Food Freaks

Let's talk about eating weird stuff, shall we?

Do you eat weird stuff? I am not so much talking about exotic foods like crickets sprinkled over your salad or shark's balls or what have you. I am just talking about something that you like, or maybe a combination of food that you invented, and anyone else that looks at it might think what in the hootenanny is that all about?, but you love it and no one can stop you from loving it.

Take, for instance, my dad. My dad is known for mixing foods in a most original way. One of his favorites is the spaghetti and salad sandwich. If we had spaghetti for dinner with a nice side salad, you bet your lady lumps that the very next day he is going to take two pieces of bread and put a scoop of spaghetti between them, along with a scoop of salad. Viola! A sandwich! No matter that the spaghetti and salad sort of drips out the sides uncontrollably. He loves it.

Nordic Boy does this thing where he heats up Boca Italian Sausage. Let me stop the story right there and say that I am not a picky enough eater to say that I think that Boca Italian Sausage is gross. I rarely think foods are gross; rather I just feel a mild preference away from certain things. One of the things I have a mild preference away from is spicy hot dogs of any variety. I know, I'm from the Midwest so this is sort of sacrilegious, but it's just not something I would get excited about eating. Pair this with the part of me that wants to get Nordic Boy's goat, and you will find that I consistently try to taunt Nordic Boy about his Italian Sausage (that sounds dirty) by calling it dog food. Totally unfair since a real meat sausage/hot dog could be said to share some ingredients with dog food, but a Boca Sausage? The dog food name-calling is sort of nonsensical, unless you have a soy-eating dog, which perhaps you do. Anyway. Nordic Boy is an expert at Not Paying Me No Mind when I taunt, so I don't know why I persist, but I do. He is just easygoing enough to have adopted the taunt for his own self, which is totally disheartening when you are trying to taunt someone. He will just up and say, before I can, "I'm going to have dog food for dinner!" which really takes the taunting wind out of my sails. Dang him.

That was a tangent and a HALF, you guys.

ANYHOO. He takes the Boca Sausage, heats it up, chops it up, mixes it with fettuccine noodles (no garlic, no butter, nothing on them noodles), mixes some peas in there too and then douses the whole thing with Chipotle Tabasco sauce and eats it. And I find that weird. It's weird, right?

More than finding it weird, however, I find it makes me green with envy. I don't know what it is, but when people have quirky things about themselves, I want to have the quirky too. I feel left out of the quirky! Not that I don't have many of my own quirks. Believe you me I do. However, when I don't, (like when I couldn't find a word that I couldn't pronounce, or when I found out that I didn't talk to myself when alone but everyone else did), it kind of makes me crazy. Which I suppose is a quirk in and of itself.

Last night, I made Nordic Boy sit there and try to help me come up with what my crazy food combo is. What is it? Where is it? What has he seen me eat that would make someone else cringe? I want a crazy food combo love affair!

I couldn't think of one. He admitted he had never seen me covet anything weird either.

I am so disappointed in this, I don't even know why. It's just so...vanilla.

The only thing I can think of is that when I was a little kid and we would go back to Fiji to visit family, my cousins there thought it was the weirdest thing on planet earth that I would spoon out a spoonful of peanut butter and just eat it off the spoon. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING" they would yell at me. It was like I was eating mayonnaise straight from the jar or something like that.

That, in terms of weird food loves, just doesn't cut it in America. Eating peanut butter off a spoon is just a red white and blue sort of thing to do, even if it is cuckoo for cocoa puffs in Fiji.

Tell me, what food combo do you love that other people give you grief for?