Me too on your menu, and no matter how many times I’ve had black beans and rice with some fried yucca or plantains, it’s never the same as getting it around Miami. A little cafecito on the side, oh my! I like Malta, too, but it’s rare that I’ve seen it anywhere but PR or the Miami area.
As for @noahdjango and @SpunkyTWS comment about okra–dear god I love that stuff when it’s done right. But with cheese? That story sounds almost like “Wash. Biol. Surv”.
Thank you. Less and less easy to find that aren’t shitty, or even worse, that fucking awful Cajun style. Those are awful, the real thing is salty heaven.
It’s become a family legend, but, given my mother’s Czech background, it’s not surprising she wasn’t familiar with okra. She says it was a horrendous, inedible mess. Even my father who likes boiled okra (he’s known as “the slick okra man” at a couple of restaurants) through it was disgusting. Fortunately by the time I came along she’d learned to make fried okra, which I love.
I find Okra to be interesting simply because it looks like some prehistoric vegetable that escaped the museum and started growing again. That, and I love the taste–and you’re spot on about fried okra. Really, I’ll eat practically any Okra, except for the cheesed version, because this is one time where I really don’t want to combine two things I like to eat.
wow… that list is so out of date.
Stereotypes are timeless 
I spent four years in the UP in college. You are 1000% correct.
I spend a lot of time in Dutch Harbor and it’s really easy to find decent Filipino food - and it’s very easy to find ingredients and advice/help with making Filipino food. There are quite a lot of Filipinos in Alaska - many who are 2nd and 3rd generation.
Cheers!
What bemused me about boiled peanuts, the one time someone convinced me to try one, is that they feel and taste exactly like what you were expecting: damp, squishy peanuts. I thought “maybe it’s one of those things that’s not as gross as it sounds,” but no, it totally is.
Boiling should be a cooking method of last resort. There’s always a more appetising option (awaits inevitable counterexamples).
I had a housemate at uni who made a variation on ‘spag bol’ which was just mince (ground beef) boiled with spaghetti. Yummy.
Hell yeah, boiled peanuts!
we do fried pies down here a lot, too. I guess Hostess has/had a national version but there’s a ton of mom’n’pop versions in the South, and they’re great, comparatively.
it’s all lutefisk up there, right?
there was a Lebanese spot over near Royal Oak that was awesome, I remember.
Just visited, a few times so far. The fate gave me a Finnish girlfriend for a sweet and painfully short time, and another Finnish friend for several years to travel with. I ended up with a broken heart that still hurts badly after the years, fragmentary knowledge of Finnish (mostly cussing, otherwise enough to have a good chance to spot when google translate is feeding me crap so I could reword the input, further work put on slow track after loss of the primary reason but not stopped entirely), weakness for the overall culture (I’ll take genuine gloom over fake smiles any day), liking some kinds of metal (“Sonata Arctica cannot be metal, I do not like metal!”) and iskelma (surprisingly similar to that kind of music from here), and (to the consternation of said friend) the trucker country (Matti Esko FTW). Got promptly nicknamed Pelle Peloton by said friend’s mom when over (a peaceful middle-of-nowhere, I love the place). And Ilmarinen must be my patron saint, as I can build you a sky but won’t find myself a wife to save my life, building one of precious metals would be the easier option. AI research, where are you with the promised results?
Also, the machining and microreactor concept research (the at-home machining is a prerequisite for the reactors) I am toying with got codenamed Sampo for obvious reason.
That’s the long story short.
Also, pontikka.
I went through Tampere once. The amusement park is nice.
I think I ate these ones. Home-made, covered in flour and deep-fried in oil. Heavenly. Asked for confirmation. (Yes, they were muikku!) 
I have experience with Irish pizza (Domino tends to be good), didn’t eat any up North yet. Google Image search suggests a high degree of visual (and therefore, in this case, structural) similarity. My chief taster however reports significant differences.
On the todo list it goes!
We did invent Ivar’s. To think of all the poor saps who’ve never had Ivar’s in season Chinook salmon chowder. What crying shame.
Budapest had a small pizza chain with over 200 variations on the menu. Then there was a billiards hall under a swimming pool that had “Welsh” pizza: leeks, goat-cheese and ewe’s tongue.
I ate my pizza with my fingers, much to the hostile of my Hungarian companions. In time, I learned to use a knife and fork, but it always felt as fake as NOT dipping my bread in the soup (a “small village” thing to do, I was told).
Kis falusi vagyok.
[quote=“the article re: north carolina”]Southern – 229 percent higher than national average.
Cheesesteaks – 207 percent higher than national average.
Hot dogs – 80 percent higher than national average.
Chicken wings – 47 percent higher than national average.
Soul food – 39 percent higher than national average.[/quote]
At least in the regions I go in, there does not seem to be a disproportionate amount of cheesesteak and soul food restaurants in North Carolina. Anyone planning to visit this state: I advise caution when going to small, strangely antiseptic looking “Southern” food restaurants. For whatever reason, I’ve never once had a good meal in one. If you want a good, cheap Southern food restaurant, find a hole in the wall that basically only contractors go to.
For some incomprehensible reason, the hot dog thing is true. I mean it’d be fine if they were usually good but … don’t trust someone from North Carolina to tell you whether it’s good or not. I’ve been dragged into going to the same, disappointing, and terrible hole-in-the-wall hotdog place so many times by people who apparently don’t know it’s terrible.
I know someone who was a high school teacher in Hawaii for a few years. Apparently most college bound kids in her area were planning to go to BYU not because they were Mormon but because …
Out of state tuition is the exact same for out of state students as for in state students. You have to put up with a lot of nonsense to get a degree at BYU but the money can be a primary motivator in an area which is pretty impoverished.
Oh come on, Riesling is pretty good if you’re in the mood for a white whine (admittedly, I’m generally not but I assume we’re not pooh-poohing France for their white wines).
Wish that was true in the area of Virginia I hang out in on a semi-regular basis. Has that too-near-to-NC “every other restaurant is Mexican” thing going on. I found it surprising that wasn’t on NC’s list. I work in a town with at least 12 Mexican restaurants. Not that I’m complaining about the number. Most of them are terrible though. I keep wishing a few would shut down and be replaced by a good Indian place, Thai place, and Vietnamese place.
Coincidentally, it does have a Peruvian restaurant which is super expensive considering the only meal I’m in that town for is lunch.
Rice. And water for tea.
Now I’m trying to think of a way to prepare pasta other than boiling it. Hmm…
I vaguely recall a recipe for “fried ramen” which involved actually putting the noodle brick in a frying pan straight out of the package. Spices and sauce of some kind were also involved. I never tried it myself.
What, you’ve never had cold brew lasagna?
The hell’s wrong with soup? I’m confused.
With hot dogs you just need to apply a little discretion and spend the extra cash for decent all-beef dogs. The usual “floor sweepings from the meat packing plant” model has nothing to recommend it, but a good kosher dog hot off the grill has amazing flavor.
