This is making me hungry....

I suppose most people wake up one morning and realize that part of them has changed somewhere along the way. Like moving into adulthood, it’s a slow process that one isn’t aware of until well past the milestone. For most things, I know that I can look back and remember when I wasn’t one way, but be unaware of the exact moment I actually changed into what I am today. And that in some point in the future I’ll look back on how I am at this moment and wonder why I couldn’t bestow some knowledge on the young woman sitting and typing now.

And yet when it comes to food, I can clearly mark my progress, remember exact moments when I realized my tastes had changed and know that as I became open to trying new and sometimes scary things, I was opening up myself as well as my mouth. I know that sounds trivial; that perhaps I’m minimizing my experiences to the palate. But in fact, I think it clearly demonstrates my progress to becoming a worldly, independent and adventurous person. Not to mention that food milestones lay a structure for the very chaotic life I have lived. I’ve marked memories through my palate, made changes in food choices, held fast on to habits, and defined myself as a work in progress when it comes to life and food.

My college roommate Holly hated tomatoes our first three years of college. Sandwiches ordered over the phone were always accompanied by a yell from behind “hold the tomatoes” as if we could ever forget her horror at soggy red bread. She ate everything without a care, old restaurant leftovers, toast from the morning left stale in the toaster, cold tortillas straight from the fridge. The rest of us would get food poisoning from something we had all shared, but not Holly. We’d be throwing up in the bathroom while she would be eating freezer burned ice cream and flat warm orange soda. Anything but tomatoes.

Then senior year came. The beginning of the end. We’d had about enough of training table so we were cooking at home more (except for the time we got drunk at 3 pm, winning 30 free beers while playing “The Weakest Drink” at the bar and stumbled into training table for chicken nuggets and French fries). Except for that time, we weren’t generally in the mood for football team fare, meaning quantity not quality. Some days we were back to ordering sandwiches like we had in the dorms. But one thing was different. Holly liked tomatoes. She couldn’t tell you when she started liking them or why, but suddenly ordering became a lot more complicated. When she yelled out ‘hold the tomatoes” it was followed by someone else saying ‘I though you liked tomatoes now.” Oh yeah, I forgot. DON”T hold the tomatoes.

It was about this time that we were all limping our way into adulthood. It’s a slow process, one that might not be complete as of yet but one that clearly coincided with Holly and her tomatoes. Its hard to determine the exact moment it began since even after she liked them, she forgot she liked them since the milestone of tomatoes, much like adulthood, isn’t marked. But, nevertheless it was the end of an era, and the beginning of soggy red bread.

My evolution overseas was a little more obvious seeing as I was eating foreign foods. For instance, I remember when I first realized I liked olives. I was in Greece of course, eating in the shadow of the Acropolis, when salads without Greek olives became like pancakes without syrup. I started craving them and found myself, much to my own shock, sampling them from the large bins at the outdoor markets and buying bagfuls from old Greek men to snack on the way home. Not a year before that pivotal first year abroad, I would have crinkled up my nose at disgust every time I saw my dad eat them. Now I was savoring their salty softness, comparing different colors with puckered lips.

Dark chocolate entered my life as well. Oh a blessed and cursed day! I began buying beautiful dark bars covered in bright blue wrapping, a picture of Athena adorning the front. It was my treat in Athens, enjoyed over coffee and books and writing. My little solitary world developing where once there had been roommates and friends or brothers and parents. Now there was coffee and dark chocolate. It wasn’t until I came home to America that next summer and tried to eat milk chocolate that I realized I had changed. My year abroad had made my look at home differently; I no longer wanted Hershey’s.

It was in Turkey that I started eating shriveled olives, the strong bitter prune looking ones that demand an accompaniment such as Ouzo or Raki. So I drank up like the locals, always drinking a foggy glass with mezes of strong bitter cheese, pickled vegetables and over ripe cool melon. I would have gone hungry before eating these foods in college. Now, I can hardly eat cheddar cheese or canned black olives.

I ate pickled everything in Turkey, the huge vats of different colored vegetables sold in bulk at every corner store. But it wasn’t until living in Slovakia that I really craved the food. Being in cold climates obviously brings out the root vegetables and pickled ones. I never thought my mouth would water at the site of crepes covered with pickled cabbage, or that I would buy huge jars at the store and research on the Internet how to make them at home.

I used to hate beer then I realized that I just hated standard American fare. I started drinking Amstels after games in Greece, as we convinced ourselves it was good for us since the quick carbs returned our body to equilibrium. Then I moved on to microbrews in the states, drinking them occasionally, surprising myself every time that I enjoyed it. Now since living in Eastern Europe, I have moved on to dark beers with foamy cappuccino type tops where my teammates and I toast each other in five languages.

We started drink White Zinfandel in college which is the most disgusting drink I can think of. Slowly I moved on to chardonnays and pinot grigios, none of which I like now. Then it was on to Greek table wine, which only tastes good from a pitcher in a small taverna in Greece. We used to drink till 2 in the morning, never getting up from our places except to dance, washing down feta cheese and calamari. The first time I drank red wine was when I was about 10, we were all fishing and my dad told me it was grape juice. Drinking it was immediately followed by spitting it out into the lake. From that point on I never liked it… until one day in Paris (Don’t you love stories that start this way!). I went out with a friend to a price fixe dinner, escargot and warm goat cheese salads, prime rib and potatoes, soft pears and peaches with melting ice cream, whipped cream and dark chocolate drizzled on top. All accompanied by the most delicious drink: French House Red Wine. It is one of the best meals I have ever had.

Red wine really became my love in Argentina however, where fabulous reds from Mendoza and Cordoba flow at every great steak house. I was there for a month and probably drank wine everyday but three. Glasses were practically free so it was easy to order one at every meal and start the night wine tasting at the hostel with friends from all over the world. Now I make my Dad proud by only drinking red.

The best accompaniment to red wine is steak of course. You’d think I would have started liking it when I went to Iowa for school but it wasn’t until I went to Buenos Aires that I began to understand the steak craze. I started craving it like an anemic, finding my inner carnivore and feeding it without shame.

Given the choice between chocolate cake and figs I would without a doubt choose figs, assuming they came from Turkey. Let’s just say there is a reason they are mentioned in the Bible. They might be the most wonderful fruit available when they are in their element. Meaning the ones in America are worthless excuses for figs. I like figs partly because they don’t play games, they don’t make you guess or poke or prod or knock. They don’t have ambiguous marks you have to decipher. They tell you up front if they are good, their honeyed juices oozing out of every pore, their skin sagging and on the edge of spoiling. I used to buy bags by the kilo at the bazaars in Turkey, eating them all before the paper bag soaked in sweet figs ripped through.

I’m a pistachio snob. I can’t respect the weenie ones in America that curl up into little shells, embarrassed by their own inadequacy. They know they are pathetic when compared to their bright green thick Mediterranean cousins, sprinkled heavily on every dessert and made into creamy ice cream best eaten on an island in Greece. You don’t break a crown trying to get into these ones. They are inviting, opening up easily to their meaty goodness.

Turkish hazelnuts are a little bit of heaven as well. They have such depth its hard to compare to any other nut. They are meaty and bold, firm and filling and sold by the tiny bagful on every corner in Istanbul.

I am also very particular about my yoghurt. I can’t stand flavored yoghurt, fat free yoghurt, or anything else that alters its natural, thick, sour goodness. Greece and Turkey have the best in the world, eaten with spicy meats or served with walnuts and honey. I even started drinking ayran, which is salty, watered down yoghurt that had my teammates swearing I was really Turkish. There is nothing better than raw spicy meatballs wrapped in lettuce leaves and washing it all down with ayran

I am not at all a coffee snob, almost anything works for me. I am equally happy with instant Nescafe and powdered creamer or the best Italian espresso. As long as I get to sit down and enjoy it with a friend or a book. Ironically enough I don’t even like Starbucks UNLESS it’s overseas because smoke free is a luxury in Europe and Starbucks is about the only place you don’t get nicotine with your coffee. But my love for coffee has changed. It became an experience for me. Getting coffee ‘to go’ is not coffee for me. Sitting at a café on a seaside cliff for two hours with a Greek friend is the only way to really go for coffee.

I’ve tried stuffed intestines, a Turkish Specialty, not my favorite but not entirely disgusting. I’ve tasted snails, which were fine. I’ve eaten pudding made out of chicken breast, which is actually surprisingly good. I’ve attempted to try blood sausage, but couldn’t get past the gelatinous feel when my fork went through it. I even ordered suckling pig last week and wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed when the waiter said they need two days advanced notice. One place my palate hasn’t shifted to is liver or tripe soup. Liver tastes to me like dog food and when eating tripe soup I can’t help conjuring up images of a hospital ground up. It tastes just like the emergency room when you walk in those glass doors and smell the sterile environment, heavy with gooping white walls. Gross.

I realize I sound a bit like a hedonist with all this gastronomic talk but I am certain my outlook on food, and on life has changed for the better. Being abroad has opened my eyes to quality foods, variety, and abundance of healthful options along with the freedom to really eat. The colors one sees at the open markets of Europe makes for one of the most beautiful, satisfying sites I have ever seen and surprisingly enough, there are no nutrition labels attached. I very much feel like the ‘fat free’ fad in America has made us obsessed with eating ‘healthy’ but it makes us do just the opposite. It isn’t a coincidence that people drink full fat milk in Europe yet have so much less obesity.

Furthermore, the eating experience changed for me when I went to Greece and traveled through Europe. Four hours of eating and drinking and talking wasn’t uncommon so people ate slowly, enjoyed the ambience, got up and danced a bit, grazed a bit more, and not one person kept away from the bread, ordered their vegetables steamed, or asked for their olive oil on the side...