I could eat it in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse, here and there. ANYWHERE.
Which is very strange considering the following:
Everyone in my family has very specific and peculiar eat habits. My brother for example won’t eat cheese, mash potatoes or butter. He mainly lives on a diet of bagel bites, can ravioli, Slurpee’s and slim jims. Then again he is 19. My father won’t eat anything with raw eggs in it or anything deemably (how is that not a word?) healthy really. Though he does love raw fruit and veggies. He just prefers most things covered in gravy. My sister won’t eat anything off a bone and we all consider seafood the end of a joke (as in “You like seafood?” “See FOOD” -mouth open) instead of an actual editable substance. My mother is the only one that will eat anything put in front of her. She is the last of six children, being picky wasn’t an option. Why and how she’s catered to all of our bazaar choices, I’ll never know. Honestly, my mom is a great cook and we have done nothing but ruin her.
My eating habits have always come in waves mostly having to do with textual distaste. I’ve gone through phases where I’d ask for McDonald’s hamburgers without meat, then six months later only eat the meat and discard the bun. I was 5. I used to hate peanut butter, now I eat them with a layer of potato chips. I spent 3rd-5th grade eating bologna and mustard sandwiches everyday. 6th grade I had chocolate milkshakes (with vanilla ice cream of course) every day after school for a year because my grandma thought I was under weight. I used to melt cheese in a bowl and eat it as a snack. I spent 7th grade having warm pretzels for breakfast and ketchup and mustard sandwiches, nestle crunch bars, string cheese and a can of pepsi for lunch. Everything else I just gave to my friends. I generally hate milk. By high school I stopped eating breakfast all together and had mash potatoes and French fries for lunch. I had Wendy’s three times a week for 6 months during drumline (Hi I’m awesome!) season junior and senior year. My only real consistently healthy balanced meal has always been dinner when my mom cooked.
Things that have always remain:
-I hate fruit. I’ve watched people eat fruit my whole life and craved to be able to grab an apple, a handful of grapes or peel an orange and enjoy the deliciousness they seem to get from it. I just can’t do it. Bananas, oranges, strawberries, etc, they all make me gag. Every single time. So I eat applesauce and orange juice without pulp and am perfectly content.
-Discounting my love affair with chocolate milkshakes (with vanilla ice cream of course) I would be perfectly fine if dessert didn’t exist. I don’t crave it ever. Waiters will walk by with their giant tray of desserts and every other person at my table will about fall out of their chair to get to it. I will make chocolate chip cookie dough and brownies so I can have the batter. Whatever cookies actually make it to the oven, I give away. I only eat two types of candy. Three types of ice cream. One of kind cake. I’m a sorry excuse for a woman.
-I am weirdly OCD about meal times. I can only eat breakfast before noon or half drunk at 2am. Otherwise I just as soon not have it. I think I’ve just always enjoyed lunch/dinner types food so much more and knew I’d get in trouble or risk diabetes if I had pop at 10am.
I could go on but I’ll spare you the rest of my won'ts.
After I moved to NYC everything changed. Overtime you’ll come to think that I romanticize my time there, but I’m here to tell you that I’m not. Not even a little. NYC and the K family saved my life, rather showed me I could have one without feeling bad. It was one of the best relationships I’ve even been in and I will feel nostalgic for that stupid city forever. Anyway, Courtney & Chris were the first people to show me you actually have a relationship with what you eat and that it can be awesome. They showed me that there was more then one type of bread and cheese and that iceburg isn’t lettuce. That hamburgers can be made with turkey. That you don’t need tomatoes, a nestle crunch bar, pickle slices, a milk shake, chips and a can of Pepsi to accompany your grill cheese. Chris taught me how to sharpen a knife on a back of a bowl. They made me feed their baby tofu and dill. They taught me about olive oil. And an in effort to please these people that were so amazing to me, my pallet opened up little by little every day. They taught me to open up to the world and generally stop talking advantage of my mother who used to buy me boxes of full size Nestle Crunch bars from Gordon Foods because at least I was eating something.
That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good batch of popcorn for dinner from time to time…ok more then I’d like to admit. I still have awful eating habits, I’ve just learned to be less stubborn about it and more pretentious instead. Yay!
The humorous part is that after such a sorted history with food, I married a chef. An adorable “I’ll eat anything once” guy. Though to be fair, he wasn’t a chef when we met. When we were fresh and new and inappropriate he would call at midnight to tell me he was outside my apartment and we’d drive 30mins out of the way to a Thai restaurant where I would get whatever variation of beef, brown gravy, peppers and white rice I could find and he’d pick the most bazaar thing on the menu.
Fried pig intestines for example:
And he loves desserts. He would eat sugar at every meal if I let him.
Here he is eating a spoonful of wedding cake frosting with M&Ms stuck in it.
We are opposite in so many ways. More on that another time though.
I am one giant digression.
What I’ve been trying to say is that one spring afternoon in midtown, Courtney and I went to visit Chris at the AP office and they pulled me into this Mexican joint and I panicked in line about what to order because I’ve never really cared for Mexican food and didn't want to disappoint them. So I got the same thing that Courtney did and thus began my love affair with the one and only Chipotle Mexican Grill.
That’s what this blog was supposed to be about. (Opps. In a few months I’m sure I’ll be short and boring.)
After that afternoon I started mapping out all the subway stops closest to any Chipotle location. I went there A LOT. Two years later when I moved back to MI, I thought it was fate that the chain went national and that they had decided to put a location not far from my parents place. With all of my quirky eating habits I can still eat there every single day and not notice and be just as in love with it as I was the first time. When I’m not that hungry, I have tacos. When I’m starving I have a burrito. Lately I’ve been on a bowl kick. Occasionally there are chips involved. I have probably spent $1000+ there now over the course of 6 years, but I can’t stop.
And I don't care.
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