Sometimes you find yourself walking around the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) late at night trying to find a restaurant that tourists wouldn’t go to. What we found was Le La Quan, a place so local that the people who worked in the restaurant barely spoke a word of English and the menu was only available in Vietnamese.

Yet, through it all we managed to place some orders. While I was really only there for a beer, one of my companions ordered some chicken. But not just any chicken – chicken ovaries. I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to eat these, so I dug in.

The first thing you notice is that they look like Satan’s egg yolks. In that I mean they were yellow, but veiny in an intimidating way. Yet, I dug in and found that it was more like a combination of hard boiled egg yolk and egg white in one. It had the flavor of egg yolk, but was much more rubbery in texture. And yet still not quite as rubbery as egg whites.

Of course, I probably could have guessed that chicken ovaries would taste a lot like chicken “pre-eggs,” but you never know until you try and now that I’ve tried, you probably don’t have to.

Oysters are weirdly popular in Taipei. Or so I think. All I know is that in two nights there I ate more oysters than I ever intended to in my whole life. One of those was in the form of some oyster noodle soup (also known as oyster vermicelli) at the Shilin Night Market, which happens every night and presumably the soup is always there being served by the same lady out of a cart as well.

So what is oyster noodle soup? It’s literally a thick broth with salty flavor, stringy vermicelli noodles and chunks of oyster. The trouble is that I really don’t understand oyster. It tastes like pretty much nothing and has the texture of something that would come out of my nose. Therefore, it’s gotta be surrounded by some really good stuff. Unfortunately, I just wasn’t feeling the soup as really good stuff. Maybe it was because it was the middle of summer and I usually feel like soup is better for cold weather or because it’s just better as a drunk food. Or…because there was just too much other good stuff at the Shilin Night Market. Whatever the case, this is one street food I could have walked by with no issue.

I often find it amazing how universal sausage is. It seems like every culture has its own version of tube meat, like all humans have some sort of collective conscience that led us to grind up meat and stuff it inside of an intestine. And while you might think that Taiwanese sausage would basically be the same as Chinese Sausage, you would be wrong.

Like all the rest of the street food I ate in Taipei, I had Taiwanese Sausage at the Shilin Night Market. I was shocked to find the sausage looked more like a kielbasa than a shriveled up log. It was cooked on a charcoal grill like I would have cooked up bratwurst back at home. It was juicy and not nearly as sweet as I would have guessed, and both were probably due to it not being dried out like Chinese Sausage is.

Like Chinese Sausage, it was all sliced up for you, but instead of being served as a part of a larger dish, the Taiwanese Sausage is meant to stand on its own. Well, almost. You see, in the bag of sliced up sausages was also slices of raw garlic. The idea is that you take a slice of each in each bite, which is insane because raw garlic is weirdly spicy and expectedly intense. And yet, somehow it all just works in a delicious way. A visit to Taiwan would be incomplete without some of this sausage.

You may recall that a few years back I paid a visit to Shanghai and had some of their stinky tofu (aka chou doufu in Mandarin). At that time it was pretty much the only variety of stinky tofu I really knew of because I had spent a year living in that city. Stinky tofu, however, seems to come in as many flavors as bread or pasta, with Taiwan claiming one of its own.

I tracked down Taiwanese stinky tofu at the Shilin Night Market in Taipei, which happens literally every night. It’s immediately apparent why the stinky tofu here is different from that of Shanghai. First off, you don’t smell if from nearly a mile away. This is probably due to a different fermentation process, but also because it is cooked by deep frying. It’s then tossed into a bag for eating purposes with a semi-sweet sauce, allowing the tofu to soak up the sauce flavor, while also changing the texture of the tofu.

The result is something entirely different, with a distinct sponge-like texture and more complex overall flavor than that of Shanghai. I can’t say which is better, especially considering how long it has been since I have had the Shanghai variety, but each is very distinct and absolutely worth trying. That may sound crazy coming from an unvegan, but I couldn’t be more confident in stating it.

While riding our scooters back to Isabel in Vieques, we couldn’t help but be stopped by some street food. The street food in this case turned out to be Pinchos, which is basically a Spanish word for skewer-grilled meat. Or, at least that’s what it means in Puerto Rico.

After taking a camel ride in the Sahara, it almost seems wrong to have sought out camel meat in Marrakesh. Yet, that’s exactly what I did because I’m a man of the people and my people are unvegans. I found what looked to be a camel hump in a stall in the Medina and knew I had come to the right place. For those that are wondering, yes that is a hump in the picture and no, the humps are not filled with water. In fact, they are mostly fat.

At night in the Djemaa El Fna (Big Square) in Marrakech’s Medina, the street food comes to life. Of course, the place is still full of street performers and snake charmers, but the food looks oh so much better. The only trouble is the insane amount of people working in the stalls that badger you about as hard as possible to stop by their stall. My favorite line, though, was “same shit, different stall.” And he was right, it all looked the same, so I stopped by one to see what they had.

By day, a stall just down the street from my riad (hotel) in Marrakesh was perpetually busy. Not with customers, but with workers grinding beef, putting together sausages and butchering away. It was interesting to watch, but didn’t exactly whet my appetite. Yet, when I returned later that night I found the place bustling with locals jockeying for some food. At this point I knew whatever it was had to be mine.

Throughout my time in Western New York, I saw a great many signs for “Chicken BBQ.” They would often appear on weekends as fundraisers for churches and the like. Eventually I learned they were using Chiavetta’s Marinade and while the chicken itself was ordinary, I found the existence and cultural phenomenon of Chiavetta’s strange enough to turn Chiavetta’s Chicken into a strange meat.

If you saw something like this growing in the wild would your first thought be to eat it? Mine wouldn’t be, but I would regret that decision because this here is a dragon fruit. Originally from the Americas, the dragon fruit has somehow become a fruit much more associated with Southeast Asia. And while it is striking on the outside, it’s even more striking what it looks like on the inside.