What food preference differences are there between you and your significant other?would be

That right there is what gives us picky eaters a bad name. Everyone should be able to eat exactly as they choose but it is incumbent on those of us with food issues to be responsible for those food choices, including buying / preparing our own meal and not being a pain in the arse about it.

Not to hijack my own thread; maybe it would make an interesting separate thread to discuss-- for those of you who are either picky eaters or know someone who is (not allergies, just strictly dislikes): what is the mildest, most unassuming food ingredient you or the person you know has been too picky to tolerate?

For me it was a girl I dated for a couple months years ago-- I wanted to show off my cooking skills, but she was so picky I wasn’t sure what to make her for dinner. I finally decided on a very simple homemade chicken noodle soup. No spices, and the only 2 vegetables in it were diced carrots and celery.

She ate the soup but picked out the little pieces of cooked celery, making a small pile of them on her napkin. Who doesn’t like celery? Especially well-cooked small pieces of it in a soup.

There’s no rhyme or reason to food avoidance issues, so no sense in expecting them to make sense. If it’s an issue to a person, it’s an issue. I let these things be their issues, not mine.

Thread started.

Try pureeing the celery next time so she doesn’t notice it.

I always liked bits of crunchy veg like celery in soups and salads, but I can’t eat them anymore because I’m dentally challenged. So I now run chopped celery, onions, pickles, etc. through a food processor before mixing them with other ingredients. (This works great for tuna salad in particular! :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:)

I have a big food processor that my daughter gave me for Christmas, but I bought a little one too. Much easier to clean, and it takes up less counter space. :slight_smile:

There wasn’t much more next time left in that relationship…

Mr. Salinqmind and I went to a restaurant and had cornish hens with a goor-may stuffing (meaning, not the ordinary Stovetop Stuffing he could bear). He ate it but very carefully removed each bit of fruit or nut out of that stuffing, flicked the offending bits out onto a napkin, and scrutinized it with an eagle eye, before managing to choke a few teaspoons down. smh What a sad thing to have to live with, so constricted and picky.

Then celery apparently works like paprika. :wink:

When it comes to “the one who got away,” it was anchovies. The second time I wanted to order a pizza with anchovies, she flatly refused to eat them.

I love anchovies, especially when they’re packed in olive oil.

I also like to dip bread and pizza in olive oil, so long as it’s Extra Virgen, Cold Pressed. This completely turned off the last girlfriend I had before I left the US.

My Russian ex-wife wandered into the kitchen one day when I was eating a bowl of sliced bananas with milk and sugar. She looked at me like I was insane!

In re vegetables and soup, Katya always grates beets and such so that they practically dissolve while cooking. Until recently, I preferred more a rustic style.

One more: The last Russian girlfriend I had would invariably order sauteed frog’s legs and fried tofu drenched in hot pepper sauce when we went to our favorite Chinese restaurant on Valentine’s Day. The frog’s legs I didn’t mind so much (they taste like a cross between fish and chicken), but I draw the line at tofu.

When I was in college, you could always tell when the cafeteria was serving tofu for vegetarians because the place stank like burning rubber. Yeccch! :nauseated_face:

Bleeding purple beets are nauseating far beyond anything one encounters in the practice of pathology.

I never cared for beets until I’d lived for a while in Russia. (I always thought they smelled and tasted like dirt.) I can eat them now, so long as they’re properly prepared.*

*Spoken in the voice of WC Fields.