Food

There's a girl in my office who doesn't like warm vegetables. She'll eat any vegetable cold and raw, but once it's cooked - she gags!!

I'll eat almost any vegetable except okra and beets. Okra can be tolerated in small doses - but beets, never. Nothing grosses me out more than getting a salad with a big old pickled beet on it. And that disgusting red juice slopping down my lettuce! Once in Hawaii Ed and I went to a really nice restaurant and the salad had these very decorative shoestring red things on top. I became immediately suspicious and told Ed they were beets - he swore they weren't. Even tasted them and insisted they weren't beets! He actually challenged my beet radar!! We asked the waitress and she verified my fear. I won $100 on that one!!

Okay, last year I did figure, heck, I'm an adult now and I should give them one more chance. Especially since my former-beet-hating daughter now eats them when her husband roasts them, and in Borscht (her kids' favorite meal). So I got some nice, plump, fresh beets, cleaned them, wrapped them in foil (per instructions) with olive oil, salt, pepper, a little garlic. What could go wrong? We sat down to dinner and my husband actually liked them. I tasted them and - yup - still tastes like dirt! Granted, dirt with a nice olive oil after taste. But dirt. So now I'm officially done for the rest of my life. NO MORE BEETS!!


When I was little, I had a traumatic event involved cooked carrots. My mother was hosting a Tupperware-like party given by a pot-and-pan salesman. I guess these were all the rage in the 50's. Anyway, my cousin and I wandered in the kitchen - we were around 3 or 4 at the time. The man was cooking carrots and we both said that we didn't like cooked carrots. So the guy proceeds to tell us that if we didn't eat the carrots, he would take us away from our moms and we would never see them again! I can still remember standing in that kitchen and looking up in fear at the carrot man! We ate them - we got to stay home with our moms - but I still get nervous when I see cooked carrots.


My kids were always pretty good eaters, not too picky. Of course, it's not too difficult to cook for kids whose favorite meal was creamed canned turkey over minute rice! They liked it because it tasted like the food they got in the school cafeteria!! Hard to go wrong with that kind of competition.

I did like to try out new recipes on them. It was always obvious when they didn't particularly like something. They would ask questions like, "Is this an experiment?" or make comments like, "This isn't bad, but you don't need to keep the recipe." Subtle...

Luckily, my husband enjoys anything I cook - as long as it doesn't contain eggplant. So, if you have a good recipe for an eggplant/beet salad - please keep it to yourself!!