Strange food associations…

When Richard was young, his mother drank buttermilk. A lot of buttermilk. He couldn’t stand the way it looked. Eventually he might have come around to liking it, except somewhere along the way he took a big swallow of truly spoiled milk, and that did it. 

He has never tasted buttermilk. He also won’t eat cottage cheese. And he won’t even try my homemade yogurt, although why he turns his nose up at it is beyond me. It is smooth and does not have “chunks” of stuff in it.

One of the most memorable of a string of otherwise wonderful Thanksgiving meals throughout my childhood occurred one year at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. I am not sure how many of the cousins were there, but we had a fine time sticking black olives on our fingers and wiggling them around and then eating them off our fingers.

At some point, I suspect one of the adults became annoyed by this behavior and said something like

“Cut that out, if you keep eating all of those olives,

you will make yourself sick.”

And sure enough, not too long after eating the meal, I got violently sick and spent some time bent over the porcelain throne.

Up to then, I loved black olives, but it was quite a while before I started eating them again.

Our son was not a picky eater -- not in the least  -- and we usually did not have trouble getting him to eat. He was, however, very visually oriented, and there were a couple of foods he got “fixated” on because of the way they looked – not because of how they tasted – and he would not eat them any more.

We kept chickens for a long time and had fresh farm eggs several times a week. He loved eggs and gobbled them down.

One morning I set his plate of eggs in front of him and he took one look and started gagging. That was the last time he ate eggs (unless it was part of an ingredient in something else) until he was well into adulthood. He could give me no reason for what it was about the eggs that caused such a violent reaction.

Later, the same thing happened with long spaghetti. He quit eating it because it reminded him of worms.

He stopped eating elbow macaroni because… well, I am not sure why… something about the “bend” in the pasta, but he would eat “penne,” which is the fatter straight tube.

Now he really liked corkscrew pasta, because it reminded him of the auger that used to operate at the feed mill in town. He had started stockpiling pasta in preparation to move out, which I am now slowly eating my way through: six 1-pound packages of augers.

The other day I cooked some augers to make a small pasta salad for lunch—lentils and whatever vegetables I could scrounge with salsa on top…

And as I put the augers on the plate...

 I suddenly got my own association with something.

Along with the chickens, we raised Muscovy ducks for meat. The drakes are big and are very meaty.

(Our main drake was pure white. But I don't have a picture of him. This one is from Wikipedia)

We had lots of Muscovy ducks. They are the “rabbits” of duck-dom. They are prolific breeders, and the ducks raise large batches of ducklings.

I couldn’t help but notice that the augurs look very much like a certain organ that the male duck has that is vitally important for procreating.

I had a very clever title picked out for this post and when I mentioned it to Richard he said.  

You aren’t going to use that, are you? 

I sort of hemmed and hawed and he said...

Don’t

I have a new name for the augurs, which I will not share. My little pasta salad was very tasty. And we will be eating augurs tomorrow in macaroni and cheese.