As long as you’re eating lots of processed foods, you’ll be used to unnatural flavors, high sodium and overwhelming sweetness and fatty flavors they contain. If you want to develop a taste for fresh whole foods, you have to eat them.
I’ve been eating primarily fresh unprocessed foods for over a year now, and it’s amazing how much my opinions and tastes have changed. I’m still struggling to make the same change with the other people in my house, though (particularly my kids – both of whom have food aversions). So to help us all, I decided to initiate “Try a New Food Tuesdays” in our home.
I usually do our grocery shopping on Monday nights. So each Monday, I’m going to buy a new and/or unusual whole food, and on Tuesday, we’ll all try it. Or, at least, we’ll all look at it, smell it, and most of us will taste it (the four-year old is not so easy to convince).
I thought it might be good to share what we’re doing here on my blog, so each Tuesday, expect a post about the prior Tuesday’s new food. I encourage you to join us and start a new food night in your house! After a whole year, you’ll have tried 52 new foods, and you’re bound to like at least a few of them!
Last week, we decided to start off with fruit, since it’s more palatable to the kids, and thought we’d take advantage of Uniq fruit (also known as Ugly fruit) being in season. Uniq fruit was created accidentally, and is a cross between an orange, a tangerine, and a grapefruit.
I read up (on the internet) and found that a ripe Uniq fruit cannot be determined by color. You want to select fruits that are heavy relative to their size, and where the skin “gives” a little when you apply pressure.
You can either section them and eat like a tangerine or cut in half and eat like a grapefruit. We decided to eat ours like a grapefruit. We cut it in half between the two ends, as you would with a grapefruit. Immediately, the sweet smell of citrus hit our nostrils. My daughter said, “it smells like an orange! Yum!”
We took a spoon and dug out the sections and slurped them up. Our Uniq fruit was VERY juicy. Our opinions:
Me: Very juicy. Tangy, like a grapefruit, but sweeter. I would prefer Uniq fruit to grapefruit.
7-year-old: Mmm…yummy. It was excellent, but a little too sweet.
4-year-old (smelled it only): Eww!
Daddy: Too sour!
The point of Try a New Food Tuesday isn’t for everyone to like everything we try. We all have our own tastes, likes, and dislikes. The point is to break out of our comfort zones and give some different foods a chance. So while some of us would eat Uniq fruit again, and some of us won’t, the first Try a New Food Tuesday was a huge success.
I’d love to hear if any of you are going to start this in your homes, and what you’ve tried. If you are on Twitter, tweet about Try a New Food Tuesday with the hashtag #TNFT.
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Hi liz, followed you over here from twitter! GREAT site! grabbed your feed-please check out my blog and my two for tuesdays with two REAL FOOD recipes http://amoderatelife.blogspot.com/2010/04/one-thing-leads-to-anothermake-cookies.html
Take care and glad I finally made it over here!
Alex