Gastronomy

Recently, I’ve been (rightly or wrongly) accused of immaturity, particularly in my personal taste. I like children’s films, I like cute girly stuff. I love Disneyland. But the biggest problem has always been my preference in food. I was a vegetarian for over a decade, until about a year ago I started having fish a bit – now I eat fish regularly, a lot less since I split up with Daniel but that’s mostly because I can’t be bothered to cook it myself – and I’m also pretty rubbish at cooking. But I still have it at least once a week. But I really, really am a fussy eater.

I like cheddar cheese and other fatty varieties (feta and bavarian smoked cheese, gouda and mozzarella) but I can’t stand goat’s cheese (yuck), or any mouldy cheeses (basically anything french except brie). Despite being a vegetarian for so long, I am not a massive fan of veg – most notably, onions. I hate onions with a passion I can barely express. Onions are an emetic for me – honestly, if I have to eat them I get seriously nauseous. I also hate peppers (any kind), courgettes, aubergines, beetroot, celery, pumpkin and avocados. I hate leeks, asparagus and beansprouts. I won’t eat anything with ginger or fennel in it. This isn’t an exhaustive list – I’m sure there’s other stuff I hate.

The worst is, I hate spicy food. Now, spicy for you may not be spicy for me – korma is very spicy to me. Salt and black pepper CRISPS are spicy to me!

When you get to my age, you have to pass through a series of occasions where the foods listed above must be eaten. Mostly this is when other people have spent a long time cooking something for you, and you have forgotten to tell them how much you hate the food they are cooking. People’s parents for example, when you get asked over for tea.

When I was little, I remember going round to one of my best friend’s houses for tea. We had fish fingers, peas and chips. OK, chips, fine. Peas, not great, but edible. But fish fingers. Oh God. I hated fish fingers vehemently. For me, it’s not always the flavour of the food, it’s the texture – I am still this way. I like creamy textures – melted chocolate, creamy cheese sauce – things like that. At the time, I hated the flaky, dry texture of fish fingers.

But my parents raised me proper. So I didn’t make a fuss, I didn’t stamp my foot or push the plate on the floor. When Katie’s mum said “chips and fish fingers – that’s alright isn’t it girls? And if you eat all that, bread and butter pudding for afters!” I nodded and said “yum!” enthusiastically. What I was really thinking was, ‘how am I going to eat this without being sick, and there’s not even chocolate for afters. I’ll have to sit and pick the raisins out of the pudding before I can eat that’ (I still hate raisins).

Thankfully, there was a bottle of tomato sauce on the table. God bless you Heinz, how much more difficult my childhood would have been without tomato sauce!! I liberally applied the sauce to the fish fingers, and, without chewing as much as possible, swallowed them down. I had to resist the urge to gag.

I have coped in similar ways throughout my life with foods that I hate, even now, aged 25, I will sit and pick beansprouts out of noodles from the chinese (the texture, again), and I generally downright refuse to eat things with onions in.

I am much better than I used to be – I will eat most kinds of fish, and if I don’t think I like something, but I’m not sure, I’ll at least try it. On the last drama trip to London, I tried coleslaw. It’s just cabbage, carrot and mayonnaise, right? All of those things, tolerable. So I tried it. And almost vomited. Onions. It’s the onions. But I tried it, right?

Some things, borderline things,  I have forced myself to have so often, that eventually I grow to like them. Such as, mushrooms. As a child I hated mushrooms, and I love them now. Believe it or not, I actually hated melted cheese for a long time – well into my early teens, except on pizza. I couldn’t have cheese on toast or the cheese on top of a pasta bake. My mum always used to make a dish called ‘tuna hash’, which was mashed potato with tinned tuna mixed in, with a generous helping of cheese on top which went in the oven to go all brown on top. My tuna hash was always pink, because I would peel off the cheese topping and discard it, and then mix in tomato sauce to make it palatable.

Lately I have been trying to force myself to have these ‘borderline’ foods in an attempt to get myself to like them. This is a tried and tested technique – for example: I hated lager in my mid teens. Now I love the stuff. So it can be done.

I love peanuts, so I am going to try to expand this to other nuts that I might like but I have never tried.

Most people love olives. Well, I like to cook most things in olive oil, so in theory I shouldn’t mind olives. Daniel and Mel – and my dad, all like olives and order them in restaurants. I have tried one or two, and they weren’t that bad, so last night I bought myself some from ASDA. Manzanilla olives with feta cheese. Only quite small ones. I’ve eaten about half of them (I ate about 8 or so) I have to say, the taste was definitely improved when combined with feta cheese! After 8 of them though, I started to dislike the taste (texture is OK) so I put them away and I’ll try a few more today.

I want to try beetroot again – mostly because everyone raves about it and reckons it’s dead nice. It doesn’t appeal to me really, but I am prepared to try it with an open mind.

Now, I have always had a sweet tooth. I love things with nuts in – and I’m not keen on things with fruit in (generally because it includes raisins or currants – gross). But chocolate, toffee, caramel, sugar in almost any form – yes. Cakes, mousses, pies, flans and bakes. All yes.

I really, really love SWEETIES as well. I remember promising myself I would GORGE myself on sweets when I was old enough to buy them myself, every time I was told I couldn’t have any by my parents. The only day we were allowed to eat sweets and chocolate til we were sick was Christmas, and GOD, it was glorious. My favourite sweets were (and still are) cherry lips, floral gums, rainbow drops, black jacks and fruit salads, bubbly bubble gum, flying saucers, wham bars, irn bru bars and highland toffee bars, popping candy and fizzy belts (which used to erode your tongue).

On long journeys, we used to get giant gobstoppers from the service station. One gobstopper would last literally weeks, and my tongue would sometimes peel from the abuse of licking it. I always licked mine on one side only, so that after time a cross section of the various layers was visible, which always seemed celestial to me somehow. And after many weeks, when you came to the middle, it was always a strange, seed-like centre – not sweet. A bit of a disappointment, really.

Anyway.

I’ve purposefully avoided talking about things like DANIEL, or JONNY, or MY JOB in this blog entry. I just don’t want to talk about them right now. Suffice it to say, some shit is going down. You’ll probably find out before too long.

In the meantime – do you have any suggestions as to what new food I should try?

Next week I’m going to make myself a very, very, very, very weak curry. And I WILL like it. I WILL.

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Mes rêves…(amha)

When I say I’ve got loads more to blog about, what I usually mean is that I have had lots of thoughts that I wanted to share. Mostly dreams, which I don’t think I will ever cease to find totally fascinating – I dream so vividly and some dreams leave such a lasting impression on me. Jonny says he can never remember his dreams, but I know that he does dream, because he twitches about and murmurs in his sleep, especially in REM just before he wakes up.

I remember my dreams as I wake up, and usually want to tell them to someone/write them down straightaway. Unfortunately Jonny is rarely interested, friends like my best friend Sammy are the best to sleep near because she at least pretends to be interested. Sometimes I wake up early, like at 6am or something, having had a really good dream, wanting to remember it for later, and when I finally get up I can never remember it. Sometimes I can wake up, and then fall back to sleep and ‘re-enter’ the same dream.

I have loads of theories about stuff to do with dreams; some from reading on the subject and other people’s opinions that I agree with. I think that in your everyday conscious life, you collect images, sounds and smells, and even experiences, and your brain uses this as a language so that when you sleep you can express things. They reckon that you can actually remember everything that has ever happened to you, but that you can only recall some stuff, most recent stuff and then very significant things that have happened to you. This is because when you associate a memory with an emotion it becomes really strong and more important to you – I suppose this is because you can then seek out good stuff again (love/happiness/exhiliration), and avoid the bad stuff (anger/conflict/sadness). It’s also long-forgotten memories that prompt feelings of deja vu too. When you get in your car for the zillionth time, or see a face that you encounter every day, you don’t get a sense of deja vu then – because you expect things to be the same as you remember them. It’s when it’s a series of events occur that are very similar to a series of events that have occured in the past that you get that uncanny feeling that you’ve been here before. I think this is because we lose the ability to distinguish between extremely similar things; places, faces, even turns of phrase, when we are very young. So when you meet someone new and you feel like you’ve already met them, in that place and saying those things, it’s because you have probably been in a very similar situation long ago that you forgot about but is still imprinted there somewhere. And you make instant connections with this new experience and the almost identical old memory. That explains the feeling, I think. It’s not hard to imagine, we see so many things and go through so many things every day – and so much goes in subconsciously. Sometimes I try to take things in consciously: to note the colour of things or patterns or how things feel, things I see every day. You have to keep refreshing it or it loses vividity. A recurring complaint that I’ve noticed of people who have lost a close friend or relative is that the face of the person lost begins to fade in their memory, which I bet is distressing.

I think it’s these memories, their associations and then recent experiences that shape our dreams. I also agree with the concept of that repressing things can make them come out in your dreams, too. I think it’s because we need to feel certain things, go through them, learn from them, emotionally. This is why you will dream of disgusting or replusive stuff, immoral stuff, and downright STRANGE stuff. It’s like your mind saying ‘what do you think of this..?’ and ‘how would you react to this…?’. I often dream of my dad’s death, and it’s completely disturbing, I hate it. But I understand it to mean that 1) it’s on my mind, 2) I can’t/won’t/don’t need to deal with it in my waking life, and 3) I am ‘training’ and ‘testing’ my emotional responses to it in my safe place.

I also often dream of flying, or it features in my dreams as part of something bigger anyway. I have to swim through the air, and concentrate really hard. I use it to escape from situations, mostly. I can fly so high, right above the clouds and very fast sometimes. Other times I find I am trying to fly and can’t, or can’t get very far.

One of my most recent dreams was about me being in the 50s, and WW2 was on (I know it ended in 1945, shh), and I was in this unique position to change things, because I was from the present and I sort of knew what would happen. However, no matter what I did, who I killed, what events I changed, all they did was spur on a new set of events which led to the same eventual outcome. In other words, I couldn’t stop the war, or people from dying, no matter how much I tried or whatever I did. In the end, the dream concluded with the realisation that no matter what I do, things will end up the same anyway. And I can have a good guess at the ‘mental material’ used for this dream. Well I’ve been looking at vintage clothing with Mel, I read a book called ‘The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets’ by Eva Rice, I went to the Imperial War Museum. I also read ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ by John Boyle; then watched it with Jonny when I found the DVD in ASDA.

I’m not sure I completely agree with fatalist ideas. I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve finished thinking about it. Same with time travel, as marvellous as it sounds. I’m generally open-minded. I think I would be more inclined to believe in fantastical things if something fantastical had ever happened to me before, but nothing miraculous has ever happened to me. I live in hope.

So…. that’s what I think anyway.

Back to the land of the living, so to speak, it’s 41 days til holiday and I currently have £0 in the holiday fund. I am working from 9 til 5am tonight. I’ve still got to tidy up the flat as my things are still everywhere and it all needs sorting out, but I really can’t be bothered. I went to see Transformers 2 with Jonny, Mel, Harry, Rochelle and Jordan on Wednesday – it was in the IMAX, which is always awesome, and I really enjoyed it, having accepted it for what it was. Plus I have a crush on Shia – he’s just one of those people who you can tell you’d like to have in your life.

what a lovely young man...

Also, was in the northern quarter yesterday with Mel and went past a ‘games’ shop, can’t remember what it was called, but I was sucked in by a poster of Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen. I wonder if I am too old to have this poster on my wall.

Edward, so troubled <3

 

I think that’s all I have time for now. Maybe time for more over the weekend.

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