“Oh she won’t want it,” my aunt said passing the steaming hot casserole dish over my head, “this wouldn’t work with her beige diet.”
“Beige diet?” I asked, oblivious to the way the turkey sans gravy, heaping pile of mashed potatoes and butter-less dinner roll basically blended in to the dinner plate in front of me.
“Chicken, rice, potatoes, chips, Life Cereal,” she listed, “you’ve never noticed you have the beigest diet in the world?”
As I watched the peas, cranberry sauce, carrots, yams, and green bean casserole make their way around the Thanksgiving table, I realized my aunt was right.
For the fist twenty years of my life I subsisted on substantially flavor-less and undoubtedly uncolored fare. It is not my mother’s fault. She would ask me to make that clear. My father too. They swear up and down that I LOVED vegetables when I was little. We all collectively remember the cooked carrots incident of 1990 as being a big turning point. I couldn’t keep the carrots down, and from that point on my parents couldn’t make me finish my plate before leaving the table. So I picked and chose around every dish offered and wound up with an assortment of white meats and starches without fail.
A firm believer that a well baked batch of chocolate chip cookies can put the world back in order whenever things are going awry, I would bake with M&Ms whenever I was feeling self-conscious about my eating habits. The candy coated chocolates were the greens, oranges, reds and yellows I missed out on by refusing to try salads even when my friends started making a habit of going to Fresh City for lunch, turning my nose up at whatever peppers and onions were grilled on kebabs between chunks of chicken or shrimp at summer barbeques, and declining any passed app that didn’t come on a skewer at cocktail hours.
Thyme – and time changed everything. In my mid twenties, I bought The Biggest Loser cookbook for a boyfriend focused on getting fit, and we spent a season or two making homemade meals for things like Valentine’s Day and our mid-march anniversary. Soon, we considered ourselves culinary wiz’s for our ability to make Chipotle Honey Lime Pork Tenderloins and Italian Flank Steak with Roma Tomatoes that would have made Jillian Michaels amused if not particularly proud. Thyme, basil and balsamic vinegar became fixtures of his pantry where we did the bulk of our special occasion cooking.
My own spice cabinet still would only ever contain pepper, lemon pepper and garlic powder for several years to come. My kitchens never seemed to call for cooking beyond a few staples I could make with just those, and frankly, I was afraid when I opened cabinets of foodie friends with rack upon rack of spices I wouldn’t risk entering into the mix.
By my late twenties I was attempting to be more adventurous, at least when out for fancy dinners. “I’ll have the fire roasted garlic chicken with fennel and acorn squash,” “…the Label Rouge chicken on the tangle of greens,” “…the pollo pressato with mashed sweet potato.” Sure I was prone to pulling the seasoned skin off the cut of poultry presented to me, but at least I was trying the side dishes that came with. No longer averse to rounding out my eating habits, I had actually seen a holistic healer for a while who helped me use the emotional freeing tapping technique to squash my fear of consuming cooked carrots and to convince me I could enjoy eating broccoli. With age comes an openness to bettering one’s self. Also, a naturally slower metabolism.
The month before I turned thirty, I was went ahead and let myself get swept up in the new wave of clean eating called WHOLE30. Entering a new decade of life, I decided it was finally time to enter the world of eating well. I faced my fears of spicing up my own spice rack, and I racked up a ridiculous bill having filled a basket at Whole Foods with everything from Dried Cilantro to Cloves, Mustard seed to Marjaram, and Paprika to Tarragon.
Thirty days sans grains, dairy, legumes, sugar, and alcohol wiped away my predisposition to the bland, artificial and less exotic food out there. I spent weekends prepping meals more colorful than I ever could have dreamt of in my beige diet days, and then I spent weeks devouring them. My palette expanded with every day I x’d off on my wall calendar.
I’ll still err on the side of cookie baking on a bad day and taking the easy way out by ordering chicken when I’m overwhelmed by a long or unfamiliar menu at dinner out, but there’s no longer a dish that goes over my head at Thanksgiving. And the rich range of colors I’m met with when I open my fridge, pantry or cabinets has made this decade of dining my best yet by far.
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