the passionate ailurophile

I HATE OATMEAL.  Not oatmeal cookies or oatmeal bread, or even using oats instead of bread or cracker crumbs in meat loaf.  Nope, I mean I hate oatmeal cooked as a hot cereal.

This dates back to when I was a kid, and was forced to eat my mother’s crappy cooking.  She couldn’t even get oatmeal right.  The oats were kind of tough and chewy, perhaps from not being cooked long enough.  We were not allowed to sweeten it up at all with sugar, and even the amount of milk we were allowed to have was scarce.  Forget about getting even a lousy banana to cut up and put into it.

To me, it looked like a bowl of barf, and trying to eat it without gacking was a challenge.  But to throw up while trying to eat it would have meant severe punishment, which included a beating if my father, who did all of the beating, happened to be around.

Every time I managed to choke that crap down, I swore to myself that when I grew up and had my own house, bought my own food, that I would NEVER eat oatmeal again.  And I never have, at least not in hot cereal form.  It even took a while before I would try an oatmeal cookie, now I like those.  And I do bake oatmeal bread frequently.  But never, until today, have I ever cooked it as hot cereal.

Today, I learned that no matter how easy the instructions are, it is VERY difficult for me to cook something that I don’t like.

But Mike wanted oatmeal, he’s still going easy on the tummy, and he was eating it for breakfast at the hospital.  That made me all the more glad I never showed up until afternoon, hospital oatmeal has to be almost as disgusting as my mother’s, and just watching him eat it would make me throw up.

So I cooked it for him, trying very hard not to gag.  I found it hard to believe that this cooks in five minutes, after five minutes, and the 2-3 minute resting period with the lid on the pot, it STILL didn’t look done.  Stirring it, it felt undercooked.  Normally, if this were something like pasta or rice, I’d check for doneness by having a taste.  But no way in hell was I going to do that, or else I’d gack all over the kitchen floor.

I cooked it for a little longer than instructed, but it still didn’t seem cooked.  I got sick of looking at it, as I still think it looks like gack, so I finally served it to Mike with some milk, just a little sugar (he can have some, just not too much), and sliced banana.

His only complaint was that I didn’t put enough milk in it.  So I got him some more milk, and he was happy.

Whatever.  But I swear, I don’t know how people can eat that stuff.  Maybe if my mother had cooked it right in the first place, and I was allowed to dress it up with milk and sugar and fruit, then maybe I’d have liked it.  But no…what I was forced to choke down as a kid was so disgusting, there’s no way I can bring myself to eat it now.

There are a few other foods that I was forced to eat as a kid, and will not touch now.  Fortunately, they are nothing that Mike likes and wants to eat.

One of those items is SPAM.  Another is canned vegetables.  I don’t mean canned tomatoes (those are perfectly acceptable to me, I use them all the time), I mean stuff like canned green beans (the worst), peas & carrots, and the like.  And yet another is instant mashed potato flakes.

My mother used those three ingredients (the canned veggies here were the peas & carrots) to make the now infamous “hash”.  I’ve blogged about the hash before.

To make it, start by making up a batch of mashed potatoes with the instant potato flakes.  Ignore the part of the instructions that says to put in milk and butter, make them just with water.  Don’t make them too smooth, as they must have big lumps in them, that when you bite into them, dry potato flakage comes out.

Open a can of SPAM.  Do not rinse the gelatinous goop off of it.  Dice it up and throw it into the pot containing the mashed potatoes.  Finally, open a can of peas & carrots.  Dump the entire contents, water included, into the SPAM/potato mixture.  Mix it up, and force your family to eat it or else.

This is why I have a serious hatred for commercials that show kids being brats about food, and not eating what it being put in front of them.  I don’t suggest that anyone make their kids eat badly cooked oatmeal or the aforementioned “hash”, but if the food is healthy and has been properly cooked, certainly they should be made to eat it.

I especially hate this commercial that is currently running.  That kid is an annoying brat, I don’t know how anyone could think that she is being “cute”.   She may look cute, but she’s not acting cute.  And let me tell you something else…when I was that age, I was HAPPY to get fish sticks for dinner, even though they were made from minced fish.  I thought they were quite tasty, still do, in fact.  Once in a while, when I’m feeling lazy, I still bake up some fish sticks and tater tots.  And yeah, with minced fish.  So bust me!  But anyway, as a kid, I loved the fish sticks mostly because they were a bazillion times better than “hash” and other nasty crap my mother used to concoct.

What childhood food traumas do/did you have, and did you ever get over them?