The Groceries and the Veggies

For once, I actually went grocery shopping. As in... made a menu plan, made a list, went to the store and bought things.

In our house, going to the grocery store is one of those things that should happen on a weekly basis, but often doesn't. More often than not, what ends up happening is we end up going to Target to pick up the very basics of eat at home type food... milk, spaghetti, cereal, soda, Kraft dinner (I'm ashamed to admit how much we actually do eat Kraft dinner)... OR we end up just saying screw it and going out to eat.

The simple act of grocery shopping itself just seems to be one of those things that's difficult for us... Doing it effectively requires beforehand planning. Making decisions on what sort of meals you want to eat for the next several days, figuring out what you already have and what you need to buy... all before you get in the car to go to the store. Doing those preliminary steps just seems to be difficult for us, and often we've skipped doing them... which generally leads to frustration at the store because we don't know what we want so we either over buy or under buy, or forget to buy that one thing we really really needed.... and when you're constantly doing something wrong like that... your inclination to go to the grocery store AT ALL kinda falls by the wayside.

But... It's becoming more and more apparent that something has needed to be done in this department. The way we've been doing things isn't exactly financially prudent, and it isn't exactly healthy either.

That's why there's a second reason why you should probably be shocked about my trip to the grocery store yesterday. I proceeded to buy everything I needed for the recipes I picked out from the vegetable, organic and world sections of our local supermarket. With the exception of organic milk and a bottle of white wine which happened to be at the other end of the supermarket. I bought no meat. All the recipes I picked out were vegan and from The Post Punk Kitchen.

Why is this shocking? Here's a hint... I am deathly afraid of most cooked vegetables. I wouldn't say I hate them... because at this point, I really don't know. I'm just afraid that I am going to hate them if I try them and I'm not going to be able to get the taste out of my mouth regardless of how much milk or soda I drink and how many times I brush my teeth after consumption... and I'm afraid I'm going to offend someone if I have a bad reaction to something I've eaten... If I try something new and dislike it, I tend to have horrible anxiety attacks.

Having a food related anxiety issue is probably one of my more socially difficult problems... I have a hard time explaining it to people, especially since I feel like I'm going to be judged harshly for it. If you do any google searches for "adult picky eaters" you're eventually going to trip over somebody's nasty blog entry about so-and-so's girlfriend who threw a fit because she was too picky to eat anything served for dinner even though it was all perfectly normal food that 90% of the population likes and how said girlfriend needs to grow the hell up and eat it anyway.

I'm almost terrified to look for help online just because any time I come across one of these bitch rants, I'm reduced to tears. There have been times in my life when I was at someone's house for dinner, was extremely hungry, and sat down to dinner only to discover that everything on the table was something that I didn't eat.... and I didn't handle this discovery gracefully. The reaction was a look of horror and then running off to sob in the bathroom because there was nothing I could eat, and now how everyone would know my embarrassing secret of having the eating habits of a three-year-old. How utterly utterly unfair it is not to like some very normal foods that people eat...

If I try to eat it, the reaction is far worse if I don't end up liking it... The running to the bathroom to throw it up, the trying everything to get the taste out of my mouth, the panicking because it tastes unpleasant.... and crying because the whole ordeal is just so goddamned embarrassing, and feeling like you've failed everyone because you just can't seem to do this without causing a bit of a scene...

I wouldn't be like this if I could help it. If there's anything I wish, it would be to like this stuff. To not be afraid of this stuff.

But the message is clear, it's shameful to be a picky eater. Shame on me for being such a bad bad horrible person.

I'm trying to be better about it.

The interest in veggies is somewhat inspired by the fact that meat just doesn't seem to be settling very well with Matt anymore. We need to be eating a less meat-heavy diet for his sake...

Fruits and vegetables have always been my nemesis. I generally don't have the same sort of food issues with meat... which is why my diet has been so heavily carnivorous, I'm totally fine with trying different kinds of meat, trying meats prepared different ways... Fruits and veg? They're absolutely panic inducing.

Growing up, there were three acceptable veggies... Only to be served raw. Celery, green peppers and cauliflower. Everything else I couldn't eat. Mostly, I ate a lot of celery and green peppers because I usually would only eat half of the cauliflower. As I got older, I started eating a few other things... Lettuce, spinach, carrots, onions, the occasional radish... Enough to eat the majority of your average restaurant salad.

Cooked veggies... Not so much. As a child, I could do tomatoes, so long as they were in the form of tomato sauce, fully pureed, no tomatoey lumps. I grew less picky about the lumps as I grew older... and I started eating salsa without complaint... but I still can't eat a tomato by itself. Potatoes are okay, so long as they're mashed or french fries.. but no other preparation is acceptable. Most other veggies, not acceptable cooked if alone. Sometimes they can be acceptable in soups or casseroles where the main ingredients are stuff I eat... Usually because undesirables can be easily picked out. It's less scary that way.

Beans seem to be the thing that's most quickly growing on me... Lentils are the only one I can say definitively that I like. I'm learning to like garbanzos (aka chickpeas)... Tonight's dinner was Brown Rice and Garbanzo Beans. I wouldn't say I was 100% thrilled with it, brown rice has this tendency to cook up crunchier than I like... I'm not sure if it's cause we're cooking it wrong or just because it's that way... and I sorta felt like the can of garbanzos it called for was too many garbanzos... but I ate a bunch of them, I can't say I really liked them... but they weren't horrible, I probably could learn to like them with repeated exposure.

It's going to be slow journey, I think...