Yuck or Yum?: Picky Eater Orders Unfavorable Food Items Off the Menu

A screenshot from day 1

Being a vegetarian who doesn’t like vegetables is a daily challenge. Each week I’ll pick a different food item to order off the menu I would never typically order because of my strict dietary preferences. Join my journey as I travel into the unknown to discover if maybe I actually do like vegetables… or maybe I’ll just stick to grilled cheese.

Introduction

“To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often”

Winston Churchill

I love food! Breakfast, lunch, and dinner never fail to cross my mind multiple times throughout the day. It’s 1pm and I’ve just eaten lunch? I’m already thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner. However; I’m just about the pickiest person when it comes to deciding what I actually put into my body. For about the first 10 years of my life, all I consumed was yogurt, cheese, and buttered noodles. Fast forward 10 years later and now I eat all kinds of things like yogurt, cheese, buttered noodles…oh wait I haven’t changed a bit. I have quite recently, however, seen the error of my ways and have decided to venture out into the unknown. Through this blog I hope to find that the foods I despise maybe aren’t so bad after all. Each week I will choose a different restaurant to showcase and I will order a food item from their menu I would never typically eat. In doing this I hope to broaden my selection of foods and eliminate my personal biases around these foods. To put it into perspective, here’s a list of food items I would never typically eat or order off a menu:

  • Onions
  • Anything Smokey
  • Ketchup
  • Mustard
  • Peppers of any kind 
  • Eggs
  • Doughnuts
  • Tomatoes
  • Pancakes
  • Cilantro (other garnishes)
  • Cottage Cheese 
  • Jelly 
  • Beets
  • Olives

And the list goes on and on. During this 16 week semester, I am going to push myself outside of my comfort zone and try to specifically order foods with these ingredients in them or just combs most people like but I’d otherwise never even dare to try. To also put into perspective just how bad my current food habits are, here is a list of foods I cycle through on a weekly basis:

  • Coffee
  • Avocado
  • Tofu
  • Yogurt
  • Pizza
  • Cereal
  • Granola Bars
  • Pasta
  • Trail Mix
  • Energy Drinks
  • Bread
  • Chips
  • Anything Sugary

As you can see, mostly carbs. While some of these foods aren’t too bad for you and some can’t always be avoided when ordering a dish, I’m going to try my best to avoid these foods while ordering just to insure that I am going out of my way to eat something totally new to my body and my comfort zone.

DAY 1

In and Out

Yuck or Yum?

Yuck or Yum? In and out animal style fries with a Neapolitan milkshake

Day 2

Olive Garden

Day 3

A “Home” Cooked Meal

A “Home” Cooked Meal For this week on “picky eater tries unique foods”, we decided to make our attempt at home cooked meals. I am not the best chef by any means necessary. My idea of cooking is through food in the microwave and calling it good. Our original plan for the evening was to go out to Panera and find something gross to order. However, after having just gotten back from a weekend vacation at Disneyland where all I ate was processed food, I decided to let my friend give it a try and attempt to make me like her food. That and the Panera was closed by the time we got there. It started by me making a very specific list of food items, textures, and flavors I didn’t like. I also showed her my food blog for an idea of what I had previously been doing. Then she said “I have the perfect idea but it’s going to have to be a surprise”. This made me slightly upset because she knows I don’t like surprises, especially when it comes to food but I really needed to step out of my comfort zone tonight. Upon the arrival at her house, I could smell what seemed like orange zest and garlic. This was already a major concern of mine because while I love garlic, orange flavored things make me feel sick and I don’t want to associate something nasty with something I love. After about an hour of cooking, my friend had finally completed her dish for me. What I saw before my eyes was both so aesthetic yet made my stomach want to run for the hills at the same time. Green beans, mashed yams, and tofu. While the Tofu looked amazing, all I could smell was the orange overpowering everything else on the plate. “Don’t get offended if I don’t like it,” I reminded my friend because after all, it was her cooking but it was also an experiment. I decided to start with the tofu and save the worst for last. I like tofu, but only when it's nearly burnt to a crisp. On its own or with very little cooking and marinating, tofu has one of the worst textures I’ve ever come across. Something about it is just so unsettling. “Look I made it look just like meat!” my friend exclaimed. She was very proud of the dish. I was able to slide my fork right through the slab of tofu and that’s how you know it’s undercooked. After giving it a thorough taste, let’s just say my reaction was nowhere near what I was really feeling inside. I acted like it wasn’t that bad but in reality all I wanted to do was spit it out and run 10,000 miles away. Maybe that’s a little dramatic but the texture was very slimy, the mandarin sauce was far over powering, and the giant slabs of butter on top did not help whatsoever. To cleanse my palate, I decided to move on to the yams which I was only scared about because of the seasoning my friend said she had put in them. Her family only liked spicy stuff so when she said it had a bit of a kick to it, I was very nervous. However; after trying it, I was pleasantly surprised. The sweet flavor of the yams went really well with the spices that I hadn’t even heard of before but weren’t too spicy for my weak palette. Last was the green beans, which after the tofu didn’t seem so bad. I’ve tried to like green beans for so many years but it’s never quite worked out. Something about the celery like texture and crunchiness just leaves me on a bad note. After trying my friend’s version, I wasn’t ready to say I had changed my mind about green beans but I also wasn’t opposed to eating all the ones that were on my plate. While the texture still wasn’t great, it was overall a lot softer than any other green beans I’ve had in the past. When the rare occasion occurs that I do eat vegetables, I like them almost overcooked and very soft and these green beans almost mimic that. Plus overall the garlic flavor of the beans was a home run in my book. Now for the ratings...this is the part that gets complicated for me because each component of the dish almost deserves its own rating but I’m going to grade the dish as a whole. As far as the flavor goes, I’d give it a 6/10. If it were just the tofu alone it’d be a zero but the mashed yams and green beans really saved this dish. For how full it makes me, I’d say that if I had actually liked the tofu, I definitely would have been stuffed afterwards but even just with the yams and green beans I wasn’t full but I was satisfied. Texture gets a whopping 2/10 because of the tofu and green beans. In the previous editions of this blog, it has really been focused on gross tastes and I think my friend used that against me to make the perfect disaster that she did. Would I “order” it again? Probably not. Next time I’ll leave the cooking up to me. For an overall rating out of 10 I’m giving the dish a 5 because the presentation was very beautiful and I can’t completely knock it down just because I’m the super picky one. Any normal person would have probably loved this dish. Thank you Natalie for being my Mom away from home and making me a home cooked meal.
Tofu, Green Beans, and Mashed Yams…Yuck or Yum?

DAY 4

Panera

Mediterranean Salad

This week, my friend and I hit up our local Panera to try something I would not normally like. Panera is one of my all time favorite places to eat because it is cheap, fast, and delicious. I typically order the mac and cheese or some sort of salad (and by salad I basically mean lettuce, dressing and maybe a few croutons because I am just ultra picky in that way. As I looked at the menu, I noticed that most of the items that I would typically never eat contained meat and no way to substitute it out. At first I thought that Panera ws going to be a failure, secretly a win in the back of my mind, until I saw a particularly nasty item. It was called the Mediteranian Salad and everything about it made my stomach turn. Olives, peppercinis, onions, and tomatoes. The four vegetables I despise the most and just about at the top of my hate list when it comes to cuisine. I knew that it was the perfect thing to try and after ordering, I immediately regretted it. When I got back to my seat with the bowl in hand, it actually didn’t look so bad. If I was not so picky the salad would actually be aesthetically pleasing. However, I knew that just after one bite in I would not want to eat the rest. My stared at me judgeful as I stared at the salad in disgust. 

“Why did you even order that?” she asked. “I have to,” I replied “Don’t ask” I added as a look of confusion crossed her face. I dug my fork around in the salad an alarming amount of times to find the perfect bite with the perfect ratio of all the vegetables. I was at first surprised, the dressing was very good, until I took a bite and was met with the crunch of the onions and slimy texture of the olive. Had Panera not completely doused my salad in the dressing, I would not have been able to finish the bite in my mouth. After the terrible experience of the first bite, I decided to try and isolate the tomatoes, lettuce and cheese from the rest of the dish. I found that I was able to eat these three ingredients alone together but never again would I look at another onion. 

As far as flavor goes, the dish gets a 5/10. The dressing and cheese really saved this one but it was still very hard to bypass the flavor of onion. For how full it makes me, it gets a 2/10. Lettuce, tomatoes and cheese aren’t the most filling things in the world but the bread on the side helped satisfy me enough. The texture gets a 0/10 because I absolutely hate the texture of onions and olive, so just one glimmer of these within a bite can throw off the whole dish for me. Would I order it again? The answer is probably obvious but that is a hard no. I would almost rather eat meat then have to sink my teeth into another onion or olive. Lastly, the dish gets an overall 3/10. For what it was, the price was not great and the food was not able to change my mind about any of the foods I hate. Only resolve my hate for them.

In my book, it is almost a win because I was actually able to eat a raw piece of tomato for once in my life. Even if it was small, it was still a step in the right direction. Although Panera did me very dirty with this salad, the real blame can only be put onto myself for being so picky. 

DAY 5

Pizza Rock (Sacramento)

a very leafy pizza

Today’s post is a special one because for this segment, I was able to travel outside of the city and venture into a whole other territory of food. Pre-quarantine, my friends and I hit up Pizza Rock in downtown Sacramento after dropping another friend off at the airport. Pizza is a very important part of my diet, and in my opinion, a very hard dish to mess up. Looking through their menu, it was hard to find anything that I didn’t like because italian food is a very easy thing to love. However I stumbled across the truffle pizza. It was topped with arugula, goat cheese, parmesan cheese, mozzarella cheese, mushrooms, and balsamic vinaigrette. While mushrooms are my ultimate favorite topping on a pizza, the many cheeses and especially the arugula scared me with this one. I hate the texture of soggy and warm lettuce, so the thought of them placing it on a pizza was horrifying. I ordered anyway because I knew it was my duty to do so for my blog. Upon its arrival I was pleasantly surprised to see that the arugula was more of an afterthought and not so much cooked into the pizza like the rest of the ingredients were. It was simply laying on top, uncooked, in its natural state. 

I noticed as I seperated all the pieces out that the pizza deconstructed itself very easily and it was hard to keep all the toppings in place. After I had gathered what looked like the perfect bite, I was pleasantly surprised by the taste. It was really something different from that of which I’d actually eat on a pizza. The texture was the big home run here because it all just fit together so nicely and much better than I could have ever imagined. My favorite part of it soon became the arugula because it paired so well with the vinaigrette sauce. One thing I think that could have made this dish better is spreading out the goat cheese into smaller, more frequent clumps; instead of just laying down two or three huge clumps that take away from the rest of the pizza.

All and all, I give the dish a 9/10. Nothing could stop me from ordering it next time because I was just so pleasantly surprised by how much I liked something that I thought I wouldn’t like. For texture I give it a 7/10 because the ingredients were placed unsymmetrically throughout the pizza, leaving each bite to not be consistent with the other. I would not typically mind this but some bites seemed to taste significantly better than others. The overall flavor gets a 9/10 because while it was very delicious, as I was just saying, some bites were better than others and this could have been easily fixed with better consideration from the chefs. This pizza was well worth its money however because while it was expensive, it lasted me two meals, both of which left me feeling very full. 

I am super grateful that I was able to visit Pizza Rock before the events of the quarantine because it has opened my eyes to more and more things that I can add to my pizzas I make at home. Even my friends were even surprised to see me order it and even more surprised that I enjoyed it so much. I hope to revisit Pizza Rock real soon for some more amazing pizza

 

Kailie Dorris-The Self Proclaimed Garbage Disposal

A FOODIE INTERVIEW

“I am truly a human garbage disposal when it comes to food,” Kailie Dorris, an 18 year old Butte College student says. She will eat just about anything from anywhere. Dorris is a self proclaimed foodie and is pretty much willing to try anything when it comes to food. She describes herself as the perfect friend to be around because whatever people do not like, she will typically eat. 

“It really is the perfect combo,” Dorris says when describing her friends, “I get to pull off the food I don’t like, if there even is anything, and they give me what they don’t like.” This mutually beneficial relationship is what Dorris enjoys most about being a non picky eater. As a child, Dorris was never really picky either. 

“I had certain foods I would not eat but I was always willing to try anything,” Dorris says. She often rejected her parent’s attempt at getting her to eat fancier cheeses and artichokes. Now, those two things are some of her favorite foods. Dorris finds it particularly difficult to order at restaurants but not because of any dietary restrictions or pickiness. 

“If it’s a place I’ve been before, I always have a go-to order,” Dorris states, “but if I’m somewhere I’ve never been before then I find it difficult to narrow my order down to just one item because I want to try everything!”. Her favorite restaurant in town is a tie between Italian Cottage and Olive Garden. 

Dorris is also not picky about the quality of her food. “I’ll buy an $8 pack of sushi from Raley’s and it’s just as good as a 5 star restaurant to me,” Dorris said laughing. One food item that Dorris is however scared to try is Pacole, a mexican style soup. “I’m usually willing to try anything but there is something about pig lining that just does not sit right with me,” Dorris says, “I think I am going to venture out and try it the next time I’m at my boyfriend’s house though”. 

One of the most obscure food items that Dorris has tried is Cow tongue. She also likes to make up strange food combos like mashed sardines on saltine crackers and spray cheese inside of an Oreo cookie. “I did it (oreos and cheese) one time as a dare and ever since then I have not let it go.” In the future Dorris hopes to try bugs, escargot, and more Indian food.

“Nobody should be afraid to try a food because you obviously don’t have to like it,” Dorris tells as a piece of advice for picky eaters, “ Only if it’s actually dangerous to eat, then you have an excuse.”

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