Picky eaters something to be studied

Duke University's Medical School is conducting an interesting survey online of adults who are picky eaters. According to the blurb on their website, "Most people have foods that they dislike or will not eat. However, for some people, unusual or picky eating leads to distress or problems."

I've been told by many people that I am a picky eater. Friends and co-workers like to point out when I say I don't like something, which apparently I do a lot out at restaurants or when talking about meals.

Even though I write a food column each week in the Life section of the Weekend Pinnacle, I am certainly not adventurous in what I eat. Anyone who reads the column on a regular basis will probably notice the almost complete absence of seafood recipes. It's not something I eat, so it's not something I cook and it's not something I write about. Others who know me personally will also know that anytime a recipe calls for dark chicken meat, I substitute white meat. If it has bell peppers, I pick them out of my serving. If it calls for jalapenos, I leave them out or substitute in a milder pepper. I don't eat tofu, eggplant, zucchini or anything that has an unpalatable mushy texture. I avoid pork chops, pork shoulder, pork tenderloin but am totally fine with pork sausage and ham.

The main things that make something not appealing to me are texture and smell. The smell of curry is enough to make me nauseous and the smell of fish is equally appalling.

I don't eat anything that comes out of the water - except perhaps rice. That includes fish, shellfish, seaweed and anything else someone might come up with. The last time I ate fish I was probably 7 years old and it was probably a tuna fish sandwich at my grandparents' house. I've had friends who have tried to cure me of my dislike of fish. I tried a bite of teriyaki mahi mahi once at a restaurant. It tasted good - but it still brought about a gag reflex and made me lose my appetite. I tried a tiny taste of fish in South Africa at a friend's insistence and again the gag reflex kicked in. He said he didn't realize I actually have a physical reaction to it and asked me to never try fish again. A few years ago I ate a stuffed mushroom that a friend assured me had to crab in it. I swallowed it and ended up sick for days - which perhaps could have been a food allergy but since I never ate shellfish I didn't know about it.

So I thought I might be a candidate for the survey and decided to take it a few days ago. It's sort of the first step in gathering information so there is no long-term commitment to follow up studies or any requirement to taste test things in front of researchers. Once I started taking the survey, I realized that perhaps I am not as picky an eater as I thought. The questions include things about avoiding social situations or not going to restaurants.

I will admit that I do dislike potlucks because I don't like eating dishes when I don't know exactly what is in them. But it is also because I think a lot of people just aren't very good cooks. When I do have to go to potlucks, I generally stick to what I brought and scout out a few other safe dishes. If I am going to a new restaurant, I do check out the menu on the Web site to ensure there is something I like. There almost always is, unless it is a seafood restaurant. So I wouldn't say I stay out of situations because of picky eating habits.

It does ask if you lie to people about your eating habits and I emphatically say no. I am open about all the things I don't like to eat so people know not to offer them to me.

I did try to break out of some of my pickiness this year by making resolutions to eat at five new restaurants and to cook with five new ingredients. I did get a few ingredients I liked, but I also got one that I will never use again. When I made quinoa at the beginning of the year halfway through dinner the gag reflex kicked in and I couldn't finish my plate. Now the sight of quinoa turns my stomach so I've added that to the lengthy list of things I don't eat.

Homemade tomato sauce and ravioli offers quite a challenge

It wasn't easy but New Year's Resolutions No. 3 and 19 are now complete. The task involved dozens of tomatoes, an explosion of glass in the oven, a broken pasta maker, and eventually a tasty meal.

The resolutions were to make homemade ravioli and pasta sauce, neither of which I've done before. I have made linguine and angel hair pasta so I figured it would be easy enough to use the same basic recipe to make sheets of pasta that could be folded over into raviolis. For the filling, I wanted something simple such as ricotta, Parmesan cheese and herbs mixed together.

I figured the complicated part of the meal would be the pasta sauce since I wanted to make it as much from scratch as possible. That meant starting with a homemade tomato sauce that would be slow-roasted in the oven. Back in the spring, I planted three Roma tomato plants specifically with my eye on the prize of homemade tomato sauce. But the weather did not cooperate this summer. While I have tons of cherry tomatoes, we only had a dozen or so small, misshapened Roma tomatoes.

So on Saturday, I went to the Morgan Hill farmers market and bought a bunch of vine-ripened tomatoes. They were expensive, but looked delicious. With help from my mom, I spent Labor Day chopping garlic, herbs and slicing tomatoes. The tomato sauce recipe called for slow-roasting the vegetables with olive oil, garlic, onion and other herbs for two and half hours in a glass baking dish.

Once everything was in the oven, the house started to smell like a pizza with the mix of tomato, garlic, oregano and thyme. But at 15 minutes, there was a loud explosion in the kitchen, like nothing I've ever heard before. At first I assumed the cats had climbed on the counter and knocked something done, but as smoke started coming from the oven we knew it was something more. One of the glass pans had shattered inside the oven, leaving none of the three pans of tomatoes viable.

We had to wait for the oven to cool off before we could start cleaning it up. My mom took the lead on the clean up and went out to the store to buy some more tomatoes. These tomatoes were smaller than the ones from the market and not as ripe. My mom prepped batch No. 2 and put them in metal pans we knew would not explode. At the 15-minute mark, there were no explosions so we figured we were okay.

As the cooking time neared an end, we heated up a deep skillet with olive oil, then tossed in onion and garlic. Into the mix went ground beef, fresh mushrooms and eventually the strained tomato sauce. The recipe called for using a food mill, which I don't own. So I put the roasted tomatoes into a wire mesh strainer and squished out as much liquid as possible. Out of 24 tomatoes, we ended up with 1/2 to 3/4 c. of liquid - not so much for all that effort. To the sauce, we added a cup of white wine and two large beefsteak tomatoes, diced. In the end, I broke down and added just a little tomato paste left over from a meal earlier in the week. The sauce smelled and tasted excellent.

The next step was making the raviolis. I started mixing up chopped basil, chopped spinach, ricotta cheese and Parmesan cheese for the filling. As my mom was working near the stove, she accidentally knocked over a bottle of balsamic vinegar, that then shattered all over the kitchen. For the second time that day, we had to clean up a huge mess of glass.

After the clean up, we got to work on the pasta. The pasta dough is a simple one that uses 2 c. of flour and three eggs. Then I went to get the pasta maker, which I gave to my sister for her birthday last year. It had been used once. I tried to clamp it to the kitchen table, but the clamp didn't fit right. So my mom held the pasta maker still as I tried to crank the first ball of pasta through the rollers. But the pasta wouldn't go. We soon realized that only one of the rollers was rolling and it was just not going to work.

With the pasta sauce already made, not making the raviolis didn't seem like an option. Instead, I got out a rolling pin and rolled the pasta out as thin as I could by hand. It certainly wasn't as thin as it would have been with the pasta maker. And I am sure the pasta got a lot tougher from all the handling. We only got 18 raviolis out of the pasta, but they were pretty big so I just figured each family member would just eat a few. The pasta squares weren't perfect, but I did feel good that the raviolis did not pop open when I tossed them into the boiling water. The filling tasted great and the pasta tasted fine. It just wasn't quite the right consistency.

We each had our fill for dinner, and then cooked up some frozen raviolis to toss with the rest of the sauce for lunch.

I don't think I will be making either of these recipes again, but at least now I can say I have.

Cheese ravioli with meat sauce - a photo essay

Cheese and spinach ravioli with tomato and meat sauce

First I grew some Roma tomatoes.

Then I sliced them in half, seeded them, coated them with olive oil and seasoned them with onion, garlic, oregano, thyme, salt and pepper, to roast for 2.5 hours. All with help from my mom.

Then one of the glass pans exploded in the oven. So we waited for it to cool and then started over with the second batch of tomatoes.

The tomatoes came out of the oven roasted and caramelized just right.



I sauteed onion, garlic, ground beef and button mushrooms.



Then, I squeezed as much liquid out of the tomatoes as I could - it wasn't a lot. Then I added in white wine.

While the sauce simmered, we mixed up a filling of cheese, spinach, basil and garlic for the raviolis.

But then the pasta maker didn't work. So we had to roll the dough out by hand.

The dough came out thicker than it should have, a little tougher from all the handling and the ravioli were a little malformed.

But they stayed together in the boiling water and tasted fine. The sauce was great, but next time I want to make homemade pasta sauce I'll just use canned.