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[theinevitable]

pork is so good.

I don't think I know how to cook it, though.

[side_show]

My sister and I were talking about this recently actually.  Our mom was a terrible cook, so whenever I think "I don't like ______." I'm always careful to reexamine whether I don't like the food or if it was just that I had a bad introduction to it.  I've re-tried pork in any variety available from well-prepared roasts to souvlaki to properly prepared juicy succulent chops, in all cases more than once.  There's been more than one situation where I've had a taste of some sort of pork dish that others are raving about.  I typically like things that are meaty and juicy (that's what she said), so I always expect to take a liking to it, but it's the flavour of pork I don't like, as well as the texture of the meat, especially the fat.

I prefer giraffe and poultry, but I like beef too and also enjoy lamb, as well as some wild game depending on preparation.

[AugustWest]

Buncha philistines in here.

[Carlos del Vaca]

I heart the pig too, but there's no accounting for taste.  I do not like sushi or olives, and given my overall enthusiasm for food I feel as if I SHOULD like those things.  But, no.  So, some would say I am mental for that, so there you go.

[side_show]

I love sushi, but hate olives.  I loooooooooooove sushi and haaaaaaaate olives.  Interesting that you'd mention those two foods which I have the strongest feelings about.  Sushi is one of my all time favorite foods, and olives are my absolute least favorite.  If someone wants to torture me, the would just have to force feed me olives and it would break me.

On the subject of meats and butchery, one thing I love is pâté.  I'm not one for many aspects of charcuterie, but while pâté is something I don't eat often, when I do get my hands on some, I just love it.  I suppose that's another aspect of pork I like then.  Pork liver in pâté is something I enjoy.  There was a pate du foie gras I could get out in the country, where my French family lived, that was outstanding.  I'm probably adverse to most store-bought charcuterie because I grew up with access to such fresh, authentic French charcuterie.  I haven't had any pâté that was that outstanding in years, though I like even mass produced pâté.  It was probably something some French farmer was making in his basement -- the sort of thing that's illegal to sell these days due to the impossibility of proving hygiene standards for product coming out of a private home.   

Two foods I grew up on that I didn't know were high end foods: pâté and morels.  Both were things farmers in my paternal grandparent's area treated as standard food stuffs.  My grandpa had several morel patches he'd pick from, but I was basically the only person who liked them in our family, and when he died no one knew or cared where the morels were.  Now I gotta go to a gourmet market and pay out the nose for sad looking poor quality versions of them. The amount I used to eat in a single sitting as a meal when I was a kid would be around $100 to purchase at the only market I've seen them at locally.  I refuse to buy them.  I must have eaten a couple thousand dollars worth of morels each spring without even knowing it.  I don't think my grandpa had any clue that they were valuable either, because he was one cheap bastard and would have most definitely have sold them had he known.  He would just pick bags of them when he was out checking his trap line, and no one, I mean no one would want them other than me.  Neither of my parents even liked them, so I got them all to myself.  I can just remember eating one or two heaping plates of them sauteed with a bit of butter in a single sitting, maybe with a piece of bread to sop up the juices.  I'm thinking once we move in four years or so, I want to attempt to cultivate them in our yard.  There's a place locally that teaches inoculation of spores, and I'm thinking I've got to take this skill with spores back.  I'm also going to ask around with the trap-line guys I know to find out if any of them have the inside scoop.  I'd love to learn to find and pick them naturally.

[Nabubrush]

My grandpa had several morel patches he'd pick from, but I was basically the only person who liked them in our family, and when he died no one knew or cared where the morels were.

I don't like fungi, but this still actually kind of tugged my heartstrings a bit.

[side_show]

My grandpa died by a rageful suicide.  He shot himself in the stomach in the basement of his home in the area he butchered deer and skinned animals in.  My grandma was upstairs when he did it.  He knew she couldn't climb stairs due to her arthritis.  He knew how to kill things and he died slowly.  I think he was punishing her.  They were very unhappy together for most of their years.  She died less than a year later in a freak car accident. 

My parents marriage is very similar and my sister and I always fear that it will have the same ending.  I've been encouraging my dad for years to get divorced.  He did put the wheels in motion for a while toward that, but then changed his mind about six months ago.  He once asked me what he would do if he were divorced.  My answer was "be happy."  His response was that he just "couldn't see it."  I know for folks who've had happy lives that sounds fucked, but having come from these generations of darkness, I know that before I took the path to healing, I too thought happiness and love were fictional concepts produced by Hollywood, so I understand why being happy is a concept he doesn't really understand as worthy of great pain to pursue.  Being on the other side, I know it is, but it's not something that translates.

There's so much loss in my past, even the simple act of eating wild mushrooms is tinged with it.  I've grown accustom to that, but it used to make me very angry.  Thankfully sorrow is my neighbour now, not my room mate.

In regard to myself and healing and moving forward, Google brought me to this article about learning to find morels in a community about an hour from the city.  The article is from about a year ago, so I called the lady up after that last post and asked if they're doing it again, and that if so, I'm in.  I also told her that if not, if there's someone who I can connect with who can teach me, I'd like to.  Looks like May is prime morel hunting season locally.  Maybe I'm in luck!

Another thought about butchery - that place my grandpa butchered dear in and skinned animals?  Back when he was alive and I was little, I was forbidden from going in there.  Being forbidden to do something as a kid makes it oh so tantalizing, so needless to say, at some point when I was too young to deal with such things I did sneak in there and saw a bloody mess that scared me silly.  To get to the butchering room, you had to pass through a dimly lit bar area with all sorts of beady eyed taxidermy on the walls and a big black velvet painting of a naked lady gazing over her shoulder at the viewer.  That whole basement scared the hell out of me, but later it was the only quiet place to go in a house full of people with their hearing aids turned off, so I'd sit down there with the badger, the bear and the dust and study for school.  The couch was right next to the door to the butchering area, so there was always that strange smell of blood and spices in the air (he made sausage at some point too).  It was a creepy refuge, and later a fitting setting for a suicide.  Probably why I feel to ambivalent about butchery now, eh?

[littlefallsmets]

Foods I do not dig:

Most forms of seafood, most forms of pig, most fruits, any mushrooms, any olives... I also hate large chunks or slices of peppers and tomatoes even though I like them in tiny pieces.

I have the palate of a picky eight year old, I guess, but there we are.

Foods I love:

Most applications of well-cooked cow, vegetable sushi, nearly anything with garlic onions or hot sauce on or in it, most things in Mexican/South American Asian and Italian cuisine that do not contain things I do not dig.

[CortJstr]

I'm thinking once we move in four years or so, I want to attempt to cultivate them in our yard.  There's a place locally that teaches inoculation of spores, and I'm thinking I've got to take this skill with spores back.  I'm also going to ask around with the trap-line guys I know to find out if any of them have the inside scoop.  I'd love to learn to find and pick them naturally.

I may confusing them with another mushroom, but I thought the reason morels were so expensive is that they can't be reliably cultivated.

[Choop]

i think you're thinking of truffles, cj.

smets, "well-cooked" cow is usually food abuse. properly prepared beef is almost always medium-rare to medium. at least you are aware of the fact that your palate is as educated as a neon tetra

[littlefallsmets]

Oh, I know it makes me as gauche as a pack of gauches but yeah.

Anything less than medium well makes me wanna throw up.

I've tried to follow that cherished foodie advice that you're supposed to eat steak when it looks like a freshly-discarded maxipad again and again but I just can't get into it.
 
Perhaps my deeply planted germphobia is to blame and perhaps I'm just really really right, I'll leave the distinction up to history.

[CortJstr]

i think you're thinking of truffles, cj.

smets, "well-cooked" cow is usually food abuse. properly prepared beef is almost always medium-rare to medium. at least you are aware of the fact that your palate is as educated as a neon tetra

Wikipedia says "Efforts to grow morels are rarely successful and the commercial morel industry is based on harvest of wild mushrooms" though I've heard that truffles are difficult to cultivate also. Hence rooting for them.

[Nabubrush]

Oh, I know it makes me as gauche as a pack of gauches but yeah.

Anything less than medium well makes me wanna throw up.

I've tried to follow that cherished foodie advice that you're supposed to eat steak when it looks like a freshly-discarded maxipad again and again but I just can't get into it.
 
Perhaps my deeply planted germphobia is to blame and perhaps I'm just really really right, I'll leave the distinction up to history.

sMets: if you want well-done beef you rock that. Own it, just as you own not liking giving it to ladies in the can. IT'S YOUR LIFE.

[Nabubrush]

Also, s_s.






Sometimes the things you write and the way you write them . . . I'm glad sorrow is only your neighbor now. That was hard for me to read.

[pmcd9]

I love sushi, but hate olives.  I loooooooooooove sushi and haaaaaaaate olives.  Interesting that you'd mention those two foods which I have the strongest feelings about.  Sushi is one of my all time favorite foods, and olives are my absolute least favorite.  If someone wants to torture me, the would just have to force feed me olives and it would break me.

I loooooove sushi and I loooooove olives

On the subject of meats and butchery, one thing I love is pâté.

On the other hand, I hate liver.  In much the same way you've attempted to like pork, I have tried to like liver. This is definitely the food that I have the strongest negative feelings toward.   I think I would rather eat poop than liver. 

My grandpa had several morel patches he'd pick from, but I was basically the only person who liked them in our family, and when he died no one knew or cared where the morels were.  Now I gotta go to a gourmet market and pay out the nose for sad looking poor quality versions of them. The amount I used to eat in a single sitting as a meal when I was a kid would be around $100 to purchase at the only market I've seen them at locally.  I refuse to buy them.  I must have eaten a couple thousand dollars worth of morels each spring without even knowing it.  I don't think my grandpa had any clue that they were valuable either, because he was one cheap bastard and would have most definitely have sold them had he known.  He would just pick bags of them when he was out checking his trap line, and no one, I mean no one would want them other than me.  Neither of my parents even liked them, so I got them all to myself.  I can just remember eating one or two heaping plates of them sauteed with a bit of butter in a single sitting, maybe with a piece of bread to sop up the juices.  I'm thinking once we move in four years or so, I want to attempt to cultivate them in our yard.  There's a place locally that teaches inoculation of spores, and I'm thinking I've got to take this skill with spores back.  I'm also going to ask around with the trap-line guys I know to find out if any of them have the inside scoop.  I'd love to learn to find and pick them naturally.

I have a deep love of morels even though I've never tasted one.  I had been meaning to take a picture for awhile now, but after reading your post I grabbed my camera and took this shot.