Cutting Losses...

Reading a thread about rosewater and cardamom rice pudding on one of my favorite food sites got me thinking...

It got me thinking that no matter how adventurous and open-minded I like to think myself, no matter how much weird shit I've eaten in my life and would eat again, no matter how much I believe in the ability of my mind and palate to frame aromas and flavors in their proper context, there is just some food in this life that I am probably never going to find a way to like. Tolerate? Certainly. Dispassionately appreciate? Probably. But like? Not really.

See that knife? It's a 5 dollar Kiwi knife,
and it's my favorite knife everrrr...

There was a time I would have hated to admit that I couldn't learn to like something because I felt doing so would diminish my food cred in some way. But life has a way of checking your priorities for you if you're not going to do it on your own. And if 

- living a year of near suicidal hell that *clinical depression* doesn't even begin to describe, 

- losing almost all the worldly possessions you worked for all of your adult life, 

- having your name and reputation dragged through the mud by a man who would legally ban you from your own home only to ask you to return the very next day to dig out investment statements that he wouldn't even have had were it not for the fact that you saved that money for him,

- spending a hellatious weekend in county jail due to the aforementioned legal order (having been about as upstanding a citizen as a person can be), and 

- losing the ability to live with your own children in that home because that same man, whom you put through law school, decided he was going to ruin your life if he couldn't have you around to put up with his nonsense

doesn't teach you that life is too short and too precious to spend too much time pretending you're something you're not or that you like something you don't, nothing will.

That's not to say that you should't give your mind a 2nd, or even 3rd, chance to wrap its tongue around the cardamom and rosewater. But eat it a 4th, 5th, 6th, 100th time and keep telling yourself it doesn't taste all that bad and before you know it, they've been taking up real estate in your pantry for 13 years, talking crap about you to the sea salt and peppercorns and demanding full custody of your Berndes.

Sometimes it's good to chop your losses (with a big, fat Kiwi cleaver).

shinae