OM NOM NOM
I'm not exactly sure when the shift came but, at some point during my adult life, I became a bit of a foodie.
This is hilarious when I think back to how picky of an eater I was as a child. Without fail, my lunch every day at school was a peanut butter sandwich on white bread. Every day...except on Fridays when pizza was on the menu. On these occasions, I purchased two plain cheese slices at a reduced rate of twenty-five cents a slice. The change left over from the two dollars my Mother gave me every Friday usually went to candy at one of the vending machines or a soda as I got older.
Dinners at my house weren't much more diverse. I recall regular meals of hot dogs, steaks, burgers, chicken and fries. Some days I tolerated pasta but I harbored a great disdain for the dish after a few weeks straight of it after a rough financial patch.
It wasn't as if my parents didn't try to get me to eat more things. An attempt to get me to try jelly as a kid resulted in my choking on the slimy substance as I simply did not want to swallow.
The main issue was I just have strange taste buds and even stranger eating habits. When I was small, I could not let my food touch nor could I start another dish without completely finishing the first. I hated buns on my burgers and hot dogs. White American was completely unacceptable.
I outgrew a lot of this but Italian dressing and ketchup still remain the only condiments I will touch. Mayo makes me want to wretch. I still can't eat bagels with seeds on them for the texture of poppy and sesame bothers me. Unconsciously, I consume anything on a spoon upside down so my tongue touches the food directly.
The biggest change though has been the expansion of my palette. A college town full of hippies and tourists opened a new wonder of foods to me that tiny rural American never could. I tried Thai food, Indian, sushi, tofu and so forth.
While I've always enjoyed food, these new discoveries made all the world of difference. Where once I stuck to my old, boring staples, I now want to try almost everything under the sun.
I am waiting with bated breath to try alligator once I made my trip down to New Orleans. I'm constantly looking online for new recipes to try.
However, there is a definite downside to all of this for my biggest expenditure has to be food. I hit up the grocery store a few times a week - more I'm sure than most people. I eat out a few times a week for my cravings for pad thai and spicy tuna rolls can be hard to sate. I think about what I will be making for my next meal before I finished preparing the one at hand.
I suppose I could find worse ways to spend my cash but I have to start toning it back a bit until I get this whole job situation squared away.
Why must you be so delicious and diverse food?