Flavors

September Writing Challenge - Prompt # 22:

Flavors 

As I write this, it’s late at night on a Thursday. I just ate a few handfuls of one of my favorite snacks - Dot’s honey mustard pretzels. When I was a teenager, I loved Gardetto’s mustard pretzels, but it’s been years since I’ve had them, and while the internet seems to have some to offer, they are no longer a stocked item in any stores I shop at. Dot’s aren’t quite the same flavor, but they are readily accessible and likewise delicious. The problem is, having eaten them late at night, they’re probably going to give me heartburn and horrible overnight breath. I made my choice, and I must endure the consequences.

As I contemplate my future issues, it seems like a great time to write about flavors. 

Here are some flavors I don’t really like:

Lipton onion soup mix - I hesitate to use recipes that call for onion soup mix. It comes back via nasty burps and bad breath that could kill a yak from 200 yards away. I feel sick after I eat it. Because of this, I usually drastically decrease the amount of soup mix or avoid it altogether. I don’t like flavors that resurface later. 

With that, I don’t like heavily smoked meat. I don’t handle meaty fire burps three hours after I eat. 

Nutmeg is a weird one for me. I try to avoid it or decrease it in recipes. And I’m careful with cinnamon. I would never entirely write off cinnamon (75% of the time it’s fine), but sometimes I don’t like it. It depends on what it’s in. 

Artificial banana and cherry are yucky to me. And along those lines, I really don’t like fruit punch. Banana Laffy Taffy, cherry Slurpee, and Hawaiian Punch are all easy for me to turn down. In fact, I don’t really like Slurpees much. Sometimes I’ll have a pina colada or a banana (which makes no sense since I just said I don’t like artificial banana flavoring, but I guess I’m just thinking of Laffy Taffy specifically). 

I’m sparse with Italian seasoning. Italian sausage is kind of iffy for me. 

Horehound is gross. I probably wouldn’t even know what horehound is except that my mother-in-law is really into old-fashioned candy, so she has made me try stuff like horehound, and ain’t nobody need horehound in their lives when we have much better tasting stuff these days. 

I’m not a fan of Pizza and Mexican flavors in things that aren’t pizza or Mexican. For example, I don’t need to eat pizza flavored chips or pasta with taco seasoning in it.

I don’t think I like almond extract. I sub for vanilla.

Cola flavored things aren’t good. Just keep the Cola in the Cola. I don’t want it in a gummi or a popsicle. 

Black licorice is not my thing.

Something about butterscotch doesn’t sit well with me. Occasionally I enjoy a scotcheroo, but I have to be cautious with butterscotch because it can be icky to me.

Sweet pickles are an abomination. I always do a smell check with pickles because I’ve been betrayed in the past and thought I was eating dill when it was really sweet. 

Sometimes it’s easier to make a list of things you don’t like rather than things you do (hopefully this is because there are more things worth liking than not liking), so to add balance, here are some flavors I like:

Salted butter, basil, sour cream, chocolate, most fruits, tigers blood, coconut, natural lemon, cashew, pineapple on pizza, Best Foods mayo, salt, sweet potato, fry sauce, salt and vinegar chips, ham, bread, avocado, vinegar and oil, dried mangoes, cheese, candied pecans, rocky road (with marshmallow pieces - not cream), peanut butter, cookie butter, curry, cream cheese frosting, pumpkin, and pistachio. 

Now I’m not saying I want all of these as an ice cream or saltwater taffy flavor (nor am I going to eat Best Foods by the spoonful), but I like the taste of these things. 

(As supplemental material to this post, here is a list of 100 things I like to eat).