Theme Thursday: FOOD

I cannot wait to eat off the buffet of blog posts about food.  It's EVERYWHERE!  I mean, I love food.  I eat it every day.  And, so much is being written about it nowadays.  Everyone seems to be heading toward the locovore, slow-food, grass-fed movement.  I try, I really do but have you seen the prices lately?  And, I'm not just talking about arugula.  So please, don't yell at me that my ground beef isn't always from cows that have been grass-fed and put to bed each night with a story.  And, okay, I'll admit it, I have bleach in my house!  I need to whiten my tablecloths for Thanksgiving.  I know it's bad, I'm sorry.  Oh, oops, got carried away there for a moment, Catholic guilt and all.  But can I just mention, real quick, that I mostly clean with vinegar?

Vinegar reminds me of one of my sisters because she can't stand it.  When we were young, if she had to pass the salad dressing, she would wrap it in a napkin so she wouldn't get any on her.  To this day she eats her salad without any dressing.  And if you think that's odd, you have not met my family - home of the pickiest eaters on the planet.  Several family members do not eat cheese of any type.  My brother never has and never will eat pizza.  Who doesn't eat pizza?

This same brother though, only ate one type of peanut butter growing up.  Grand Union brand peanut butter in the five gallon buckets.  But they had to be red buckets.  Side note:  the empty peanut butter buckets came in handy as holders of large amounts of spaghetti sauce or as personal puke buckets, you know, whatever.  One day, my mother brought home Grand Union peanut butter in a yellow bucket and my brother said it tasted bad.  So now you know what my poor mother had to deal with.

7 kids and 1 husband: all picky.  It's no wonder that we had the same meals every week.  One time my mother made pea soup and none of us liked it so she sent all of us to bed without supper.  Go mom!  She did some odd things though as well.  On spaghetti night, we all had half a grapefruit, don't ask me why.  To this day, I always associate grapefruit and spaghetti.

I'm surprised I'm not as picky as I once was but I attribute that to Brian, who likes food and will try anything, even jelly fish.  And to Clara, my daughter.  When Clara was born, I wasn't one of those overly busy, frantic parents.  I mean, she slept all the time, what was I going to do?  I didn't have a car which was probably lucky because I didn't go out and spend lots of money.  The closest store to me was a grocery store so I'd stroller Clara over and buy food and make dinner.

I almost raise a picky eater though.  For some reason, and I can't fathom why, I started, all of a sudden, making Clara a separate dinner from what Brian and I ate.  As we all know, this is stupid because it creates picky eaters.  We had a time changing that pattern but eventually we did.  Now, both our kids eat a lot or at least try a lot of different food.  Even sushi.  Sushi was difficult at first but they both started to like it after they spent the day making it with dad.  They say the way to get kids to like food is to have them make it.  So I guess, They were right.

The first time I had sushi was in Baltimore on a date.  I was living there in a previous life and went out with this guy from work who told a friend of mine he was smitten with me.  I can't remember his name.  He took me to sushi because I had never had it and he insisted that I would love it.  I don't know if I did love it or not.  I think it was an acquired taste for me.  After dinner, we went back to his apartment and smoked pot and listened to the Grateful Dead.  We sat there and over a long interval he explained how awesome the Dead were at playing their own thing for a while (listen, listen, listen) and then coming back together at the same time.  We didn't have a second date.

Oh, in case you were wondering, I didn't inhale.  But I hear that pot causes munchies which is so funny because weren't we just talking about food?  Happy Theme Thursday Everyone!