As a further elaboration: growing up, I absolutely hated pasta salad. I could not and would not eat it. But one day, when I was about 22-23, I was working somewhere that includes meals, since shifts were literally all day for a week (save eight hours for sleeping). The cook made a pasta salad that I could only describe as “orgasmic.” I ate that same pasta salad for every meal for the next two days until they finally tossed the leftovers. Ever since then, I have been “converted” to enjoy pasta salad. That one dish completely changed how my body reacts to a food that I already tried several times.
one time a popsicle turned me bi
Creamsicle?
I’m choosing to believe you were a straight woman and it was the frigidity that made you attracted to women.
Suck on that!
If you’re joking, that’s a pretty good pun
In 2016 I was traveling around New Zealand and had an amazing mushroom and cheese toastie. It was so good that I remember thinking, as I drove away, that I’d be happy to eat that toastie over a lot of foods I normally enjoy.
Around a year later I decided to stop eating meat. I begun by allowing myself to eat fish and over a month or so gave up that as well. While not directly related, that mushroom toastie planted a seed in my brain that being a vegetarian didn’t mean eating salad every day.
I don’t know if or when I would have become a vegetarian anyway, but that toasted sandwich certainly helped me decide when I was ready.
That’s rad, I’ve been on a similar path but I keep on going back to meat from fish
Don’t worry about being an absolutist!
Eating less meat is 100% a win. Celebrate that!
Mushroom and cheese toastie… I’d never thought about that but might give it a go.
The first time I had a Hefeweisen was the first time I genuinely enjoyed drinking a beer. Since then I’ve been much more receptive to other types of beer but wheat beers will always be my preference.
Same here! I always felt like the odd one out for not liking any beer. One day I was at a friend’s house and they had a random assortment in their fridge and I saw one with a really cool label and it claimed to be from “the world’s oldest brewery” which sounded promising.
It was Weihenstephaner Hefe Weißbier, which was of course the easiest thing in the world for me to remember and to request at the time 😆
After that, a local brewpub restaurant had a wheat beer with a hint of raspberry flavor that I liked, and eventually I learned to drink most any beer, but I still love a Weihenstephaner when I come across it.
it’s so good.
I’ve had a few of their other varieties as well and all have been good too!
True. I love a lot of fruity and lambics too. We used to have Pyramid brewery here, they made an AMAZING apricot ale that I miss dearly
I didn’t realize Pyramid was gone. My ex used to drink the apricot ale.
Sours can be really fun too. There is so much creativity in brewing, there’s always tons of great new things to try.
My husband once joked that I like to drink my bread. It is so hard to find a good Hefe where I am. I’m tired of the IPA trend.
It was the fourth of fifth date with my girlfriend. She was an avid cook and wanted to cook me dinner… Specifically lasagna.
I arrived at her apartment with her in full swing preparing it… The only problem was all the pasta was green, it was a vegetarian lasagna (she’s not vegetarian). Asparagus and other vegetables rounded it out. It looked really unappetizing.
Here’s the problem. By this time I was REALLY into this girl and here she was spending a lot of effort making me something that I really didn’t think I could eat. I was afraid this was going to end our relationship.
So I spent the whole time watching her make this dish telling myself… “Ok Canopy, you’re a 34 year old man and not a child. You can pretend to enjoy it this once. It won’t kill you.”
Over and over that was going through my mind.
We sit down at the table and she told me to serve myself and I dished out as much as I thought polite…
Then I took a bite.
I ended up eating two servings worth it was so damn good.
OH, and she and I have been married for 20 years now and have two boys. Also, food became one of the cornerstones of our relationship. She took me from being a Midwest redneck meat and potatoes child, to a full blown foodie that actually has a wider palate that her.
She also taught me how to cook and it turned out I am really good at it. I made us salmon cakes with an aioli, with mashed potatoes (that I just threw together without a recipe), and roasted broccoli.
I’m smiling ear to ear over here. Lovely story.
I recently came around on non-seafood sushi (sweet potato tempura rolls). I eat seafood once a year in good faith — all types, over the years — and it’s always a hard no, and I had just lumped sushi into that category. But I honestly didn’t know there were veggie sushi options until this past year, so I gave it a try and loved it.
“Sushi” technically just refers to the vinegared rice. There are a number of non-seafood sushi options. Cucumber, pickled gourd (kampyo), egg, avocado…
I’m similarly not a fan of seafood, and I’ve given it plenty of fair shakes, and will continue to do so, I’m not a picky eater by any stretch of the imagination and I want to like it, especially since I love fishing
But I do personally find raw fish to be more palatable than cooked. I wouldn’t say it’s good, but it’s not bad, I wouldn’t seek it out but if it’s what’s available I wouldn’t be mad about it.
I also, in general, find freshwater fish to be better than saltwater. At least around me I don’t tend to see a whole lot of freshwater fish on menus or in grocery stores, if you’re in a similar boat, that might be another avenue for you to investigate the next time you decide to give seafood a chance.
I’ve also played around making some oddball non-fish sushi since my wife doesn’t share in my dislike of fish and is a sushi fiend, so it’s a way to scratch her itch for that while also making something I’ll eat. Probably my best creation has been a spam, pineapple, and jalapeno roll.
Meanwhile, I like nearly all fish except freshwater fish (trout excluded).
If you make teriyaki Spam and eat that with rice and nori, it’s basically spam musubi, which is surprisingly good.
Sushi is the one food I can’t eat anymore after getting gastric sleeve surgery. I mean I can do sashimi still but what’s the point without the rice ya know?
High quality sashimi is fantastic.
Kenya AA…
I always drank coffee just for the caffeine, but I wanted to cut down on the cream and sugar. So when I’d order the brew of the day, whatever it was, I started taking a sip before drowning it in other flavors.
Buuuut, then I’d go ahead and dump some stuff in it, because I still didn’t like the taste. Until one day, I got a cup and took a sip… and another sip… and decided that THIS cup didn’t need a bunch of stuff in it.
Now I pretty much never add stuff to my coffee( I’ve learned what origins and roasts I like, so I can stay away from coffee I don’t like - and if it’s nasty, it still gets the cream and sugar treatment…
Because life’s too short to drink nasty coffee.
Kenya AA…
I kept waiting for Kenyian alcoholic’s anonymous to feature in the story. I might be stupid
So many times. Hated asparagus until my aunt made it for me at 16/17 years old. Now I can’t get enough.
A Peruvian/Japanese fusion restaurant in DC ended my absolute disdain for mushrooms (specifically shitake) when I was in my mid 30s
I have learned to keep trying things I think I don’t like every few years because you never know what meal will change your palette - and maybe your life
When I was a child, we’d often see people walking at the edge of a farm fence adjacent to a country road near us.
I asked my dad what those people were doing. “They’re looking for asparagus,” he said. Hmph. I knew my dad was just making shit up again, especially with a funny word like asparagus.
Some time later he told me to go up to the fence at the edge of our yard and find some asparagus. Oh, dad, you slay me.
You know what I still see to this day? People walking that same country road, with the same grocery bags. They are foraging for wild asparagus. It’s a real thing.
He should have taken you asparagus foraging to teach you how. It was unreasonable to expect you to know something he didn’t teach you.
My father was many things. A forager was not one.
To be fair, the way asparagus grows looks like a prank. It’s like someone just stuck it in the ground lol
I had a similar experience with steak.
For the longest time growing up, I just wouldn’t eat steak, id eat meat, bacon was fine, chicken was fine, but steak made me wanna throw up. My parents would keep throwing all these sauces on it, and none of them worked. Eventually, at my dads best friends 50th birthday, and he had a really nice roast, I tried it (with no sauce), and suddenly I got it. Ate steak all the time after that.
My mother’s steak was like chewing gum. You couldn’t swallow it.
Swallow gum and your mom all the time
Ajitsuke tamago (“ramen eggs”). I hate eggs. Always have. But it turns out that I love eggs when they are soft boiled or poached and overwhelmed by savory marinade/sauce. Still don’t really like the whites.
Still don’t really like the whites.
As most countries with a colonial past do
When I cook meat, eggs or with ginger for people who don’t like them, they’re usually converted. Turns out most people who don’t like steaks, ribs, roasts, etc just haven’t had good ones
Reminds me of a King of the Hill quote:
Hank: [Presses his tongs into the steak cooking on the grill] Firm but with a little give. Yup, these are medium-rare.
Bobby: What if somebody wants theirs well-done?
Hank: We ask them politely, yet firmly, to leave.
100%
ginger
you know this is really mean, that person has a name and is an individual, just calling them ginger is rude
I didn’t realise I had to be politically correct about cannibalism
I think you should digest this lesson :D
I don’t like steaks because you have to kill an animal to make one. Can you make a steak the way I like it?
You’d rather we cut the steaks off of a still living animal? Seems kind of cruel.
I think you’re lost, bud, this ain’t twitter.
Yeah. I’m not vegetarian but converting people to eating meat isn’t really something to be proud of.
Not yet, but we’re getting pretty close. Cultured tissue plus 3d bioprinters will be able to give you a genuine steak which never involves a conscious animal, probably in the next 5 years or so. Maybe sooner.
Places making cultured meat are shutting down because they don’t get funding and they can’t get permission to sell the stuff.
Companies aren’t tech. Regulations change, new funding comes through. Eventually it’s gonna be cheaper to cultivate meat than farm it.
That’s a shame, I was really looking forward to eating clone meat.
I say we ban animal meat, and let the capitalists satisfy the demand by funding lab meat!
If they live long enough, every person eventually develops a taste for pickles.
Mushy shitty pickles is not the way.
Crispy, fresh pickles of the appropriate size is the way. There is nothing like it.
Is there an established timeline for how long it takes to develop this taste?
Avocado. For some reason, for years, I thought they’d taste nasty. Turns out, they’re just like meat if it was a fruit and I dig that.
Same! I hated guacamole as a kid.
Then all the Avocado toast jokes happened and tried it, and it was great!
Then I started making my own guacamole/eating the good shit in texmex/Mexican restaurants and realized I hated that nasty supermarket national brand guac.
I didn’t hate it but I was ambivalent. Then one day I was at work and my boss was like “I’m craving guacamole, go get these ingredients so I can make us some.” So I did and his recipe was excellent. I have been an avocado junkie ever since.
If you haven’t grown up drinking it, coconut water tastes a bit funky the first time you try it. The first time I tried it, it was kind of funky and I didn’t care much for it. The second time I tried coconut water was after hiking several miles in high heat, sunshine, and high humidity, it still tasted a bit funky. It tasted exactly the same actually, but this time, being quite dehydrated and nearing heat exhaustion, it tasted fucking amazing. Now I love that sweet coconut water umami, so much better than Gatorade or any other sports drink.
You mean the savoury coconut water umami?
I don’t know if this fits but orange juice. I always disliked it even though I thought it smelled great and everyone else loves it, plus I like oranges. Every year or two I would try orange juice again hoping to like it, I really wanted to like it!! After three decades of trying to like orange juice I tried some from a brand I don’t usually buy for my family and it happened! It was so good! I drank like three glasses and got a bad acid stomach ache lol but I’ve liked it ever since, it still hurts my stomach if I drink too much though
I can definitely understand this. There are so many different brands of orange juice that taste wildly different from each other. I’m pretty picky and over time I’ve learned which brands I like and don’t like, but I can completely see how you had that experience.
My mum made the grossest fish. Idk what she did to it or what type of fish it was but it stank up the whole house, tasted worse, and was dry as fuck. I avoided all fish for years, still don’t really like fish and chips as an Aussie.
Went fine dining once and one of the courses was a piece of fish with toasted quinoa and Geraldton wax. It was one of my favourite dishes of the fourteen courses. Absolutely delicious. Then I went to Scotland and tried Cullen skink and ended up having that multiple times throughout my trip.
I’ve realised I just hate bad fish, and that mum wasn’t as good a cook everyone said she was -and everyone saying that is even worse.
