Neko wrote a lot - I had a lot to say. So instead of filling up her comment box with a post size comment I decided to steal her entry and supliment it with my own:
1. i have an overdeveloped sense of fairness when it comes to food that stems from an unfortunate birthday cake related incident when i was seventeen. bascially, my parents bought me a cake to celebrate and then ate it all before i had a chance to have any, which created a nazi-esque sense of the fairness of equally divided portions in my head that more or less rules over my eating habits to this day. this only really comes to light when anyone tries to share food with me and unfortunately for him, agent five is the person this applies to about 99% of the time. he is subject to no end of “this is my half, this is your half”, whether we’re talking about pizza or a jar of salsa - and let me say….trying to keep up with who has eaten half of an oddly shaped jar of salsa without actually pouring it into seperate bottles is no easy task. believe it or not, though i still occasionally end up doing this, i try to draw the line at putting my half and his half of whatever meal we may be consuming in seperate containers. because while i recognize the possible necessity of this for my own nervous disposition, actually doing that makes me feel really crazy. like i’ve gone one step too far.
I have a thing with fairness too, not quite to the degree you seem to, but mine stems from being an only child, and everything always being mine. Then I had to start sharing w/ my cousins who had no concept of asking first. There are foodstuffs in our house which I deam Phlome’s or Mine depending on who is more likely to consume it (or sometimes on who bought it). Chips and Salsa will always be Phlomes. Because of that I will never finish of the salsa. Unless something is MINE, I will not finish it off - if it’s ours or his I offer it or at least give a heads up. I HATE when someone finishes something of and doesnt’ let me know. If my cheerios are gone in the morning, and I didn’t expect it, I would be very very cranky. Fortunatly Phlome doesn’t like cheerios. Pringles are the real problem we both LOVE Pringles so much, that they are dangerous to have in the house. I suffer much guilt when I finish off a tube of Pringles, but I suffer willingly for the yumminess of Pringles. Fortunatly Phlome asks for my help when he eats Pringles, giving me the chance to eat some before they’re all gone. You see, my hand fits in the tube of Pringles, making it much easer to get to them, especially down at the bottom.
2. i know! after that first thing, it seems like anymore food weirdness instilled into one human being would be cruel, doesn’t it? but there’s more! this is more of a social weirdness thing, but it applies mostly to obtaining food - i refuse, REFUSE, to order food at drive throughs. i don’t enjoy physically going in and ordering things to go, but i prefer it to ordering through a talk box. i notoriously hate talking on the phone, and i think the drive through is too closely related to that for me. i will actually switch places with the passenger in my car to avoid it. the exception to this rule is at sonic because at sonic you don’t really have a choice but to yell into a box and i really like the ice they use in their drinks. this particular weirdness used to bleed into “talking to waiters” as well, but i’ve managed to overcome that.
Ok - that’s just silly. Phlome refuses to order at drive thrus but for a different reason: they alwasy screw up his order. But that’s really his problem, because he carries with him this curse of bad service. I often go through drive-thrus and only on very rare occasions do they mess up my order but id does really piss me off when they do.
Now the ordering from waiters thing - one of my cousins was that way. She was afraid to order from waiters - like well into highschool, I think she may have recently gotten over it. She would tell whoever she was with, what she wanted. If the waiter asked her she would panick and plead with her eyes to whoever was with her to order for her. It’s like she was terrified of the waiter or something. She can be a bit overly dramatic sometimes.
3. i hate, hate, hate raisins. i will pick them out of cookies, salads, trail mix….anything they happen to be in. cannot stand the taste, the texture, the thought of tasty grapes shriveling…ugh. no, thank you. in a somewhat related distaste, i will pick raisins out of an oatmeal raisin cookie and happily eat that, but you couldn’t get me to eat a bowl of oatmeal to save my life. other things i won’t eat: mustard (any really, but especially honey mustard), sweet pickles, pork sausage (unless it’s on pizza), the dark meat on either chicken or turkey, duck, white chocolate, i won’t eat a cheeseburger if it has ketchup on it, but i’ll eat ketchup with fries, dehydrated fruit, apricots, walnuts, unless they’re in brownies, most kinds of ham and hot dogs.
Raisins rock - but don’t feed them to dogs, they’re bad for them. And actually grapes are better. Honey Mustard is one of the worst ideas man-kind has ever come up with. White chocolate is a mis-nomer. White chocolate is in fact chocolate sans cocoa. In other words: it’s vanilla. I love dried fruits except apple chips and dried bananas. Which ironically enough are the two fruits I eat most often. I prefer dired pineapple to canned pineapple, but fresh pineapple is best. With almost any nut (real nuts, not counting the peanut) I will not eat them in anything, except a bowl of other mixed nuts. I want them by themselves and unsalted. I don’t eat peanuts except in crunchy peanutbutter and occasionally in a snickers if I can’t find a milky way.
4. i like fruit by itself, but hate deserts made of fruit. fruit deserts to me are all gooey and usually make use of some kind of pie crust, which i also don’t really like. this includes all manner of fruit pie - apple, blueberry, peach, etc., any kind of cobbler, any fruit laced cheesecake and most fruit salads. the only exceptions are chocolate covered strawberries and strawberry shortcake.
Now I know you’re just fruity! Phlome doesn’t like fruit pies - or any pie that is not custard or pudding based. I looove fruite pies, cherry and apple being my fave. Fruit make for the best desserts in my opinion, though I might change my mind for a chocolate mousse fudge cake.
5. i love to cook, but cooking for anybody but my husband (who i always cook with and not really for) makes me an absolutely frantic basket case. my office has a couple of pot luck lunches during the year and i agonize for a month beforehand what i’m going to make and how much of it to prepare, then spend most of the potluck nervously monitoring my offering. none of my worrying ever pays off because i usually stick to the safer side of potluck fare - tasty mexican dips or deserts. i took a little bit of a gamble this year with a flourless chocolate rum cake, but i mean….chocolate…and rum… what is there to complain about?
You must share this recipe please. Phlome loves rum cake, and I love chocolate cake - it could be the perfect dessert to share!
6. presentation and uniformity is also a problem. agent five read the previous five entries and contributed the following…..
“Arrangement of single dishes: Pizza must have all ingredients equally distributed over it. Salad needs to have everything homogenously mixed. Roast beef sandwiches must have textural and structural balance across the beef as well as even sauce application”
“Refusal of oddly shaped pieces: This includes pieces of meat or fried things. Any “piece” or “chunk” of something that is sufficiently different in shape from the normal majority of other pieces is usually refused.”
and both of those things are very, very true.
I don’t cook for the presenation I cook for the eating. Phlome often makes fun of the way my food looks when I make it. But at least it tastes good. “It may not look good but at least it tastes good” is a far better compliment to me than “it doesn’t taste like much but ain’t it pretty.”