[Lauren201]

I am having a serious problem. I can't stand the thought of eating another piece of chicken. I ate so much chicken at the beginning of my journey that now I don't want to eat any more. The other problem is that I don't like fish. So I'm at a loss for what to do. Recently my husband and I have been eating lean beef and sirloin steaks. I am still losing but I am wondering how long it will be until I'm tired of that too. My MIL says I need to start a "I hate food" blog. LOL She's right though, I am a seriously picky eater.

What do you do when you get tired of a particular food? What else is there to eat? Keeping in mind that my cooking skills are very basic.

[fillupthesky]

what about pork? or tofu?
maybe sticking to veggies and such and other forms of protein like eggs/egg whites and beans?
there are a million ways to make eggs and incorporate them into meals.
do you like any kind of seafood? i just ask because a lot of people who don't like fish love shrimp/crab and such. sorry for the 20 questions!

i try to eat one meat per day, so i don't get sick of it. i usually rotate between chicken, beef, ham, burgers (turkey or lean ground beef) and i do eat fish, so that mixes it up.

[peanutt]

I don't eat any seafood or fish either. In addition to meat, I eat a lot of eggs, beans, nuts and other non-meat sources of protein. Look beyond the meat!

[Lauren201]

I guess I forgot to mention I am sort of allergic to eggs.. I get very sick to my stomach and end up with really bad diarrhea (TMI sorry). The only seafood I like is fried shrimp. LOL Also I don't like ham.

Recently I added almonds into my mix. I also just started eating veggies when I started my journey, before I wouldn't touch them. I've really grown in the food department, even though it doesn't seem like it. I'm not really into beans, either. I'm working on trying new things, it's a slow process.

[kateleestar]

Turkey? Pork? Lamb? I love them all. I love chicken, too, but.. nothing beats "thanksgiving" on a tuesday night with a turkey breast, some green beans, homemade (low cal) mushroom gravy and some cauli-mashed-potatoes!

I like the site food.com, it used to be recipezaar, but now its not... Its really great, and there are oodles of things to search for!

Google around, you'll get some ideas! GL!

[kaplods]

Originally Posted by Lauren201

What do you do when you get tired of a particular food?

That doesn't ever happen. It used to, when I thought I could only eat "diet food" on a diet (lettuce, grapefruit, plain veggies, chicken (white meat only), and tuna in water).

It doesn't happen anymore, because I've become very adventurous with food, and I'm always trying something new. And not only food, but herbs and seasonings too. If I see something new, I buy it and try it.

Originally Posted by Lauren201

I don't like fish... I am a seriously picky eater.... What else is there to eat? Keeping in mind that my cooking skills are very basic.

I hesitate to make suggestions to someone who tells me they're picky eater, and they don't cook much, because invariably whatever I suggest they either say "Yuck," or "too complicated."



To some degree you can be stuck. Depending upon how picky you are, if you're not willing to expand your food choices, being bored can be an unavoidable side effect of being picky.

There are a bazillion choices, but some are going to be things you've never tried before. Personally, I'd rather have a bad food experience than a boring one, so I've never been afraid to try almost anything (if it's horrible, I at least have a funny story to tell - like when I tried to cook squid and another time snails at home. I'd eaten both in restaurants - but when I tried to cook them at home they both ended up eraser-rubber tough. Completely inedible).

I've never been picky, but I never liked fish (until I tasted fish that was cooked well). My husband makes awesome fish, but if I'd been picky, I wouldn't have tried it (as it was, I told him "I'm probably not going to like it."


If you're picky and not wanting to try new foods or learn to cook them, then you might end up bored. You could make a list of everything you are willing to eat and then cycle them on a schedule, or you could try to expand your horizons a bit.

You could start by experimenting with foods that are most like ones you already like. If you like apples, you could try some varieties you've never tried before. You can branch out to more exotic fruits too (if you like fresh fruit, fruit is probably the lowest risk experiment).

You could experiment with seasonings. Plain chicken is pretty boring (to me), but I could eat chicken every day if I had to, because I know about 1000 different ways to season chicken (most of them I learned by experimenting or looking through cookbooks).

Crockpot cookbooks are a nice place for the non-cook to start cooking, because they're mostly cook and ignore (as in the Fix it and Forget it cookbooks).

Another thing I learned is that even the worst salad dressing often makes a good marinade. So if I try a salad dressing and don't like it, I will use it as a marinade for beef, chicken, turkey, pork, lamb or shrimp (and fish).


I also brown dried tvp (soy granules) with ground beef and seasonings (garlic, onion, green pepper, celery... stuff like that) and broth (to reconstitute the tvp). If it sounds interesting, you can find my recipe in the shoestring meals thread. I then freeze it in ziploc bags - mooshing the bag around every 20 minutes or so as it freezes, so it freezes into scoopable crumbles (you can do this with plain ground beef and other ground meats). To make any recipe that calls for browned ground beef, I scoop out what I need (for spaghetti sauce, chili, sloppy joes, taco filling....)


I think browsing recipes (from the library, from magazines, foodie blogs, online searches, whatever.)

If your tastes and cooking skills are very basic, the "Taste of Home" and "Cooking Light" magazines are great (I don't subscribe or buy at the newstand, because I can get as many as I want from thrift stores, usually for a quarter or less).

[Nola Celeste]

Chicken isn't mandatory.

It sounds like you're doing just what I do when I get bored--eat something else for a while. Lean beef's a good choice. There are plenty of others, though; how do you feel about turkey, lamb, veal, venison, buffalo, rabbit, ostrich? Okay, some of those might be hard to find and others might not be to your taste (I don't know that I could eat an ostrich, now that I think of it), but there are lots of tasty critters around.

Or you could go in a very different direction and plan meals that aren't critter-centered. I'm not a vegetarian, but sometimes I'll wind up going two or three days without eating meat just because none of the stuff I want to eat happens to have meat in it. Beans, lentils, and chickpeas contain plenty of protein, but have a lot of variety to offer. Soy products do too, but those aren't to everyone's liking (I can't stand most soy stuff, but I'd be remiss if I didn't suggest the possibility).

Different cooking methods also help. Chicken stewed with garlic tastes different enough from chicken roasted with herbs that I don't get nearly as blah about it if I vary it a bit.

[Silverdrmr]

It's funny. This happened to me a few years ago after a diet that was pretty rote- scrambled eggs whites and broccoli for breakfast, broiled salmon for lunch and salad for dinner.

After I finished my diet (about 4 months), I couldn't stand the sight of eggs, broccoli, or salmon.

I recovered from the broccoli and salad overload pretty quickly.
It took me MUCH longer to recover from eggs and salmon (as of only a few months ago, I could smell them without getting sick). I still can't eat egg whites alone, I have to add at least 1 or 2 egg yolks. The thought of eggs with broccoli still makes me sort of queasy.

Someone offered me broiled salmon the other day, and I was surprised that I was actually interested.

So, what's my point?
Despite the fact that the thought of scrambled egg whites and broiled salmon made me sick for a really long time (at least 3 years), these proteins in other forms were fine. For example, I could eat eggs over easy or hard-boiled without a problem. I love sashimi (raw fish, including salmon) and it has never inspired a queasy feeling.

Have you been eating a particular cut of chicken maybe in the same way? For example, roasted or baked chicken breast with the same type of seasoning? Maybe you should try chicken thighs, wings, legs. To me, chicken breasts and the rest of the chicken taste completely different and therefore provide different flavor profiles. Maybe try varying it up with mexican/indian/chinese inspired recipes?


I hope this helps

[AnnieDrews]

Get a turkey breast, sprinkle with poultry seasoning and roast it in an oven bag...YUM!! You can slice up leftovers for sandwiches, etc.

Also, I have been sneaking ground turkey and turkey sausage into my family's food for quite a while now. It's awesome!!

[fillupthesky]

you have grown in the food dept
if you do like shrimp, try making it in a way that looks good to you other than fried- flavors that are familiar, just with a different protien. try it. if you don't like it, you can pawn it off on someone
i also agree with trying different seasonings and spice blends.
another way to "mask" chicken is to buy ground chicken and make it into little meatballs and put it into italian wedding soup, or into a tomato sauce. cooking is scary, but there are a lot of websites, blogs, magazines that you can peruse through to find simple things that you'll enjoy making

[katy trail]

try experimenting with different seasonings too. i love indian spices. everything under the sun tastes better in 'curry'. veggies included. spinach, beans, whatever. it just tastes like curry. which tastes like heaven. too bad my fam. is tired of it. and my son hates it even more than tomato sauce, but we're all different.

so experiment. find your 'heaven' seasonings.

[AnnieDrews]

Roast pork is also good. The loin has 122 calories and 3 grams fat per 3 ounce serving.

[Initiative]

You could always try a vegetarian diet with no egg. You can even get a lot of vegan foods that are good. I switch my diet back and forth between vegetarian and chicken/turkey and fish. I can get bored of foods really easy too so vegetarian is actually a pretty good style of change. Stuffed mushrooms are delicious! Turkey might also be a good substitute for chicken too. I buy turkey burgers, turkey hotdogs, turkey bacon. lol I don't really eat beef or pork except on rare occasions.