Food I Dislike the Most and Why

On Day 13 of 30 Days of Blogging, I've decided to answer a question that Mom asked, since I spent the day with my parents:

Food I dislike most and why

At first I was thinking, "Why would my mom ask that? She knows the answer," but then I realized that ever since I went away for college my mom has heard some odd, previously unheard phrases relating to food come out of my mouth. For example:

"Yes, I'll have salad with dinner."

I ate traditional, pile of lettuce with other things on top and dressing, salad for the first time when I was about 24. Salad was always a part of the meal that I greeted with horror and refusal, as it contained a number of things that I don't like: tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, sometimes mushrooms, and lettuce, just for starters. But then this one time I was at Pizza Hut with my friend Karen for the lunch buffet, and there wasn't any pizza out for a few minutes because they were kind of bad at keeping the buffet stocked at that particular Pizza Hut, so Karen was like, "Let's just get the Caesar salad until the pizza's ready," and I was like, "Yes. Let's do that. We'll... eat... salad. Yes."

And it wasn't terrible.

I still didn't like tomatoes, cucumbers, mushrooms, or onions.

"We don't have to get a white pizza. I'll just eat one with sauce on it."

I never had tomato sauce until I went to college and had it on pizza. When you're pooling your money to order pizza, you can't really force everyone else to go without sauce because you hate it. Half the time you're lucky just to get the toppings you want. By the end of my freshman year, I was eating sun-dried tomatoes (yay for 90's cuisine!), regular pizza, and dipping breadsticks and cheese sticks in marinara.

And it wasn't terrible.

I still didn't like cucumbers, mushrooms, or onions.

"Mmmm... pickles."

The year is 1984. The family is at a diner in the nothern part of the Yukon Territory. They have been in a Dodge Ram Charger for days on end, all four of them and two dogs, one of whom hates being around most of the family and the other of whom weighs over fifty pounds. They have been homeless for weeks, because they are moving from Kentucky to Alaska and have somehow turned it into a road trip where we drive from Kentucky to New York to Colorado to Alaska. We miss our stuff, we miss having our own beds, we are tired, and the younger child, me, is refusing to eat a hamburger that cost about $10 Canadian because it came out with relish on it. Mom has scraped the relish off, but just knowing that it touched the meat has sent eight-year old me into a hunger strike tantrum where I am only eating the fries and Dad is visibly seething across the booth from me. I have also loudly informed my family, and probably the rest of the diner, that all of the food in Canada is "wrong" and that they (the Canadians) ruin everything.

I don't remember when I started eating pickles, but it was sometime in college, and even though my parents have never mentioned it again I still remember refusing to eat that burger and being a total brat about it.

I still didn't like mushrooms or onions.

"I need to get some mushrooms for Christmas dinner."

That one was fairly recent, when I made my friend Scott's coq au vin for Christmas dinner 2010. I've eaten mushrooms since then, not very often, but a few times. They haven't killed me, but they're not a favorite.

I still hate onions, though.

Oh, God, do I hate onions.

They're slimy and crunchy at the same time, and no matter what you do to them, they only get more crunchy or more slimy unless you manage to cook them down out of existence.

So, that's the answer. I hate onions, because they are disgusting.