MAY
24
On this, my 2/3 birthday, I went to an old favorite Italian
restaurant where they know me by my unmistakable order of fried calamari and
fusilli with butter. I’m also the one who empties the bread basket in minutes.
Fried calamari, you say? But that has flavor! It’s shrimpy! It’s
chewy! It’s everything I typically abhor. Interesting story: When I was in 6th
grade, I went to lunch with a close friend and his mom who were fully aware of
my picky eating situation. They ordered fried calamari and his mother proceeded
to force me to eat it.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” she insisted. “If you don’t
like, you spit it out.”
She essentially hypnotized me into eating the calamari (her husband, who actually is trained in the hypnotic arts, has also offered to hypnotize me out of picky eating) and bizarrely I loved it.
Just to be absolutely clear, I love the ringed calamari parts and not the weird
stringy purple parts. It has to be crunchy, salty and heavily breaded. If it’s
too stretchy, it’s a no go. But I love fried calamari. That’s basically the
last major new food I’ve added to my repertoire and certainly the most exotic:
that was like seven years ago – I’m working on it.
Anyway, I added to my order some fried zucchini to go along with my
fried calamari. That wasn’t actually a new food – I just thought you’d like to
know.
The new food, after I had polished off my various fried items and
my fusilli with butter – no thank you to the parmesan – was some of my dad’s
salmon. Salmon! Sticky! Flavorful! It also had some weird orange sauce with
definite chunks of things in it. Allegedly those chunks and sauce flavors were
tomato and onion or something – the fewer questions asked the better. I have a strange, dreamlike memory of eating a tomato and instantly throwing it up – I’m pretty sure
that never actually happened, but I closely associate tomatoes with vomit which
obviously may be a bit of an issue this summer as I try to overcome that.
The point is I had the salmon with the sauce on it. It was okay. I
did fine. I had a few bites. I probably wouldn’t seek it out again. But I ate
enough that a waiter looking at my plate would suspect that some had been
consumed without taking out his magnifying glass.
For dessert at that restaurant, I usually would just get vanilla
ice cream. (Are you shocked?) Instead, I asked what sorbets they had. The
choices were raspberry and mango. While I’m definitely a sorbet person, I’m
basically limited to apple, pear, orange, strawberry, cherry, peach – neither of
the offerings were sorbets (or fruits) that I eat or had ever eaten. Being
daring, I ordered the mango sorbet. I love sorbet so I figured, it was much
closer to something I knew I liked than salmon. Indeed, it was a great specimen
of a sorbet! The flavor was a little more tangy and citrusy than ideal, but I
ate a totally normal human-size portion of it.
The mango sorbet also stimulated “the face” when my mom sampled it.
“The face” is a massive reaction that my mother has to all tart foods (at any level
of tartness, even quite mild). All her features shrivel up in a fit of
hilarious agony. Often, “the face” will manifest itself, then vanish for a
moment, and then, when it seems the tartness has passed, return with a violent vengeance. Gotta love it.
Salmon and mango sorbet: makin’ progress, y’all!
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