Food: Hypersensitive; Hyposensitive or somewhere in the middle?

Finally, my mother also hated sliced bread.  We bought proper bread from local bakeries, PRIMA & KOLOS .  The bread cost around three times as much as standard supermarket bread, had a hard crispy crust and needed a very sharp kitchen knife.  Her opinion of the cheap white supermarket sliced bread was that it was like moist cardboard,  only suitable for wiping your bum with.

I'm glad that your mother wasn't a bad cook.. My mum could be quite inflexible about things too!

My mum made most things from scratch although we did have fish and chips from the local chip shop on  Friday evening and a pizza on a Saturday evening. Everything else was cooked from scratch is was just that it never really got beyond scratch if you know what I mean? I mean she could cook a piece of meat or some potatoes or vegetables, they just didn't go beyond that, she never cooked spaghetti bolognese or stew or curry or anything imaginative, just plain meat, potatoes and vegetables. She couldn't mash potatoes properly either, I have a lifelong aversion to lumpy mashed potato thanks to my mum!

If ever we went out on a trip we always took a packed lunch. Basically sandwiches and an apple and a carton of juice. She would bring suares of kitchen roll to wipe hands on. I don't drink caffeinated tea so I don't know what teabags she used.

I was only allowed one bag of crisps a week too. I could eat half of the packet on a Saturday with my lunch and I was allowed to take the other half a packet with my packed lunch to school on a Wednesday.

That's terrible that your mum told everyone that you were useless and unable to make coffee, just because you weren't making it to her very precise specifications! It's also terrible that a relative told you that you were pathetic for the same!! 

It seems that she had a fear of other people's cooking!

Thank you for sharing :-)

My mother was not a bad cook, she just had very strong opinions and was inflexible. 

She hated ready made food and insisted on cooking almost everything from scratch .

She worked part time in a restaurant but hated eating in restaurants. 

In my childhood we often went on day trips with our local social club.  My mother insisted we never buy food or drink during the trips, we must always bring everything from home.  This included bottles of dilute cold fruit juice. A couple of thermos flasks of hot tea.  Cups to drink both hot drinks and cold drinks.  masses and masses of sandwiches,  Home made damp cotton cloths wrapped in plastic paper to wipe our hands and faces.  And we had to carry all this heavy stuff around with us.

She insisted tea bags had to be square / rectangular.  I once bought round tea bags.  Whole packet of 80 went straight in the bin.  She said just looking at them made her want to vomit.

She insisted milk used in coffee had to be boiled.  Not cold, warm or hot.  But BOILED. She heated milk in a milk pan and as it started to boil it rose to the top and just before it overflowed grabbed it to put into the coffee.  Once many years ago I made her a coffee without boiling the milk.  It went straight down the sink.  And she never tired in telling people that I was useless and unable to even make coffee.  Twenty years later I was accosted in the street by a relative and told that I was pathetic,  because she had heard that I a grown man was unable to even make a cup of coffee. 

Many years later I discovered that I started school three months late.  One of the reasons my mother gave me for not sending me to school was to protect me from other people's cooking.

My mother was a terrible cook! She had set meals for every day of the week and she cooked them all badly! If anything she taught me how not to cook! I taught myself to cook from scratch with the use of a few good cookbooks that I purchased when I moved out of home aged 18.

Crisps are good, though I've been doing the whole 'clean eating' thing since before Christmas so no crisps at the moment But when I do eat crisps my favourites are prawn cocktail crisps or chilli heatwave doritos, nice and spicy niknaks are good too! I eat spicy food more for the flavour than for heat, I'm just getting into a Moroccan Tagine phase at the moment! I only drink herbal tea. Ginger, lemon and manuka honey is my current favourite, I like the kick from the ginger. Coffee is good, the stronger the better, I like Turkish coffee too. I'll eat most meat and fish/seafood but not liver and I'm not keen on kidneys either, any entrails basically! I rarely eat on my own because I have children. I hate watching my 5 year old daughter eat as she eats with her mouth open, I'm trying to train her out of it but that just makes it funnier for her to do it just to wind me up, kids!

Please do describe your late mother's habits and how it affected your life, it would be interesting to read about.

My food habits are many.  I consider them relatively sensible.  Unlike my late mother who was inflexible and absolute in her belief in what was the correct way to cook and what she/we as a family were allowed to eat.

My habits:

• Crisps, I'm an addict,  as a child I was salt and vinegar. Now I can't stand the flavour. Now it's cheese and onion and beef and onion.  I love seebrook ribbed crisps.
• Curries and chicken tikka.  I'm almost an addict. First one at university was the best.  Others have been a let down, it's like chasing the dragon, never getting the same high again.  Gradually I've gone for hotter flavours, madras, jalfrezi, vindaloo.  Although the very very hot latest ones are too much and they burn my mouth.
• Tea,  I'm very particular and only drink selective brands.  Others taste like dishwater . So I only drink tea at home. When I'm out somewhere I always choose coffee because I can drink any coffee.(except the very very strong Turkish coffee which is like treacle).
• I love chicken, pork, cod, haddock I can tolerate beef and lamb,  I hate prawns, salmon, liver and kidneys.
• I usually eat alone.
• I hate watching other people eat.  It makes me feel sick.

Perhaps I should later describe my mother's habits and how it affected my life.

I guess it’s good in a way that the lack of variety of food when you were a child has made you very open to trying different foods as an adult. I do believe that you can have food intolerance tests done at your GPs if that’s something that you wanted to pursue? I usually fill up on fruit in between meals to stop myself from getting too hungry. I’m also quite short so would need less calories to gain weight!

I tried the goats cheese and chive omelette this morning, because I sometimes do an omelette on a Saturday so I thought I’d see if I liked it and if I could get it past my kids. I liked it. My 5 year old is now a goats cheese convert! She loved the goats cheese and loved the omelette, although she did spend a good 5 minutes picking the chives out before eating it ♀️Litlun though was having none of it! The omelette didn’t even make it as far as the sniff test! She sat and looked at it for a couple of minutes then got down from the table. My attempts at passing her pieces of it were met by her promptly pushing my hand away. She also refused to eat a new cereal and then her usual cereal in a different bowl so she eventually ate her usual Cheerios in her usual bowl. I’m guessing the massive meltdown that she had after all that was probably due to me messing about with her breakfast. I think I’d best just stick to her usual Cheerios in her usual purple bowl from now on! 

I like most food but there are a few textures I don't like (bananas, smoothies, avocados, scrambled egg are just a few) Growing up all we ate was pasta and peas, sometimes with tuna (we had no money at all) so as soon as I had money of my own I went off and tried every bit of food I could find! I still like trying all sorts of new food. Probably Thai or Eastern Asian food is my favourite. Noodle soup type food or sushi and sashimi. I also suffer from diary intolerance and perhaps a few other intolerances as well but I have no idea how to work out what these are - it's so complicated trying to work out what diet to follow, everyone says their one is the best. I know focusing on fruit/veg and lean meats/fish is healthy, but I still have digestive issues, so there must be some fruit/veg or grains that I should avoid. I'm also hungry all the time. Anyone else have this issue? So it's very easy for me to over eat. Which isn't difficult as I'm quite short and dont need many calories. So I have to do at least an hour of exercise a day or I put on weight (eating less isn't really an option when you can only have 1200 calories before putting on weight)

I just use Aldi's medium egg noodles cooked in vegetable or chicken stock, As a baseline I'd add frozen peas and sweetcorn and soy sauce but if there was leftover chicken or prawns or anything else that was suitable, in the fridge, then I'd add that too. It's my go-to quick and easy lunch when I haven't got much time. No I haven't ever tasted Pho, it seems a bit like a noodle version of special fried rice?

nexus9 said:

Needless to say, no full English here..

All I can eat fried for breakfast is one egg on a sandwich, a full English would put me straight back to bed or I'd be sick. I haven't ate pork since '95 so I can't even really remember what one tastes like!

Kitsune said:

Home made pot noodles are the best! I'm going to have to make some up next week!

Yeah, Odon and Ramen noodles always serve me well! I always put leftover chicken in certain ones. Packet noodles can be jazzed up nicely!

Have you ever tasted Pho? It's a big bowl of broth and noodles, and you drop stuff in as you go along. You put the extras on the side. The more you drop in the thicker and tastier the broth gets. Best thing about it is, you can start off bland, but everyone can add what they like to theirs. It's good because everyone basically ends up with theirs the way they want it. 

well you've got to be sure that you've got enough gravy, right?

That's bad that you had such bad experience with school dinners but good that they eventually decided to be reasonable about it. Shame it took them so long though!

I can understand the bad association with the chicken balls! Port is a bad thing to develop an aversion to though, I love a bit of port at Christmas time!

I also remember my eldest daughter has an aversion to apple and blackcurrant juice for the same reason, association between drinking it and having a stomach upset during the following night. These stomach bugs have a lot to answer for!

I don't think that I've ever tried the one Ton soups in a packet. What different flavours do they do?

Home made pot noodles are the best! I'm going to have to make some up next week!

I could imagine that fizzy drinks wouldn't be good for silent reflux. Limes are good, not as good as lemons though :-)

1. I just find Pepsi way to gassy anyway. I don't like fizzy drinks that much and the doctor warned me they are not good if may have silent reflux. Limes are fine

I have heard the noodles you get on shops can be very difficult to digest. I did like those one Ton soups in s packet you can get though

Needless to say, no full English here..

I used to eat the cat's biscuits when I was a child, they taste quite nice! I also used to eat egg shells, my excuse is that it's a good source of calcium!

Be careful that you don't get food poisoning from eating raw meat!