Last night for dinner I made Pasta Puttanesca. This is a basic Italian dish with not-so-basic ingredients: garlic, capers, gaetta olives, and anchovies. Yum.
What? Not yum? You don’t like anchovies? No capers? Olives? Not even OLIVES!?!
OK, some people don’t like olives. Or, if they like olives, they only like California pitted olives, the kind you can stick on each finger and eat off, one by one.
Olives are one of my favorite foods, after watermelon and white rice and Greek strained yogurt. Oh, and coffee. But if you don’t like olives, I understand. I don’t like shrimp. The texture is like rubber.
According to this blog, the “top five food items people almost unanimously hate” are:
- Black Licorice
- Anchovies
- Prune Juice
- Spam
- Anything Banana Flavored Except Bananas
Olives didn’t make the list, although anchovies did. If you’re among the “almost unanimous” food haters, you can make Pasta Puttanesca without the hairy little fish. But don’t leave out the olives.
Apparently, a lot of people like olives. Just ask the marketing folks at Swank Martini. Some people even use olive brine to make martinis. Which is a little like the adult version of what my kids do, which is drink pickle juice.
What about you? Do you like olives? Green or black?
Do you sometimes wonder what to do with pit after you eat an olive? Have you ever dropped one in a potted plant while at a cocktail party? (If you answered “yes” to that question, chances are you’ve stuck a piece of ABC gum under a chair at least once in your life.)
Write about olives. What memories do the bitter little fruits evoke? At family gatherings, was there always a stick of salami, olives, pickled cauliflower, stinky blue cheese, and Saltine crackers? (If so, are you my cousin?)
Pungent foods, and especially those that are also basic and symbolic, often create pungent memories. So if you don’t have much to say about olives, write about some other sharp, zesty food that you’ve eaten through the years. Write about jalapeños. Or write about your least favorite food.
In any case, you know the rules. Fifteen minutes, keep the pen moving, don’t cross out, don’t stop to think. Everything I know about olives…. Everything.
Olive, doodles and scribblings ©
2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
The olive drawings are just great. I love olives. I just had my favorite hot weather dinner (even though it is not hot — yet) – “bruschetta” – or is it bru-sketta? Not sure.,.. toast with cheese (feta, usually) tomato and olive tapenade. Yum!
I love the Turkish breakfast – soft feta cheese, bread, cherry preserves and yogurt, tea, olives — You really can’t get a good one here anymore… Too salty, not flavorful enough. But we must surrender. Olives are the pungent reminder that we have taste-receptors of a highly-advanced degree – they recall sun and the fullness of the fruit. (3 minutes?…)
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Thanks, lil. I love it when you do a spontaneous 3-minute comment/writing practice 8) .
Your dinner sounds like ours. Avocado and cherry tomatoes with roasted garlic and blue cheese crumbles on brown rice.
I love the Turkish breakfast, too. Especially those preserves. I wonder of Tai Lin (sp?) might sell good Turkish preserves.
Your comment about too-salty olives makes me think of how when I lived in Spain, I felt like it was the first time I’d really tasted bananas. That whatever it was I ate all through my youth, they must have been watered down bananas. I truly missed the taste of real bananas when I came back. (I probably tasted real olives then, too, but they didn’t stand out to me the way the bananas did.)
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yuummm blue cheese crumbles…
Oh and I forgot an important part of the Turkish breakfast: hard boiled eggs. And sardines.
One thing they were lacking was the real coffee – not the syrupy espresso, just a decent cup of coffee.
Ta Lin has the dolmas in the can, really good, only there are about a hundred packed in there.
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I’ve never, ever seen an olive that didn’t have a piece of pimiento stuck in it.
I’ve never tasted anchovies.
Onions suck.
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My daughters love dolmas, but no way we could eat 100 before they went bad.
Hard boiled eggs. Yum.
Sam, even red onions?? Don’t tell me red onions. Red onions are awesome.
Your local grocery store must not have an olive bar, because there you find olives stuffed with pearl onions (sorry), garlic, jalapeno, etc. Oh, and nonstuffed varieties, too.
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HA! I too was a child pickle juice drinker and I still take a nip once in a while… and of course black olives were made just for fingers! Both of these memories make me smile…and I could never be parted from my beloved coffee…but we part ways at the black licorice SloWalker…I love my “Good and Plenty”
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Memory of olives: being a tall 14 year old waiting for the escargot at the Ivy restaurant in London with my father at one a.m. after “The World of Suzy Wong”. Dressed in a strapless blue chiffon gown with a Shirley Temple in front of me. Telling the waitress that her real name was “Shirley Temple Black” and sucking the vermouth off the olives that my father handed me from his martini.
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Olive bar? Ybonesy, my local grocery store doesn’t even carry tofu. Or kippers. Or black soy beans. And, one or two days a week, I can’t even get heavy whipping cream, which makes me really, really, coffee-deprived cranky.
And all onions suck. They’re sucktastic. Even the red ones.
‘Though chives, leeks, and finely ground onion powder may be tolerable in teeny-tiny amounts.
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mmmm olives! I like them all. Even the weird non-Californian type. Sometimes they are a little salty but still tasty!
Capers with smoked salmon, fresh tomato and some kind of soft cheese like brie. Sounds preppy, but I love that kind of food.
Every so often, I’ll go to the mall to get a crepe. I’ll get the one that’s all veggie; with tomato, basil leaves, white soft cheese, etc. I was once criticized by a colleague of ordering and eating a “girly” crepe. His had meat and stuff.
Today my wife went to a workshop to make Venezuelan style appetizers. She brought back several kinds for me to taste. She had a “crema sardina” (a sardine paste) that was killer! I really liked that one!
Yes…olives! Good food!
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My father liked to pull practical jokes. When I was dating, and going to prepare dinner for my boyfriend, my Dad replaced the canned, black olives I was going to use with olives right off the tree. He told me not to eat them…just pretend they were processed.
The poor young man ate one and didn’t let on that anything was out of the ordinary. Later, years after we were married, he told me that the olive was so awful, so bitter, that he couldn’t even taste whatever else was served! (Evidently, they have to be soaked in brine for a long time before they are edible.) So much for a sad olive story.
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Good and Plenty, H? Isn’t that just black licorice with pink and yellow coating on it?
Franny, that’s an intriguing memory…escargot?, 14, London…now I want to know the story of your childhood (before, I wanted to know the story of your early adulthood).
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Sam, sounds like the kind of place that only sells Folgers coffee in a can.
Mimbresman, your comment about the girly crepe made me laugh. I wonder if New Mexico spicy foods have influenced your fondness for these pungent flavors.
oliverowl, raw olives are indeed bitter, more so than raw quinces. Have you ever had those?
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[…] Writing Practice – Olives Red Ravine’s new writing topic is olives. […]
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Pasta Puttanesca sounds delicious. I love those salty foods with a pungent kick. The olive drawings are fun…I am so hungry for olives now.
I was up in the middle of the night last night and gave this a try. Thanks for the idea.
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I love olives now, but it was an aquired taste. I don’t remember eating many olives as a child. I do remember that my mother always gave the olives in her martinis to my father. She preferred her martinis with a slim twist of lemon rind. I’ll bet she never added them to recipes.
But, when you mentioned foods you hate … there was no hesitation before my mind screamed, “LIVER!” Especially beef or calve’s liver. I remember having to sit at the table, for what seemed like forever, until I took a least one bite. I remember it would make me gag (very melodramatic, but with sincere disgust.) I hate the smell of it cooking and the chalky dead taste of it.
My dad always loved liver with onions. He consistently ordered it from the menus at roadside cafes. I love onions, but there are not enough onions in the world to hide the taste of liver.
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I enjoyed your writing practice, TheOtherIvy. I vaguely recall, too, a Carol Burnett or Laugh-In skit of an impersonation of an olive in a martini glass. Hmmm, I wonder if anyone else does.
breathepeace, your comment reminds me of a liver experience I once had. Like you, I hate liver. Uck, the texture and look. It’s just gross. But when I was in my mid-20s and had been living in Santa Fe with a roommate for about three years, eating mostly things like yogurt and popcorn for dinner, she and I went to Luby’s. It’s a cafeteria, like Furr’s (if you have those). Anyway, we were in the line and I looked through the glass at the options. There was liver and onions, and this part of me took over from my brain and asked for a serving of liver and onions on my plate. That same part of me ate the entire thing and loved it. It was so weird. I swear, it was as if my body took over and just went for what it needed. That’s the last time I ate liver and onions. Uck. Chalky. Good word for the flavor. Melt-in-your-mouth meat, except not in a good way.
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I have to have plenty of ketchup along with the onions to make liver palatable.
My least favorite foods are all melons, (yes, even watermelon!) brussel sprouts, turnips, beef brains, heart & kidneys, “mountain oysters,” (only tried them once, on a dare,) & lima beans. Only had soft-shell crab once and didn’t like eating the shell, which one is expected to do, but love crab meat. Whoever commented that they didn’t like “rubbery” shrimp…the shrimp were over-cooked, if rubbery.
YB, I Never tried a raw quince, but they must be awful!
I like the olive drawings, and meant to tell you that even though I’m afraid of snakes, I have to admit that Baby looks like she has a very engaging personality!
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ybonesy,
I think its the combination of New Mexican and Cajun influences, plus my sense of smell isn’t as sensitive as some peoples, so I think think it might dull my taste buds (just a theory), therefore I like strong spicy foods.
My favorite juice here in Venezuela is fresh parchita (passion fruit) because it is so tart. Good stuff! Then with beers, I like a good hoppy I.P.A. Impossible to find here in VE, but when in NM at Christmas I happened across a new one when hanging with Steiner, “Dale’s Pale Ale” from Lyon’s, CO. Very tasty!
MM
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Looking at the posts on organ meats, I love chicken liver!
I had haggis last summer when in Scotland. It wasn’t bad. Very rich. It is served at breakfast with a “Full Scottish” breakfast, but the best I had was at a pub in Edinburgh, deep fried haggis ball, on a plate of “mash” (mashed potatoes and gravy), washed done with a good Scottish beer. Tasty!
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As a child, I adored the black olives and thought it was one of the funnest things in the world to put them on my fingers and make them talk to one another. Yet, I poo-poo’d my mother’s green olives due to the nasty pimento. Sure, I could pull the pimento out, but they were still contaminated with all that pimentoness.
And while my taste in olives have grown a wee bit more sophistated in my old age, I still don’t like pimentos. But, I love LOVE the olives stuffed with garlic or blue cheese.
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mimsbresman, I had the Scottish breakfast…fried Haggis (that resembled large black pellets), fried eggs, fried beans, fried potatoes and God help me …I asked for toast…it was FRIED… Great tea though
LazyBuddhist…I’m with you…double-poo-poo on pimentosness.
yb, yes, good and plenty candy is the old pink and white stuff shaped like some sort of narcotic capsule with a black licorice center that you need to gnaw for on a while. Don’t they just sound yummy.
The only food I will absolutely not eat is a bell pepper…and don’t tell me the “yellow” ones and the “red” ones are much sweeter. Been there, done that…and made noises like a cat with a hair ball. They do make a lovely photo model though.
😉 H
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LazyBuddhist, I vote NO on pimentoness, too. Wow, olives stuffed with blue cheese. I’ve never had them, but it’s two of my favorite things.
Speaking of…oliverowl, a watermelon aversion? I’ve never heard of one. It strikes me as being such a rare thing that I’m thinking you should devote a blog to it. 8)
Chicken livers, eh?, MM. At first I thought, Yeah, chicken. Anything chicken is always better than anything beef. But then I read that word “livers” again, and, well, uh-uh.
Heather, again, blog material. Bell pepper haters unite. So that the 18 of you can have reunions and pick the bell peppers out of your Spanish rice. 8) (I hate Spanish rice.)
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Me too Sister yb! They have a chain called Tex-Mex in So Cal that has great food and fantastic lime tasting, spicy salsa BUT their Spanish rice is green! It doesn’t matter what color it is, I loath it!
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Actually, ybonesy, make that 19 of us bell pepper haters. Which makes perfect sense for those who poo-poo the pimento since, according to Wikipedia: “Pimento or pimentão are Portuguese words for “bell pepper”.
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I love olives of all kinds, even the ones with the pimientos in them. When I need to use green olives for a recipe, I will squeeze out the pimientos and greedily eat the pimiento bits all by myself as I go.
One of my all-time favorite recipes is for a risotto with Picholine olives and parsley. It is from a now-defunct restaurant here. I pit the olives myself (using the side of a chef’s knife to flatten and squeeze out the pits) and use the fruitiest olive oil I can find.
Something magical happens to green olives when you cook them. They take on a soft, multi-layered complexity that makes me want to howl at the moon. I first experienced this in Rome, when I bought some olive rolls in the Jewish quarter. I ate the whole bag before I got back to my hotel.
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yb, I just love olives! (even those stuffed with pimento) My favorite though are the ones stuffed with feta cheese! Yummy!
I cannot stand liver or any organ meat. Chicken livers are only good to use as bait when fishing for catfish or crabbing when we go to the beach.
Spam? I love it too! Fried of course!
Sardines in those little tins? I can’t think of anything more gross than that.
A dirty martini is a great way to unwind! Hooray for olives! D
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Pimentos are bell peppers?! You mean, there’s not a plant that grows little slimy narrow strips of red vegetable? I’m torn now. I like bell peppers, especially roasted and marinated in olive oil, and now I’m wondering if pimentos are just the pickled version of what I like. Hmmm…I’m going to either have to revise my view of pimentos or that of bell peppers.
They take on a soft, multi-layered complexity that makes me want to howl at the moon. LOL, Elizabeth. Hey, I want your risotto recipe. Well, except, I really seem to not know how to cook a good risotto. Is it always that starchy and mushy, or is it just my cooking?
diddy, you and my dad would get along well. You could eat fried Spam sandwiches and talk politics. 8)
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Speaking of sardines, diddy, I have a story to tell about sardines that involves Mimbresman, Taos, and lightening storms. The short version is, we biked up a mountain (a friend of ours named Julia was with us), dilly-dallied about at the top, and then suddenly got hit by a ferocious storm. The sky turned black, it started to hail, lightening all around. The temperature dropped from short sleeve-type warmth to almost freezing. We were way up there, and we just kept going through the hail and rain that was hitting us. There was no place to take safe shelter.
We made it to the car, all stripped off our wet biking pants and clothes, wrapped ourselves in blankets and towels and shivered while Julia’s jeep’s heater warmed up, and we devoured a tin of sardines. I’ve never liked sardines ever, but this was a case where my body temperature had dropped low, my adrenaline was pumping, I was totally exhausted from the fear and the physical aspect of flying as fast as we could — I needed to eat something, anything. Those were the best sardines I’ve ever had.
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ybonesy, what a lively conversation to come back to, all about olives. Shrimp are one of my favorite foods. Olives, much lower on the list. Though I used to like to eat them out of a drink once in a while. Do they sometimes put olives in Bloody Mary’s? On the rare occasions when I do drink, I order Bloody Mary’s or a glass of wine. Red wine is wonderful with chocolate.
I never knew people had such strong opinions about olives, peppers, pimentos. I love pimento cheese sandwiches (lots of mayo or Miracle Whip added to the cheese and pimentos). I think these sandwiches are an acquired taste though. Mom makes them for me when I go home and visit her.
I think we learned about them in the South, though I don’t know their origins. It’s the only time I ever eat pimentos. And the only time I ever eat paprika is on deviled eggs (which we had on the writing retreat one afternoon). 8)
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QM,
My mom loves pimento cheese sandwiches! She’s originally from Arkansas, so I guess that’s where she picked up that disgusting dish. 😉
MM
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mimbresman, ah, good, another pimento cheese sandwich lover. Kudos to your mom! When Liz was home with me last time, she was exposed to all kinds of Southern food concoctions. Mom would make grits in the morning and pimento cheese sandwiches for lunch on the beach at Ocean City. If I remember correctly, my sister does not like the pimento cheese sandwiches. And Liz doesn’t like grits. 8)
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Welcome back QM !! Try pimento cheese sandwiches with bread and butter sliced pickles on them . Yum=yum. I don’t know about some of these foods, sardines,yuk. Snake meat they tell me tastes like chicken I don’t know. ‘Grits are best with lots of butter and cheese. I like chicken livers now but until I was pregnant with SCGrits I couldn’t stand them. There was a little shop in Ga. that specialized in chicken and their parts and I tried them then and found out I liked them. I think it was called Wife Savers, one of the first take home type resturants. I can’t eat the hearts and gizzards though. I’ve butchered chickens and helped with beef. When I was young sometimes you had no choice if you wanted to eat them. It was part of life. I still have trouble with the organs of a lot of meat though.
Sometimes we don’t know what we are eating, such as sausage was mostly put in intestine linings until recently. Some still are. Brains, stomach etc. I still can’t eat easily. Except in hogmaw where a stew like mixture is baked in the stomach lining. NOw that I’ve freaked you all out what will you be eating???
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Hilarious. You really threw some stuff out there for us to chew on, didn’t you? I don’t like tripe or brains or any of the homemade meat rolls that use blood or organs. And nothing liverwersty, either. Yuk.
Pimento spread is OK. It reminds me of being a kid, but I’d probably go for a muffalatto (sp?) instead, which is filled with, you guessed it, OLIVES!!
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YB I like olives. sometimes they are put in pimento cheese. The salt isn’t good for me though or I would eat a lot. I make a recipe with Jalapeno Pinwheels that have black olives in them that is really good. It also has roasted peppers, cream cheese and jalapenos. I love liverwurst sandwiches with mayo also. So many foods are an aquired taste.
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Mmmm, jalapeno pinwheels. I love jalapenos, more than green chile, which is almost sacreligious for a New Mexican.
Yes, many foods are acquired taste, from the region or ethnic background. Some are generational. All those homemade sausages stuffed in intenstines — I remember how much my grandparents loved those. My mom not so much. She’s a picky, picky eater, and in her case she was affected by seeing animals slaughtered. It spoiled her on eating chicken, for example.
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i used to eat olives when i was little; somewhere along the way to my mid- —-okay, fine, LATE—-twenties, i lost the taste for them.
i didn’t try salad dressing until i was about 20, and to this day i will only eat caesar. gravy? had it only once, and it was good, but i prefer my turkey plain–when i do prefer turkey at all, which is on thanksgiving only.
i stopped eating meat when i was 7 years old, and none grazed my lips for almost 18 years. i met an incredulous beef-eater (not to be confused with the guards at the tower of london, nor the gin, but an actual eater of the beef) who insisted i try it to see if i still was anti-meat. turns out i missed it, and now have a love/hate relationship with the stuff. i never should have quit quitting meat!
organ meats though? you’d have a better shot at nailing jello to a tree than trying to get me to eat liver, heart, kidney, etc.
mozzarella sticks? hold the marinara. i find ketchup nauseating unless it’s on french fries; usually the smell alone brings the rise of chunks to my throat.
i loathe, loathe, LOATHE mayo. ranch dip? forget about it.
i guess i’m just not very saucy, though some who know me may disagree. i get a lot of strange looks when i order food in public.
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oops, it says ‘the way’ twice in the first line…don’t know how that happened, but can it be fixed? it reads terribly.
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Done.
Your food preferences and aversions are funny to read about, especially the way you’ve laid it out in your comment. You’re right, you’re not saucy, are you?
My daughters love sauces. They call ’em “dippin’ sauce” — and they love all variety. Ketchup, barbeque, dressings, hot, ranch dip, etc. I eat ketchup on grilled cheese sandwiches. (orry if that caused the reflex.)
Interesting that you gave up meat at age 7. Did you drink milk? My girls won’t touch milk, so at least I hope the meat gives them enough nutrition so they grow as tall as possible. That and Flinstones vitamins 8) .
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Thanks, Mom! I’m happy to be home, though I did have a wonderful retreat. We talked about Georgia a lot and my upcoming trip South. We also worked on project schedules at the end and I’ve got a plan to get a boost on the writing projects and finish the transcribing before I leave in July. So I thought of you many times over the weekend. So great to see you on red Ravine again!
BTW, WifeSavers sounds interesting. I’ll have to learn more about that. I wonder if it’s still there. I love those bread and butter pickles on the pimento cheese sandwiches, too. YUM is right. I also love anything that you dip things in and I love ketchup (just ask Liz who is astounded at the rate I consume it). I don’t know where that comes from. I like to dress things up. 8)
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This has been interesting, listening to other’s obsession with certain foods.
I hate ketchup. The ONLY time I will tolerate the taste is with a good hamburger & raw onions. Probably the only thing I put ketchup on! I prefer mustard, but for the most part, I eat my sandwiches with butter only.
When eating french fries I prefer a side bowl of gravy. (sorry Scaramastra!) Or mayo. (thanks to Mom & again, sorry Scaramastra!)
oo, you hate watermelon? Oh my!:)
The weirdest thing I have ever been witness to was my 6 year old grandsons version of what to put on chocolate chip pancakes. We were at a diner last Saturday & he proceeded to put butter, salt, & lots of pepper on them. The waitress was blown away by this! But he ate them! D
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LOL! He must like sweet and salt at the same time — balances out his yin and yang.
My mother-in-law butters her sandwich breads. Oh, your gravy with French fries reminds me, in New Mexico it’s common to eat red chile with our mashed potatoes, and skip the gravy.
It is funny (and fun) to hear what folks do and don’t eat and with what.
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yb, the first time I ever ate gravy on my fries was about 30 years ago when I briefly lived in Iowa. Since then I was hooked! Very common there. Prior to that I liked them with salt & vinegar.
I have a good friend who grew up in New Jersey & she told me that if you order fries w/gravy there they send out a red sauce similar to marinara.
Yeh, my grandson has quite a way with food! His favorite thing is spinach (a staple at my house) with scrambled eggs & ketchup. D
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Reading this “the kind you can stick on each finger and eat off, one by one” just brought back some wonderful childhood memories.
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Just to clarify on the sardines, mountain biking, hypothermia, and lightning, you women were in the front seats wrapped in your sleeping bags, and I was in the back seat wrapped in my bag, handing out Sam Adams and sardines. 😉
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Oh yeah, I forgot about the Sam Adams, MM. And it was our sleeping bags we were wrapped up in. Didn’t you have crackers, too?
Hey, speaking of lightning, just this afternoon the sky turned that same sort of ominous black. The winds kicked up fierce, and then the splats of half hail/half rain. I had to sit in my car for half an hour, it was so gnarly. Finally, I made a break for it and ran to the building.
And guess what? Now the sky is cloudy but calm, bits of blue showing. Sun spot here and there. Ah, NM weather.
Hey, Robin, you were an olive-off-the-finger-eater, eh? Me, too.
diddy, I have to say, spinach and ketchup don’t mix well in my book. Yum, vinegar and salt and fries. I can go for that. Like fish ‘n’ chips.
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p.s., It snowed something like ten inches in Northern NM. Very unpredictable weather these days.
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[…] -from Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – OLIVES […]
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[…] -from Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – OLIVES […]
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[…] -from Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – OLIVES […]
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Just to say that I’ve published my response to this WP on my blog – olives (LINK).
Despite initial doubts (what is there that’s interesting to say about olives?) I found this a fascinating topic to play with. I don’t always publish WPs, but this one seemed to come out rather satisfyingly so I thought I’d share it…
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I just read it, lirone. Writing for the senses.
BTW, I think I’ll add the word LINK to your comment so that it’s clear there is a link there to your post.
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lirone, I just read your Writing Practice on olives, too. (Link in Comment #50). It’s wonderful: alive, full of detail, and mixed with the wisdom that comes with living a while. Thank you for sharing it.
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Well, I’m very late coming to this conversation. Love the drawings, I can see olives popping into mouths and conversations, soaking up vodka in a martini, squewered on little toothpicks, well, I’ll wait and write in my journal.
The only food I don’t like from the above list is Spam. Gross! Even when I ate meat, I’d never touch Spam. The smell is wretched. But anchovies? Black licorice? and let’s face it, everone needs someprune juice now and then, right?
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Anchovies, capers, Olives… So Italian and I love Italian food, but of course pasta.
Anything Banana Flavored Except Bananas
– I agree, I love bananas but not any food that is flavored banana.
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It’s fun to come back and read this post again. BrainTraining, thanks for reviving it. Christine, not sure about the prune juice. Can’t remember the last time I had it. But I do like organic prunes once in a while.
When I was reading over this post again, I had this memory of the smell of Milk of Magnesia which oddly is used both as a laxative and in smaller doses as an antacid. I never used it but my grandmother did and she used to keep the dark blue bottle on the bathroom counter. I remember the smell.
This came up again because Liz read a poem in her video piece last weekend that was talking about the cobalt blue beach glass that came from Milk of Magnesia bottles — and so the poet had used the phrase in one of her lines.
And speaking of bananas — at the last poetry group, I had some of the best banana bread I’ve ever eaten in my life. All foods may depend most on who is preparing them. 8)
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[…] WRITING TOPIC — OLIVES […]
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