Saturday, April 8

Friday Saturday Bottom Ten

Via Kathy, ten foods I will not eat:

(I omit political choices and the long list of things I'm not supposed to eat. These are aesthetic choices and personal quirks:)

1. Raw nuts. My sister won't eat them either; something must have spooked us at an early age. Unlike her I will eat nuts in things, use nut flours, crushed nut toppings, creamy peanut butter (I know, it's not a nut), and I whip up a deadly walnut tart for the holidays. But it their unprocessed form, no.

2. Brussels sprouts/cauliflower. I won't even stay in the house with Brussels sprouts. I love broccoli and like cabbage, but not their cousins.

3. Water chestnuts. A deal breaker in Chinese restaurants.

4. Cilantro. The incontinent addition of this stinkbug of the Spice World (oh, sorry) is my capsule comment on what happened to American cuisine when a bunch of trade-school geniuses took over.

5. Kumquats. I ate one once just to be polite to a girlfriend's father. I was nearly impolite to the table setting.

6. Beets. Nope.

7. Cucumber. Once in a while, faced with going hungry or returning the thing I'll go ahead and eat a gyros with cuke-scented sour cream, but nothing beyond an emergency.

8. Clams. Probably the only seafood I won't touch, though I'll use clam juice in cooking. My wife used to drink that Clammato stuff.

9. Blue cheeses. I will eat any other cheese on the planet (except the distinctly American delicacy known as "cheese food product"), including goat cheeses that smell like there's a goat inside, but I never developed a taste for the blues.

10. Fast food, other than pizza.

7 comments:

mikey said...

Couple of thangs, DHR. First, Pizza is NOT fast food. Oh sure, it's food, and it's pretty fast, but it ain't "fast food".

I agree with much of your list. In a casino bar in Tahoe in a blizzard at 4am I was once informed by a complete stranger (attractive female, at that) that "Beets taste like ASS". I've always thought that was a very astute observation.

Yes, clams and blue cheeses are nasty. Yes, cucumbers can singlehandedly wreck a perfectly good salad, but I gotta say I LOVE the Cuke-infused goo on a Gyro. That's good shit.

Kumquats and Brussels Sprouts are WAY beyond nasty--I can only assume that ancient people decided they were food when there was nothing else available and the only options were eat them or DIE!

But water chestnuts (really no flavor, only texture, and it DOES add something to a lot of asian food), Cilantro (Fish tacos without cilantro? BLASPHEMY!!) and Raw Nuts (I couldn't go backpacking if I couldn't eat raw nuts) are absolutely wonderful shit.

And how can you compile a list like this and leave off the one worst so-called food product in the WORLD. That's right, I'm talking CAPERS! These nasty, bitter little green balls of nature's dung do not belong in any foodstuffs under any circumstances. And I can't for the life of me understand what cave-person first decided to taste them--or may decided to taste them a SECOND time!!

mikey

Anonymous said...

Consider giving lemon cucumbers a try.
Personally, I will eat everything on your list but clams. After all, clams have feelings too. ("No chowder for you!")

God, I have even worse taste in music than I do in food, apparently. Oddly enough, or perhaps not, I just today bought a Playmobil set with little cabbages and cauliflowers.

(Hey, where do Peeps fall on your list?)

Ray Bridges said...

You must have been raised middle class.

So far, the only thing I've encountered that I won't eat again is muktuk--that's whale blubber. As I chewed it, it kept getting bigger and bigger in my mouth until it choked me.

Everything else depends more on how it's cooked than it does on what it is.

The list of things I will eat but will not cook is a lot longer than your list of things you will not eat. Take brain, for example.

Anonymous said...

Everything else depends more on how it's cooked than it does on what it is.

This is the key for me, too. As an adult, I've learned to enjoy so many foods that I wouldn't have stomached as a kid ony because I finally had it prepared and cooked in a way that opened my mind and taste buds to it. Now I'll eat everything on Riley's list, including the clams, although not raw so much.

There is still one thing I can't seem to force down no matter what, which means that if I ever find myself dating again, I'll be the only guy still hungry at the "all you can eat egg salad" singles mixers at the local yeshiva.

(PS. How can you enjoy Easter without Peeps?)

Anonymous said...

I won't anymore eat anything with eyeballs or suckers still attached. I've tried octopus, squid, geoduck, sea cucumber, sea urchin, cold jellyfish, snail, slug...
If that's stuff that's gotta grow on you, I'm not bothering.

I've mostly tried it before determining I didn't like it, so it's not some sort of irrational aversion.
But I won't eat anything endangered, threatened, smarter than my cats, or older than me.

Peeps, therefore, are largely fair game, depending on that last one.
(There's also an increasing list of things I can't eat without getting a migraine, which generally just means I wait till I've already got one and then go for the peanuts or raisins or blue cheese or popcorn.)

See what you've started, Riley??

Anonymous said...

My dear departed Polish mother used to try her hand at Oriental food now and then, and I still can't quite figure out how she did such awful things to pork chops. But in my own advancing years I have learned to break many chains I grew up with, including an inability to enjoy all foods. And I agree: don't you dare call pizza fast food; hang onto that belief and you'd really better get the ehll out of Dodge.

Anonymous said...

I like cucumbers. But they make me burp.