A Year of Adventures

One year ago, I decided to actively eat disgusting foods.  But I had (and still have) a very skewed view of what qualified as "disgusting."

My views were not affected by morals.  I do not categorically avoid foods because I am vegetarian, pescatarian, vegan, fruitarian, or any other type of eater restricted by ethical or religious qualms about eating certain things.

(Uh oh, cue minor rant about privilege....) Yes, when possible, I try to get meat and produce from companies that I know treat their animals well or better yet from farmers' markets.  I prefer Heartland meat over anything I can get in Jewel.  But I can afford to prefer that.  Other people cannot afford to buy grass-fed beef over industrial beef.  I respect that and do not judge what people eat based on how it came to be on their plate.  I judge it based on if it's gross.  (End rant.  Thanks for sticking it out!)

But my views on what makes a food gross are also not tied up with cultural norms.  I understand why people eat grasshoppers, squid, livers, testicles, you name it.  While I would not seek out a testicle as part of my meal, I might feel differently if I hadn't grown up in a very specific part of the world.  I also find culturally "normal" foods for my region to be disgusting.  Pickles, for example.  In the Midwest especially, people eat pickles off of sticks like popsicles.  They are disgusting.

 

Pictured above: Nightmare fuel.  Photo from http://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/

But a lot has changed in a year.  I have had many adventures, with varying degrees of success.  There are foods that were securely on my "Do Not Eat" list that are now very securely on my "Do Eat" list.  And I have come to terms with the fact that I may occasionally have to eat birds.

These are the foods that have made the jump to the other side:

• Bell peppers
• Beans
• Cooked tomatoes
• Cooked onions
• Squash
• Small amounts of pepper
• Larger amounts of mustard
• Ketchup
• Hollandaise sauce
• Worcestershire sauce

If I can make that much progress in my first year adventuring, imagine what I can accomplish in my second!

Adventures in Westeros

I have a new found respect for women who existed before modern appliances.  (And I say "women" because the home/kitchen has traditionally been the woman's sphere of influence.)  I don't know what I'd do without a crock pot.  Especially if I had small children to take care of.  There's a reason I make cupcakes when I babysit and not soup.

But, yesterday, I did make a soup.  I also made a dinner pie and lemon cakes.  Because, yesterday, we had a Game of Thrones party.  And I own A Feast of Ice and Fire.  (The authors' blog is here!)

We feasted on Bowls of Brown, Medieval Cheese and Onion Pie, and Elizabethan Lemon Cakes.

Joey and I decided on the dishes together.  However, I had the final okay on the menu because I'm the pickiest.

There is an insane amount of meat under those apples and carrots!

Bowls of Brown involve pretty much every type of meat imaginable.  It's rumored in King's Landing that sometimes they fill the bowls with a bit of human meat.  I used pork chop bits, beef ribs, top round bits, chicken thighs, and a whole Cornish game hen.  It was delicious.

I also made the pie dough myself.  I was feeling very domestic yesterday.

The only dish I had any qualms about, the Cheese and Onion Pie called for 4 onions.  That's a lot of onions.  I'm getting better with onions, but I still wouldn't choose to eat them.  At least, I wouldn't choose to eat them a year ago.

The recipe also called for cheese (obviously), fresh herbs, 8 eggs (I know, right?), and dried currants.  I love dried currants.  In fact, dried currants were the reason I okayed this recipe for our feast.

When I tried the Cheese and Onion Pie, I was very prepared to hate it.  The onions had been cooked enough to be a bit soft, so they didn't have a bite to them.  The cheese was very light and helped play up the sweeter notes of the onions.  But the best part was easily the currants.  They plumped up during the baking and were little pearls of concentrated sweetness.  Delicious!  They helped make this my dish of the night!

A little bigger than they were supposed to be....

The Lemon Cakes were also delicious.  The lemon flavors were much more subtle than modern lemon desserts.  My completely unresearched guess is that lemons were not easy to come by in Elizabethan England.  So maybe they flavored lemon treats a bit more sparingly.  The lovely people at the Inn at the Crossroads would probably know better than me.

The main courses of our feast!

The citizens of King's Landing definitely know how to eat like royalty.

Another Small Step in the Grown-Up Direction

March is one of the best months for food.  We can thank St. Patrick's Day for that.  I believe it is a well-established fact that corned beef is the best culinary invention humans have ever created.  People love to eat corned beef on St. Patrick's Day, so corned beef is dirt cheap in March.

After St. Patrick's Day, you get to have a week or so of Corned Beef Hash.  This is the best breakfast in the world (besides banana bacon pancakes).  I just finished up our leftover corned beef, and simultaneously made another step toward real adulthood.

Corned Beef Hash, the way we've always made it, involves onions.  They lend the dish a good flavor, but are generally kind of nasty.  Usually I leave them in a pile on my plate.  I then throw them out and go about my day.

But not yesterday.  Yesterday, I ate the onions.  But I made sure to cook them in butter for a while first.  And I made sure that I had a lot of carrots and corned beef to balance out the onion.

New phone takes much more narrow pictures than old phone.  Good to know....

As the human race discovered millenia ago, butter makes everything taste better.  Probably because it is pure fat, something humans love more than anything.  It has such a reassuring taste.  Butter says, "Yeah, I know you have to eat this disgusting vegetable, but I'll be with you the whole time."  Of course, put too much butter on your vegetables and you're negating the health benefits of vegetables.  But the meal will definitely taste delicious!

So I fried up my Corned Beef Hash in butter.  And I ate an onion.  And it was pretty good!  Thanks to the magic of butter, I joined a club I don't often qualify for: The Clean Plate Club.

 Behold!  A plate clear of all onions!

Thanks, butter, for making this all possible!

Taco Surprise

I do not eat most food found on Mexican restaurant menus.  I also don't eat most food on pretty much any restaurant menu, but that's beside the point.  Joey very much enjoys Mexican food.  Miriah practically lives on refried beans.  So last night, we made Traditional Beef Burritos.

This recipe has a couple of things that are "Do Not Eat" foods.  The first one is cumin.  Cumin is still a bit too spicy for this kid.  I've realized that chili powder isn't actually so bad, but cumin just fans the flames of any other spice in a dish.

The second big "Do Not Eat" food is refried beans.  While they are essentially the life force of my sister, I maintain that beans are gross.  If you're not going to let your kid eat paste, why are you going to let them eat beans?  Same consistency, same taste.  And before you ask, yes, I have eaten paste.

Same adhesive properties?  Who knows.  Miriah won't let me "waste" them in order to find out.

And of course, "Do Not Eat" food number three.  Taco sauce.  Mainly by virtue of the fact that it is sauce specifically designed for a food that I find too spicy and too suitable for an art project.  In fact, after looking at the ingredients, I decided taco sauce was innocent till proven guilty.

Look at that!  It's even mild!  Maybe it won't be so bad....

We browned the meat (yum), added garlic (yum) and onion (eh), and then the recipe started getting gross.  But it also started smelling awesome.  I was even starting to feel a little excited.  How could something with so much garlic turn out bad?  I hoped (since this was dinner) that it couldn't.

After trying to roll the burritos, Joey passed the task to me.  I treated it like a Potbelly sandwich, and it seemed to go just fine.  Our tortillas were slightly too small, but we managed.  We popped them into the oven to bake.  Remembering those way-too-ambitious pork chops, I started brainstorming back-up dinner options.

After we took them out of the oven, I put more cheese on mine.  Once again, cheese is delicious.  I had forgotten to buy sour cream, so we had to skip that part.  The burritos looked good but scary.  Who knew how much the cumin and taco sauce would burn my mouth?

The potential dangers are so well hidden....

The meat was a little spicy.  But I could totally handle it!  I'm quite proud.  I think this is proof that I'm maturing as an eater.

More surprising though, I preferred the beans to the ground beef mixture.  Beans go well with cheese.  I don't know if that's the magic of cheese or my continuing personal growth.  I guess the next step would be to try refried beans on their own.  I wonder if Miriah would be willing to part with them.

Perhaps the Most Appropriate Name for a Food

Last night Joey and I were adventuring again.  Well, I was adventuring.  He was just eating dinner.  (He's not a picky eater, so new food isn't as stressful for him.)

We wanted to use the crock pot because it looked so fun!  I have a booklet of recipes for the crock pot so that's where we found our recipe.  We chose Maple-Sage Pork Roast.  Any recipe that involves multiple pounds of pork can't be that bad, right?  Well, as long as it's not so spicy that it feels like it's trying to chain smoke it's final pack of cigarettes on it's way down my throat.

Two items in the recipe were on my "Do Not Eat" list: onions and butternut squash.  Fun fact: when I was a baby, I ate so much squash and carrots that I turned vaguely orange.  Like a fake tan from beta-carotene.  I loved squash.  I think my body decided to turn me against squash to avoid the inevitable Oompa Loompa jokes.

Back to the cooking.  So the recipe called for maple syrup, pork, beef bouillon, and carrots.  All of which are definitely at the top of my "Do Eat" list.  It also involved garlic and sage.  We put all of the ingredients into the crock pot and let them cook for 8 hours.  So easy!  I'm definitely sold on crock pots!

8 hours later, we put the pork shoulder on a platter and all the veggies in a bowl.

Behold the yummy-ness!

Behold the....  Well, at least there are carrots!

The recipe also suggested making a gravy from the juice left over in the crock pot.  This is where the maple flavoring was most concentrated.  This was also one of the most disgusting things I had ever seen.  I'm sure you'll agree.

Joey described it best: "Troll bogies."

So how were the "Do Not Eat" foods?  I confess I did not eat the onions.  Joey had some and said they tasted pretty much like raw onions.  I definitely haven't reached that level of adventure yet.  I did, however, eat the squash.

The butternut squash tasted legitimately like butter and nuts.  What a straight-forward, honest name!  The texture is a bit mushier than I like, but the flavor was above adequate.  It was the most time-consuming part of the prep, so that might have factored in to my feelings.  I could definitely eat it if someone else was making a dinner, although I don't think I would order it at a restaurant or prepare and cook it myself.  But I would totally make this roast again (I even blanched the remaining squash in case I liked it!).  If I'm not up to prepping squash, there's always potatoes!

Squash and I are not going to rekindle our love affair any time soon, but maybe we can hang out sometime.

A Dinner I Could Actually Eat!

Despite my rather unpleasant experience with the Spicy Pork Casserole, I adventure on.  I decided to pace my adventure a bit better from now on.  The casserole was a truly humbling experience.

Tonight, Joey and I tried Oven-Barbecued Chicken from a booklet of recipes called "Healthy Homestyle Meals in Minutes."  The recipe calls for ketchup (still gross) and obviously chicken (ultra gross).  The recipe has you make your own barbecue sauce.  Pour it on the chicken, top with onion and lemon, and bake!

About to go in the oven!  It's almost like the chicken isn't there!

So, moment of truth.  How was it?

Well, it was so-so.

I'll be honest, I didn't eat the onions.  They were so big and intimidating!  I don't like the texture of chicken.  If you like chicken, it was cooked very well and worked very well with the barbecue sauce.  More sauce might help cover the fact that the dish is centered around chicken.  But the sauce was not the sloppy-joe-esque creation I had anticipated.  The ketchup flavor was more pronounced in this dish than in the sloppy joes.  Not cool.  The lemon-ketchup combo was the worst aspect of the dish.  Perhaps the dish would be improved by removing the lemons.

Someday, I might enjoy eating birds.  Today is not that day.  Fowl remain foul.

But I managed to eat the entire half of the chicken breast that I was served!  That's more than I can say for that pork chop....

Practically on the Kids' Menu

Today I had two meals that I would normally politely turn down.  Both these meals usually go over pretty well with kids.  Both were definitely meals I would not have eaten two weeks ago.  Lunch was an unexpected dish made by my wonderful sister.  For dinner, my boyfriend and I made in a conscious effort to choose one of the many dishes that exist on my "Won't Eat" list.

Let's start with lunch.  My sister asks me if I want some Annie's Shells and White Cheddar.  Of course I reply, "Yes!"  I love shells!  After she drains the water, she asks if I'm okay with peas in my shells.  My first instinct is to say, "Never," but I'm trying to broaden my culinary horizons.

More peas than I've ever eaten without my mother watching.

The resulting Shells and White Cheddar were definitely more healthy than I'm used to.  I'm still not sold.  You could taste too much of the peas and too little of the cheddar.  Maybe if I ever start to like peas I'll try it again.  Until then, my shells will be pea-free!

On to dinner.  My boyfriend and I decided to eat off the kids' menu.  We were going to make a gluten-free pork dinner.  But then I sang the sloppy joe bit from Adam Sandler's "Lunch Lady" song.  So we decided to make sloppy joes.

We used this recipe.  I was a little nervous about the green pepper, because I think they taste bad.  I also don't like ketchup.  And I hate mustard.  But part of being adventurous is trying to move past the initial ick-factor.

By the time it was simmering in the pan, my boyfriend thought it looked delicious.  I thought it looked gross.

I still think I'm right.

 Nonetheless, I put it on a bun, took a deep breath, and bit into this mess.

I guess there's a reason why they're not called "tidy joes...."

The peppers apparently cook down so they're not crunchy.  This was a big concern of mine when we started making dinner.  And when peppers cook down, they taste a lot better.  The ketchup and mustard are outweighed by the brown sugar.  Sloppy joes are both sweet and savory, my favorite flavor combination!

I learned tonight that I totally enjoy sloppy joes!  They're delicious (if not aesthetically pleasing)!