some food questions

1. What is one food (or meal) you used to hate but now love?


There are many - my finicky little kid years are not long behind me. My mother still loves to tease me about the time when she made a curry and I ran screaming through the house to dive under a blanket, to escape THAT NOXIOUS SMELL. Now I would wear curry as perfume, pre-scent my clothes with it. Oh how things change.

In most recent memory, salmon. I got aggressively ill once after eating some poached salmon, and for years onward, couldn't even look at salmon without recalling lurid barf-memories. And then this past April, my dad and I went to Fleur de Sel in Boston, a fine restaurant indeed - and I was feeling light-headed, risky. I ordered salmon with braised lentils. The salmon was seared, this side of rare, the lentils butter-infused and rich, and I fell in love with salmon all over again. Now I eat it two or three times a week, skin and all, I can't get enough. Oh how things change.

2. If you had to give up one of your favourite foods (or meals) for good, what would it be, and why?



An obscene question. Why in the name of God would I do that? But if I did - I guess it would be ahi tuna, because all the mercury will probably set me a glowing someday, or send me off crazy and gibbering like the first Emperor of China. Thankfully no one is making me, I can hasten my death at my own will.

3. Which food seems like it should be healthy and isn't, and do you eat it? Why?

Another odd question. I am chastened to realize that I don't eat very many things that are not healthy (I need to get in touch with my chicken fried steak side, again.) People think salads are healthy, even ceasar ones with boatloads of mayo and cheese and bacon and deliciousness. They are wrong. This does not mean you should not eat them if they are delicious. However, if you are eating them instead of a bacon cheeseburger for heart-health reasons and it turns out the bacon cheeseburger actually-factually has less calories, then for gods sake eat some beef.

4. If you were an item of food, personified, what would you be and why?

I like to think of myself as chili crab - complex, spicy, tends to burn the eyes and smoke the house up when cooked, creates a terrible mess. I suspect I am more like a sardine - unctuous, boney, laden with a confused identity and prone to hanging out in slimy places like cans (but has hidden, sophisticated depths when grilled over wood....I hope no one ever grills me.)


5. You've seen tomatoes and pies used for this purpose... now think of a more inventive item of food one could throw at someone. What is it and why would throwing it at someone be hilarious?


Pshh. I suppose plastering someone with live, infuriated crabs would be funny. Cruel for both crab and man, but funny.