Whoa, it takes a lot to gross me out food-wise. My only real hang-ups are melons, edible flowers and stems. I have a hard time with raw foliage. For what felt like years (it was probably only one) during grade school there was a potted African Violet in the center of the dining table and I couldn't look at the thick, furry stems while eating my morning Grapenuts and yogurt without my throat clenching up. Too much nature first thing in the morning.
It still really grosses me out to see spinach, arugula and the like with tough protrusions hanging off the leaves (cooked spinach doesn't bother me unless there is an egregiously firm tail or two that survived the sautee). I'm also scared of currently in fashion fiddlehead ferns, one reason why I've never visited any super-jungle-y parts of Malaysia—this wild plant worries me way more than sago worms.
I've been waiting for a real Hunan restaurant to show up in NYC but I most definitely won't be ordering the Hunan House's "hollow stem vegetable" pictured above and blogged about on Fork in the Road today. An all stem dish?! I'm going to have nightmares.
Back when we were serving time in Maine in the Eighties, there was an old couple down Shadagee Road who made good money every spring hunting fiddleheads to sell to the cannery. Piles and piles of fiddleheads.
Typical Mainers. We saw them to nod at them maybe twice a year, but since we were from away they just looked past us and kind of grimaced acknowledgement not exactly unfriendly-like.
A relative of ours died and we had to take a couple of days off work and go to Missouri to bury him. Nobody in Franklin County knew why we were gone, except two or three people in the library.
When we got back, there was a note in our mailbox from the old couple down the road, expressing their condolences.
So, yeah. Fiddleheads are kind of spooky.
Posted by: someone in st louis | May 29, 2009 at 05:45 PM
someone in st. louis: I thought you were going to say that a bouquet of fiddlehead ferns was waiting for you in your mailbox. Fiddleheads seem creepily primordial to me, just not something we should be eating in 2009...or ever.
Posted by: Krista | May 31, 2009 at 08:54 PM