The Taste Aversion
Currently while slicing:
Eating: leftover chicken marsala
Drinking: zin
Entertained by: last night's Late Night w/Colbert
Today as we gathered for our team pre-meeting lunch in our office, my colleague Nicole asked if I wanted to try a piece of the snack she had brought with her. She tossed the purple zip bag across the table, and as I caught it I turned the label and noticed that it was a bag of dried, seasoned chickpeas. My initial reaction when I encounter chickpeas is typically met with the same voice from Kevin McAllister in the movie Home Alone when he said "Buzz... your girlfriend... Woof!" I've never liked chickpeas in their regular form and there wasn't a chance I would like them dried. It took a long time even for me to warm up to hummus. Even though it's made of chickpeas, it must be a texture thing… I can't quite describe it but in any sense I'm just not a fan. Nicole looked and said as she saw my face, "Tarah! Oh my gosh... you're such a foodie and you won't even try it?" Gradually, I opened the bag, reached in with my thumb and pointer finger, plucked out only one piece and tossed it in my mouth. I crunched on it for a few seconds before swallowing it and hoping to immediately forget it's taste. To all of you chickpea lovers out there... no harm no foul, but I can tell that I was scarred for life from chickpeas and the smell of hummus from working at the bagel shop when I was in high school (there was something about that hummus that just didn't smell right... woof! Lol).
Usually I'm not opposed to trying new things, but how I reacted today stems from growing up in a household where ... wait, you remember my post from a couple days ago about garlic pepper chicken, yeah? Whenever my mom wanted me to try something new, say for example any Asian food, my dad would always chime in and say, "Oh, she won't like that!" and the second he'd say that I'd be on his side. I remember going to a birthday party in elementary school that I had my first experience with Chinese food. My dad told me I wouldn't like it, and so I went in to the restaurant where the party was, and with a youth angst I sat at the table, arms crossed with the scowl on my face. The item I selected from the menu was garlic chicken (and again you can probably guess why - click here for the link to that previous post) and it was phenomenal! For a long time, that was the only thing I ever ordered when we visited the local Tong's Polynesian restaurant in our mini mall down the street. I also remember going on the eighth-grade trip to Washington DC where I tried orange chicken at Panda Express and it was life changing. Hey, I was 13 at the time, and the fact that it took me that long to realize there was more to Chinese-food-life than garlic chicken was a huge step!
There are still to this day a couple foods that I refuse to have because of texture, taste, smell or combination of the three, but they're things I've at least tried before (those of you that I work with you already know about how I loathe blueberries entirely!). For the most part I'm willing to try any food once. That's the adventure in it all - experiencing food you've never had before and the unlocked mysteries that await your taste buds - delicious or ...woof!