Anata swears that I am not his wife. I am some doppelganger or changeling that has come back in her place. This is especially true when it comes to food.
Before I left for Japan, I was a very picky eater. I hated vegetables. Anata had to almost trick me into eating them. I had no trouble with lettuce, but I hated cabbage and wouldn’t even let it in the house. As a northern boy, this made him very sad. I had the same aversion to cucumbers, radishes, and most root vegetables. Really, the only vegetables I liked were lettuce, tomato, carrots, potatoes, broccoli, green beans, and onions (and that was only recently). I would grudgingly eat some other vegetables, like beets or kohlrabi, but it took a lot of coaxing.
I was equally picky with the prepared foods. I liked foods that were slightly outside my childhood staples, but I wasn’t one to travel too far off the beaten culinary path. He was able to get me to experiment with Greek, Indian, and Middle Eastern foods before I left, but even that tended to end in a fight. I was a by the recipe cook. He was not. It made things tense.
Fast forward two years. Things are completely different. Living in Japan forced me out of my food comfort zone. When you can’t read the menu, you just have to eat what comes out. I never did develop a taste for daikon, but I found that I could handle, and actually came to enjoy just about everything else. There were parts of animals I had never heard of. Raw fish I had never seen. Vegetables that were not much to look at, but tasted great when they were cooked. I made a point to try everything once, and I usually went back for seconds. I even discovered I liked things like cabbage and cucumbers that I could never stand in the U.S.
Anata is excited and frightened by this dietary change. There is almost always cabbage in the house now. We had a garden full of Asian vegetables, including cucumbers, that I happily munched on all summer and fall. I have tried to recreate my favorite Japanese dishes for him with great success, even when I don’t use a recipe at all. I really am like a different person when it comes to food.
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| Samurai Pie |
Anata is taking it well. It has made the transition to a gluten-free diet, which he needs for health reasons, easier. Sometimes he makes a game out of having me try things I hated to see if there is any change. But that hasn’t always worked out in his favor. He wasn’t pleased when we found out I like eggnog this winter. That had always been his thing. He was not too thrilled to share.
If you had told me two years ago that I would be eating ketchup fried rice covered in egg and mayo, I would have called you crazy. If you had told me that my fridge would be stuffed with leeks, cabbage, carrots, and eggplant, I would have shaken my head in denial. But it happened. Maybe I am a doppelganger. Or a clone. Imprinted with the memories of the old me, but with taste buds.
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