Vegetables
Herring. Specifically pickled herring.
Once i realized you’re supposed to have it as a condiment to other food, everything changed. Chopped matjes herring with new potatoes, butter and red onion is like crack cocaine.
Steak fries, because everybody is stupid when they’re 7.
“These don’t taste anything like steak!”
Brussels sprouts.
No one in the 80s-90s knew how to cook them and always overcooked them. Now they’re made roasted and absolutely delicious.
Oh! It’s not just that we got better at cooking them! Brussel sprouts were actually bred to taste better around the 1990s/2000s.
https://www.mashed.com/300870/brussels-sprouts-used-to-taste-a-lot-different-heres-why/
Oh super interesting! I love that we’ve bred all kinds of vegetables and fruits to be more palatable over the eons.
Life never gave us lemons, we made them ourselves.
No wait! I read something about this! Those were totally different brussel sprouts! I guess they came up with a new species that didn’t such so bad and that’s why brussel sprouts suddenly got tolerable.
Now I have to go see how much of this is true.
Edit: What do you know? All of it! https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/30/773457637/from-culinary-dud-to-stud-how-dutch-plant-breeders-built-our-brussels-sprouts-bo
Seconded. Oven roasted or air fried, they’re little balls of joy.
I always got boiled ones in the old days, same with spinach 🤮
Airfrying…thank you, good tip!
I always fry them in butter, small onion, garlic and little bacon, then add a very small amount of stock and steam them lid on till the stock has evaporated.
I use more onion and bacon when I am preparing them for Dutch Stamppot.
Soooo goooood… My go-to now for a really good really “bad” meal are Memphis style ribs with roasted brussel sprouts with butter and garlic.
…why can’t you be on sale now ribs lol
I keep hearing this, have to bite the bullet and try sometime.
Green beans. I still don’t like them if they came from a can, though. But fresh ones, French cut and sauteed in garlic butter go great with meat.
Olives. Growing up poor in New Zealand in the 1950s/60s my only exposure to olives was in American magazines. You’d see a martini with a green olive in it. It looked sophisticated and was surely delicious.
Fast forward to my parents’ silver wedding anniversary, which they celebrated with a family meal at a very fancy Italian restaurant. I would have been ten or so, first time in a restaurant. I was thrilled to see dishes of green olives on the table. At last, I’d get to eat one!
I put that olive in my mouth and tasted something overwhelmingly vile, alien, disgusting. I faked a coughing fit and spat it into a napkin. So sophisticated!
These days I eat handfuls of olives - green, black, stuffed, whatever. Kalamata is my favourite. Yum!
Chilies of all kinds. Right now I have a selection of chili purées in my fridge : Madagascar, Sénégal, Réunion island…
Pickled everything.
Korean food changed my perspective on pickling and fermentation, and my digestive system!
I always liked sauerkraut but I was weirdly against the idea of kimchi as a kid. I think the first time I heard of it, it was described by someone who didn’t like it because it sounded super gross, and I had zero spice tolerance. These days, I put it on practically everything or eat it by itself as a side.
A few years ago, I was working at a restaurant when it went under, so as sous-chef they let me take a few bits home with me. I took 5kg of kimchi home. I used to, like, come home drunk and eat a handful of it out the fridge, haha.
Oh man, that’s the dream. I buy it from a local guy who started making his mom’s recipe for friends during the pandemic and now sells at farmers markets and stuff, and I go through about a gallon every month or two. I need him to start selling me buckets of it.
I LOVE home-made kimchi. Store bought kimchi is just… meh.
Spinach. Maybe it’s availability but growing up we only got it canned and my mom cooked the hell out of it. I hated the black slimy bitter salty …. Just not even a food . But now that I’m an adult and fresh spinach is available year round, I love a nice spinach salad and even slightly wilted spinach in a pasta
Olives. A greek salad with some big ol’ kalamata olives sounds really good right now.
Asparagus, Broccoli, and broccolini… although to be fair, I didn’t discover broccolini until about 20 years ago, when I was in my mid-30’s.
Also, I found out it wasn’t the veggie that I disliked, but the way it was prepared. My family boiled (ok Blanched) all vegetables when I was growing up. That’s about the worst way possible to cook most veggies, especially the three I mention above.
Here is what I do to prepare them:
Asparagus: Heat oven to 350F. Trim woody ends and place them in a single layer in an oven proof dish. Salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle with olive oil. Finally top with Parmesan Reggiano. Roast in the oven for 25 minutes or when cheese is browned.
Broccoli (florets only) and broccolini (trim woody end, but leave as much of the stem as possible: Heat oven to 350F. Place veggie in a single layer in an oven proof dish. Salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle with olive oil. You can top these two with Parmesan, but I usually do not. Roast until slightly charred about 25 minutes.
I will never blanch a veggie ever again, except for green beans. There are times when you’re serving a spicy dish, or something with a sauce and just need something plain to go along with it. Case in point, for my General Tso’s Chicken, I serve it with blanched green beans. Otherwise, I sautee them with salt pepper and red pepper flacks and a bit of high temp oil.
Liver, tuna casserole, sardines. Getting old is weird man.
At the same time?
Sweets in general.
As an alcoholic, when I was drinking I never cared for sweets. Now that I’ve been sober for some time, I crave candy and ice cream and sweet cereals.
Probably has something to do with the way I process alcohol / sugar.
We just crave that dopamine in any available form
Welcome to the club!
Lots of energy in alcohol, still better to eat candy and desserts!
Capers
Beans
I find that beans taste like various flavours of dirt and vomit (with the exception of green beans), how did you learn to like them?
Fats and spices help.
