Despite the fact that 90% of what I ate was home cooked, mostly from scratch, meals, I managed to miss out on some basics like courgette (zucchini) and aubergine (eggplant) and BUTTER if you can believe it.
My mother was big on margarine. So when I moved out I continued the tradition until one day I made a fateful mistake. It was like in Ratatouille. I was sat in my studio just eating buttered bread having an out of body experience.
Not adulthood but I didn’t eat pizza until my mid teens. I hate tomato, and so avoided all foods with tomato in. I was persuaded to try tomato sauce and really liked it, from there I had pasta sauce, and pizza, which is amazing.
Turns out I only really hate uncooked tomato.
Spicy food. I’m almost the only one in my family that isn’t allergic to several spices, so, because my family didn’t cook with them, I didn’t get to eat anything relatively spicy until I was an adult and could cook for myself
Fresh vegetables, grilled or roasted. Growing up, vegetables were mostly frozen/canned (less expensive, kept longer) and I couldn’t stand the texture. Then, in early adulthood, there were a few times in restaurants where I took a few bites of something to be polite/fit in. Lo and behold, it turns out I love vegetables when they’re not all squishy and weird!
My parents were…not great. One of the ways they were not great was that I wasn’t exposed to a lot of new things, so I didn’t have Chinese or Mexican food until I was an adult, not to mention Thai, Middle Eastern, Indian, Japanese, and so on.
So my 20s felt like a decade just full of “holy shit this is amazing” and also a peculiar shame for not knowing such things existed.
