This came up in another thread and I wanted to throw it out there. Is your diet suddenly "weird", even to you?

My best friends comes over to teach piano to my kids and then stays for dinner. I feel so weird about what I serve on those nights because nothing my family eats now fits into what I consider "normal" or anything I would consider serving guests.

Grilled chicken, fish, steamed broccoli, weird bean concoctions, any healthy concoction. I come up with some pretty crazy things because I enjoy cooking and I enjoy spices.

I can't explain it very well, but I suddenly feel like my cuisine is "weird".

If I mapped out typical guest-approved meals it would be chicken casserole, pot roast, mashed potatoes, peas with butter, rolls, chicken pot pie, etc. These are things I think appeal to more people. But I don't eat any of that anymore.

I can relate. We come from country cooking backgrounds and we eat NONE of it. We eat veggie burgers, brown rice, broccoli, baked chicken, baked fish...nothing fried. We oil a pan with cooking oil spray, most olive oil. Even the 2yr old. eats what we eat. Would I feed it to guest??? Absolutely. I tell them this is what we are having, want some? They can always decline.

that's what sounds weird to me!!

To me, a typical dinner is a salad, a grilled or broiled protein (mostly chicken but sometimes steak, lamb or fish), a baked potato with just a little bit of butter (no sour cream or other toppings) and a veggie, usually something sauteed in a little bit of olive oil. No bread or rolls served with a meal except maybe garlic bread as a special treat with a pasta meal. This is how I grew up and consider the norm, although I structure my meals differently now and generally have a relatively light supper so it's usually some small portions of protein and starch plus a cooked veggie.

Oh well, you are offering free dinner, you pick what is made.

If they didn't like it they would make excuses to leave anyways

That food is just not weird to me! It's normal!

I'm sure no one has complained about what you fix for dinner, but if they do, don't invite them back.

Chicken casserole... I could pass on that anytime...

Jay

I'm with Peanutsmom. Heavy foods sound weird to me now.

I actually think what you eat is normal! When we go to friends place for dinner, it's always on the healthy side. A "normal" dinner at one of our closest friends? Broiled chicken, steamed carrots, potatoes sliced done on BBQ and strawberries with cool whip for dessert! No bread, and wine or water to drink. I wouldn't feel bad, because you are making dinner! They can pick and choose if something isn't appealing.

-Aimee

LOL! I guess it's all in your perspective.

Here's a great example:
Last summer, pre-life change, my family spent an entire week with my husband's aunt. To us, they ate WEIRD. Of the nine things she served one dinner, we recognized one thing: ham. My children have been taught that they must try everything, but getting them to try 8 items they were not used to was asking an awful lot and it created a problem. She was very healthy, and I admired that, but lunch for my children was natural peanut butter and no sugar jelly on hard whole wheat bread. That's fine and great, but my children weren't used to it and didn't like it.

Basically, we were starving within four days and one night my husband actually made up an excuse, ran to the drug store just so he could get a shopping bag, then went to McDonald's and brought us all dinner smuggled in the drug store bag!!

I don't want to be THAT!

Also, my mom is Pennsylvania Dutch and her cooking was bland. We ate meat and potatoes and spices were salt and pepper, light on the pepper please. I had never touched an onion before I got married and thought garlic came in a powder.

When guest comes that often (weekly) I'm not going to change the way I cook to try to please the guest. They can just joint the rest of the family.

And for the record, I think what you serve sounds yummy.

The "chicken casserole, pot roast, mashed potatoes, peas with butter, rolls, chicken pot pie" is not something I ever make either.

A.

My parents were hippies, so I grew up always eating "weird." I was the one kid at public school in the 70s-80s who had whole-wheat bread in her lunch, and dried fruit instead of Twinkies. So it's been my norm for a long time.

I do sometimes feel like I don't want my co-workers to see what I'm having for lunch, though. It's always the same thing--a leftover meat portion from the night before, with leftover veggies if there were any, plus 3 oz spinach, 3 oz baby carrots, 3 oz grape tomatoes, and half a grapefruit. But I imagine them staring at it and wondering where the "food" part is, hah!

So I still consider myself as eating "weird" and definitely different from other people, but for the most part it doesn't bother me in the least. They can think what they like about it, and eat whatever they want to eat.

I don't think I'm eating "weird" until my mother comes to visit, and I cook for us both.

Then I see how far I've departed from my upbringing & the food ways of my family.

She wants pizza, Chinese food, spaghetti & meatballs, pot roast, ice cream & cheesecake every night. Enormous Trader Joe's Belgian chocolate bars to pick at during the day, from 11 AM to bedtime, or packages of Jelly Bellys. Her typical breakfast is basically dessert: She wants doughnuts & pastries. Maybe a big white puffy bagel with garlic & cream cheese (such as they are very good at down here in the NY area). Big glass of OJ. Coffee with cream. Maybe a banana or a bit of cantaloupe also, which she thinks of as eating healthily.

And instead I'm offering her some kind of protein (lean pork, chicken, marinated flank steak) with big heaping sides of steamed asparagus; roasted eggplant, peppers, zucchini & onions; broccoli rabe cooked in a bit of chicken broth; sauteed spinach; baked sweet potato; cups of home-made minestrone soup. (Always at least two vegetables at every meal.)

She's very brave about it, for the most part, and agrees the food is tasty, but some nights I end up cooking two different meals: One for her & one for me.

I just got a flyer for the independent natural food store in the nearby village. (Which I visit rarely, because of its high prices & because we have Trader Joe's nearby.) I went into it yesterday, though, because it had a "buy one, get one" deal going & that helped moderate the prices. The minute I got in the door, I smelled patchouli. What an evocative smell! Years ago, that place & that atmosphere would have seemed so, well, OTHER, to me. And now it's the food store that I feel most in sync with, other than its prices. (Not as much with the homeopathic remedy section.)

I have definitely crossed over into the weird zone.

Seems so much like a class thing to me, sometimes. I went from an aspiring working/lower middle class family -- I was the first one in four generations to go to college! -- straight to the counterculture, without stopping along the way at middle class or upper middle class. My friends who grew up eating this way are 95% the children of college-educated parents & would be described as solidly middle class, at the very least.

Saef, you just reminded me of my mom's new...ahem..."healthy" snack.

Diced apples, 1/2 container of cool whip, walnuts, sour cream, Heath Bar Toffee bits.

A healthy salad we were served as kids: iceburg lettuce with sliced bananas. Dressing: 1/2 mayo 1/2 sugar

Carrot raisin salad: Shredded carrots and raisins with the above dressing (1/2 mayo 1/2 sugar)

Hmmm...interesting observation. My family is well-educated if not on paper, and are well spoken and intelligent people, but I was the first generation to graduate college and indeed the first of the grandchildren. My family has a long history of farming, though my grandfather pulled out of that life.

I blame the internet more than my background/education. I love to google about food!! My brother, whom you'd just have to know to adore as much as I do, has an IQ of 147 but failed out of high school at 16. He has taken an all natural route with food and loves to eat WEEDS from his backyard!! He's his own breed and I love him. But he googles things that interest him, just like I do. I guess we just have an adventurous nature whereas my parents do not.

I don't think that's weird food at all. It's the kind of food I eat, and what I serve to my guests. I had my brother in law and his wife over for dinner on the weekend. I made BBQ'd pork tenderloin shish-kabobs, with tons of veiggies (red, yellow & orange peppers, red onion, mushrooms and grape tomatoes) with wild rice and a spinach salad. They loved it. There wasn't a morsel left over. For desert I made roasted strawberries with vanilla yogurt (I made some candied pecans to sprinkle over as well) - again super healthy and they went crazy for it. Even their picky 4 yr old loved it.

I generally don't serve fish when people come over, because I know most people don't like it. However, grilled lean meats with veggies and some sort of healthy starch every seems to enjoy. I've been asked for my recipes a dozen times! So I would serve what you normally eat. Because I don't think its' weird at all!