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I just had brussels sprouts for the first time in my life.
Is that weird? It seems weird to me, but then I sometimes feel like my culinary childhood, especially when it comes to vegetables, was kind of odd. My dad is a fantastic cook, but his skills do not lie with plant products (he's gotten a lot better the last couple of years, mostly at my urging), so when I was a kid and he did a lot of the cooking, we had excellent roasts and stir-fries...accompanied by canned green beans. Ugh. And then when it was just me and my mom, she was too tired to do a lot of cooking, plus we were broke as hell, so very few fresh veggies ever made it onto my plate. Add that to the fact that I was an extremely picky child (due to a traumatic hot sauce incident and in retrospect what is probably a lot of undiagnosed food sensitivities) and the list of veggies I'd eaten and liked before I came to college was...short. Now that I'm cooking for myself and making a conscious effort to a) eat fruits and/or veggies at most meals and b) try foods I've never had before, I feel like a three-year-old eating this stuff for the first time.
It's...I don't know, kind of fun? I mean, I like eating things that taste good, obviously (who doesn't?), so that's a plus, because as it turns out there are many vegetables that I like. Green beans that don't come out of a can? Totally fucking awesome. Along with broccoli and carrots and napa cabbage and bok choi and bean sprouts and raw baby spinach. There's also something to be said for letting myself have tastes without bullshit power struggles getting in the way. I can let myself say, I don't like tomatoes and eggplant and I'm not going to buy them and I'm not going to eat them and it doesn't have to be a big thing, it doesn't have to be about me proving something or trying to get away with something or fighting over it or trying to rationalize it to people who think I'm just trying to be difficult. I just...don't eat it. I think, oddly enough, it's made me a more adventurous eater, because I'm not as afraid of not liking things.
But every once in a while, I'm just like, holy shit, how did I get to be 21 without ever having eaten brussels sprouts before? That is insane.
The brussels sprouts were okay. Not great, but I think part of that was that they cooked faster that I expected them to (I was sauteeing them in bacon fat left over from breakfast this morning), and ended up getting a bit scorched while I was waiting for everything else to be ready. They probably would have been better if it weren't for that. And the texture reminded me of cooked spinach not in the sense that they were in any way similar but in that there was a very abrupt and noticeable switch from 'this is pretty good' to 'one more bite is going to make me gag.' I may try making them again. Or I may not! I can do that, because I am a grown-up person who eats vegetables because I like them, not out of a sense of masochistic obligation.
...look, I'm procrastinating on working on edits for one of my short stories, and it was either this or talk about this morning's match against Sunderland, which was just depressing. Or DragonFable, which has taken over my weekend to a probably unhealthy degree. I promise in a couple of weeks, when finals are over and I have free time again, I will start talking about ridiculous j-dramas and how everyone in Barcelona is after Bojan's ass and how many people Oscar Wilde has had a one-night stand with in the Big Bandverse AU (the answer, of course, is all the people. Come on, it's Oscar fucking Wilde, what were you expecting?).
Is that weird? It seems weird to me, but then I sometimes feel like my culinary childhood, especially when it comes to vegetables, was kind of odd. My dad is a fantastic cook, but his skills do not lie with plant products (he's gotten a lot better the last couple of years, mostly at my urging), so when I was a kid and he did a lot of the cooking, we had excellent roasts and stir-fries...accompanied by canned green beans. Ugh. And then when it was just me and my mom, she was too tired to do a lot of cooking, plus we were broke as hell, so very few fresh veggies ever made it onto my plate. Add that to the fact that I was an extremely picky child (due to a traumatic hot sauce incident and in retrospect what is probably a lot of undiagnosed food sensitivities) and the list of veggies I'd eaten and liked before I came to college was...short. Now that I'm cooking for myself and making a conscious effort to a) eat fruits and/or veggies at most meals and b) try foods I've never had before, I feel like a three-year-old eating this stuff for the first time.
It's...I don't know, kind of fun? I mean, I like eating things that taste good, obviously (who doesn't?), so that's a plus, because as it turns out there are many vegetables that I like. Green beans that don't come out of a can? Totally fucking awesome. Along with broccoli and carrots and napa cabbage and bok choi and bean sprouts and raw baby spinach. There's also something to be said for letting myself have tastes without bullshit power struggles getting in the way. I can let myself say, I don't like tomatoes and eggplant and I'm not going to buy them and I'm not going to eat them and it doesn't have to be a big thing, it doesn't have to be about me proving something or trying to get away with something or fighting over it or trying to rationalize it to people who think I'm just trying to be difficult. I just...don't eat it. I think, oddly enough, it's made me a more adventurous eater, because I'm not as afraid of not liking things.
But every once in a while, I'm just like, holy shit, how did I get to be 21 without ever having eaten brussels sprouts before? That is insane.
The brussels sprouts were okay. Not great, but I think part of that was that they cooked faster that I expected them to (I was sauteeing them in bacon fat left over from breakfast this morning), and ended up getting a bit scorched while I was waiting for everything else to be ready. They probably would have been better if it weren't for that. And the texture reminded me of cooked spinach not in the sense that they were in any way similar but in that there was a very abrupt and noticeable switch from 'this is pretty good' to 'one more bite is going to make me gag.' I may try making them again. Or I may not! I can do that, because I am a grown-up person who eats vegetables because I like them, not out of a sense of masochistic obligation.
...look, I'm procrastinating on working on edits for one of my short stories, and it was either this or talk about this morning's match against Sunderland, which was just depressing. Or DragonFable, which has taken over my weekend to a probably unhealthy degree. I promise in a couple of weeks, when finals are over and I have free time again, I will start talking about ridiculous j-dramas and how everyone in Barcelona is after Bojan's ass and how many people Oscar Wilde has had a one-night stand with in the Big Bandverse AU (the answer, of course, is all the people. Come on, it's Oscar fucking Wilde, what were you expecting?).