There are whole lists of "things to try at least once" out there.

Then there's a category of items that were eaten in the olden times, but are not considered acceptable food anymore: whale meat, horse meat and other intelligent and/or exotic animal meats. I've had whale steaks back in the day, whale meat was widely available in the Soviet Union, as well as horse sausage. Since I ate a lot of hot dogs , I am sure I had my share of cats, dogs and pigeons.

And of course, there are commercial drinks with formulations that are not made anymore. The first Coca Cola (the one with cocaine), Starbucks Tazo Blended Drinks, Incredibly and Sharkleberry Fin Kool-aid (as well as many other discontinued flavors.)

I was always especially interested in one soft drink that I never got a chance to taste: the "New Coke." The myth-shrouded beverage seemed to be out of reach for me, until thanks to the twin wonders that are packrats and eBay, I got my own unopened can or genuine New Coke. That's a reason for the new installment of Gastronomic Adventures, of course.

I chilled the $10+shipping can of soda and photographed it in all its glory. Look, just look at it!

I was expecting the can, that is at least 13 years old (in 1992 New Coke was renamed Coke II) to be completely devoid of carbonation. I was ready for a foul smell, discolored soda, etc. To my surprise, the carbonation was mostly normal and the coke smelled just fine.

I kind of knew what to expect -- in theory New Coke has the same formulation as Diet Coke, except with sugar instead of aspartame, and should taste similarly to Diet Coke With Splenda. I knew that New Coke was supposed to be sweeter than Coca Cola Classic.

Of course, taste tests are a tricky thing. I am pretty sure I would have a lot of trouble telling Pepsi from Coke from Mexican Coke (the one in glass bottles and sweetened with cane sugar) from Diet Coke (if it's with ice).

In any case, decade old New Coke _did_ taste a bit like Diet Coke With Splenda. It was not as sweet as I expected, and had that weird little aftertaste that I always associated with the Splenda Coke. I think in Diet Coke it's masked by the aspartame and in Classic by higher acidity.

I seem to have not suffered any stomach upset or anything of that matter. Upsettingly I did not acquire any noticeable superpowers, except the ability to say that I've tasted the New Coke.

P.S. Does anybody know how to obtain some surströmming online or in New York?

P.P.S. I Know about hufu. I think it's a hoax.

Ad:

Haggis: "sheep's heart, liver, and lungs (or "lights"), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock and traditionally boiled in the animal's stomach for several hours." Tried it. It's good.

Corn Smut. It's not what you think it is.I tried it, it's actually pretty cool.

Kobe beef: "beef made from cows that are fed a diet enriched with beer and massaged lovingly by attendants in Kobe, Hyogo, Japan." It's way tasty.

There's a book about these things too - Edible Plants and Animals: Unusual Foods from Aardvark to Zamia.

Believe it or not, but they still make Moxie.