Tag: food

I tend to think of myself as omnivorous. I’ll eat (or at least try) just about anything. About the only things I won’t deliberately eat are yogurt and cheesecake. I’ve disliked yogurt since I was a young child and tried some plain yogurt. The awful memory of that has stuck with me and is too firmly ingrained in my tastes to warrant a retry. My kids find this amusing since I usually will try anything. “You’ll like it if you try it today?” they say. “I bet you’d like it if you didn’t know it was yogurt,” they say.

Well, a few weeks ago we had a salad and poured on the dressing that came with the salad, and took a bite. Something about the dressing didn’t taste right to me and my brain immediately flashed YOGURT! YOGURT! YOGURT! “I don’t about this dressing,” I said. “It reminds me of yogurt.” Kelly looked at the packaging. It turned out it was a yogurt-based dressing of some kind. This impressed my kids.

Cheesecake is another matter. I’m not sure why exactly I dislike it. I think it is just too rich for me. But that’s okay. Setting aside cheesecake and yogurt, pretty much everything else is on the table. Indeed, I like to try new things, despite being a creature of habit. The latter means I don’t try new things as often as I should, but I make enough decisions during the day and for meals at least, I try to keep decisions to a minimum.

One thing that bothers me at a restaurant is how granular the servers can get when I order my food: “Cheeseburger,” I’ll say. Then comes the flood of questions: how would you like that cooked? What kind of cheese? Onions? Pickles? Bacon? What kind of side would you like with that? Fries, you say? Regular or sweet potato? I’ve taken to revising my order as follows: “Cheeseburger, medium rare, with everything.” Enough questions.

I get into these phases with breakfasts and lunches. I’ll go for a few months eating the same breakfast and lunch day-in and day-out. Over the winter it was Stofer’s lasagnas for lunch. This spring it has been a turkey, bologna, and cheese sandwich. Sometimes, it is peanut butter and jelly, day after day after day. I don’t mind. It is one less decision to make each day.

Dinner is where I tend to branch out, especially if we go out to eat (there hasn’t been much of that over the last year, but I’m hopeful now that we are fully vaccinated). I like all kinds of meats. I’m particularly fond of lamb and duck. The Little Man has taken to duck, but Kelly shudders at the thought of either. If there is something unusual on the menu, I’m usually willing to try it. On a date night a few weeks back we had an appetizer that included charred cauliflower that was outstanding. I remember an appetizer of buffalo octopus a few years back at bar in Santa Monica that was also outstanding.

I like Caesar salads with anchovies. Servers never believe me the first time I ask for the anchovies. (I also like anchovies on pizza, but rarely order it because no one else eats it.) I’ve had my share of unusual foods as well, from turkey nuts to durian fruit (in the parking lot of a hotel at a science fiction convention).

Writing about food right before lunch has made me hungry for something other than my usual turkey, bologna, and cheese sandwich. Alas, I’m tired today and don’t feel like making a decision about what to eat. I think there might be some leftovers in the fridge. Maybe I’ll just eat that.

The situation with the blueberry muffins has become alarming. For six months now, when I wake up each morning, I feel compelled to eat a blueberry muffin.

I trace the origins of this compulsion back to an innocent vacation we took with my sister’s family to an isolated part of coastal Maine where we’d rented a large house on the water. We all brought food with us to backstop any grocery shopping we’d do. My sister and brother-in-law brought a large package of large blueberry muffins. I had them for breakfast a few times, and they seemed perfect.

Arriving back home, I sought out blueberry muffins. On my morning walks, I discovered that the local 7-Eleven had fresh blueberry muffins so I’d pick one up each morning and bring it home. As the winter got colder, I discovered that the local Safeway (the big Safeway, not the little one, which is more convenient) sold 9-pack of fresh blueberry muffins in the bakery. So I started buying those. Now, if I don’t have a blueberry muffin in the morning, it doesn’t feel like morning.

Eating a blueberry muffin is something of a technical challenge. Do you pick it up like an apple and bite in? Do you slice it in half to make it easier to handle? To add to this complexity, it turns out that the top part of blueberry muffins are the best part. I don’t know why this is, since I assumed the top contains the same ingredients as the rest. I am “save the best for last” when it comes to eating, which means, as you might imagine, I eat my blueberry muffin upside down. Since the only flat part of the muffin is the bottom, it means that when setting my muffin down on the plate, it always tips over onto its top. I try to eat my muffin in the privacy of my office so that no one else in the family makes fun of me for eating it upside down.

Occasionally, I will announce to everyone that I am going to “have a muffin.” This is a little disconcerting because when I hear myself say this, I hear my Dad saying the exact same thing. Maybe I am genetically disposed to eating blueberry muffins.

Sometimes, if I am hungry, I will have blueberry muffin just because it is there.

I have tried other muffins, but none are as good as the blueberry ones. It is always a sad day when, out of blueberry muffins, I head to the store to get more, and they are out too. “Why not try the chocolate muffins?” the baker at the Safeway asks me. I give them a look of horror at the thought.

Well, I have a full day of work ahead of me today. My big software system roll out is tomorrow, and I need to get started. So if you’ll excuse me, there is blueberry muffin calling my name. Really. I can hear it taunting me, “Eat me… Eat me…”

I can no longer remember what a good tomato tastes like. Every tomato I’ve consumed over the last ten years or so has no discernible flavor. This came to a head on Thursday when I ordered my usual sandwich for lunch. I order the same thing for lunch every day. I do this because I like it, but also because I know exactly how many calories the sandwich has, and because it is one less decision I have to make. On Wednesday, the tomatoes on the sandwich were so tasteless that on Thursday, I ordered the sandwich without tomatoes.

I like tomatoes, and I recall a time when they were sweet and juicy. Now, it seems, all of the flavor has been engineered out of them. I’ve tried organic tomatoes from the grocery store: same result. And I’ve tried “farm fresh” tomatoes from the farmers market. No luck there either. It makes me skeptical about just how farm fresh those farmers market veggies really are.

The strange thing is that things made from tomatoes taste the same as they always have. Spaghetti sauce, ketchup, tomato soup: these haven’t changed. Perhaps there was never much tomato in them to begin with, or perhaps the other ingredients have a stronger taste than the tomatoes. I suspect that some tomatoes are grown specifically for these products, and these tomatoes still have their flavor. Those are the tomatoes that I want.

My dad used to drink tomato juice, and I’ve often wanted to like tomato juice, but it tastes just awful to me. I tried it recently, and it still tastes awful, but even that has more flavor than the bland slices on my sandwich, or in a salad.

Other vegetable still taste good to me. At least, they still have flavor. Tomatoes seem to be the big exception. That’s too bad because I love to make the occasional B.L.T. sandwich, and nothing makes the B.L.T. as much as the perfect tomato slice. That means gone are the good B.L.T.’s

There will be people out there, I’m sure, who will attribute the tomatoes loss of flavor to genetic modification. Tomatoes have been tinkered with to the point where they last forever, and the side-effect of this is the lack of flavor. Perhaps that’s so, but I have a different theory. I think the tomatoes just got fed up with us, and decided the best way they could avoid being eaten would be to lose the one thing that made them edible.