Episode #167: Adventures in Food

A blast from the past. Holly probably checking out the birds from her favorite spying spot, the front bay window.

I have been known to be quite the picky eater during the first two and half decades of my life. Like as a youngster, a salad for me consisted of iceberg lettuce, some shredded cheese, bacon bits and a puddle of Italian dressing. Or a pizza without cheese. It was only much, much later that I started adding things like peppers, onions, carrots and other assorted items to my salad.

It was also much later than I started enjoying other condiments like salsa, spicy peppers, different kinds of pickles beside spears and other cooked vegetables. Even onions on pizza, but no pineapple.

As I've gotten older, I've tried other kinds of food that I normally wouldn't give the time of day to. Incrementally at first, which usually shocks my wife and family, as they've never known me to eat that particular item before. Nuts are a good example of this. Having liked only peanuts, over the years I've added other kinds like almonds, cashews, macadamias and pecans to name just a few.

I've been such a vanilla kind of guy over the years that I've always like having a bit of fun with the family whenever I would add something new to my menu.

Like cheesecake.

Right up until this year {2023}, I was not a fan of cheesecake. At all. Couldn't get me to touch it with a twenty-foot tape measure. I think my dislike of cheesecake stemmed from the fact that during my childhood, whenever my dad would feed my brother and I lunch on a Saturday, it would always be stuff that HE liked: all kinds of vegetable soups and weird cheese products like cottage cheese and maybe a small piece of cheesecake. I would have the all-too-familiar epic battle of wills over whether or not I would eat the slop put in front of me.

Fast forward to this year.

I started thinking about trying cheesecake this past March just to see if I would actually like it. I figured if I didn't like it, I would give the rest to the family. So I asked the way that the next time she was shopping at Aldis to pick me up a two pack of cheesecake.

End result was I converted the two slices into four (19g of sugar ya'll per slice) smaller pieces, which were consumed over the next five days. Suffice to say, I thought it was pretty good. I may repeat this later in the year, as I consider this to be quite the sugary dessert that should be consumed in great moderation.

Now, another item I decided to try was kimchi. I actually first heard about this on an episode of MASH, then about 15 years later from a co-worker in passing. Finally, I started seeing videos about it being made on a YouTube channel called Food Kingdom, which specials in cuisine/food products from all over southeastern Asia (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Thailand).

So I figured to give it a shot. It's just cabbage and spices, you can have it cold or hot. Paid four dollars for a 10.5 ounce jar, and been spending the past week consuming it as a side dish. I was pleasantly surprised by the tangy taste it had.

It's definitely something I can see myself splurging on a semi-consistent basis, and what makes it even better, is that I found a vegetable that my veggie daughter won't touch, so it's a win-win for me.

I'm not quite sure what else I can venture to try, as there's still a lot of foods that I did not touch when I was younger, and still didn't touch as an adult. In any event, I'll still keep searching around looking at different foodstuffs from my past and see if any of them should get a second or third look from me. Who knows, maybe I'll find something to tickle my fancy one again.

{c} 2023 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved