Easter Tradition - No Ham Please!

There are many traditional things to take part in when it comes to Easter – painting eggs, going to church, spending time with family … heck, most normal families even have ham for dinner … but not my family … well, at least not since I’ve been around. You see, I have what some people call an aversion to the portly product. Truthfully, I think my “aversion” to ham can be more closely described as a downright obsession in its disgustingness (is that even a word)?

How did this all begin, and how far has it gone? I’m glad you asked (and if you didn’t ask, go play in traffic). As a young child, I remember going over to my Uncle Richard’s house, and he had a carved ham on the kitchen table, beckoning me to sample. I obliged, eating somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-6 slices of the curiously pink meat. Later on that night whilst lying in bed, my stomach decided that it did not want to digest all of that ham, and proceeded to prompt me to puke … all over my bed. Needless to say, Inga wasn’t too pleased with her son.

Unfortunately, this type of thing happened on two other occasions when ham was on the menu, which finally caused me to nix any ingestion whatsoever of cooked ham. To put this into perspective, I would much more readily eat Liverwurst and onions, topped with chocolate sauce and warm milk – while watching a marathon of Yes Dear, than I would ham.

Now, here are the boundaries, and I’m not sure why these boundaries are where they are, but they just are. First, I like just about any other pork product (sans pigs feet, because that is just gross). These products include hot dogs, bacon, and pork. However, Canadian bacon would make me gag more than Paris Hilton on a good night. I’m not a big fan of Italian hoagies, but I will eat them if (A) the rolls are really good, (B) if there is enough mayonnaise and lettuce to muffle the taste of the lunchmeat ham, and (C) if beer is involved. But, I’d really rather have a turkey hoagie, roast beef hoagie, or even a chicken salad or tuna hoagie for that matter (in case you are planning to have me over for some sort of hoagie party …. Not that kind of a hoagie party, you perverts).

But it is a little more far reaching than that. I love turkey, BUT if the lunchmeat turkey is considerably pinkish (yes, some lunchmeat turkey looks like this), there is a good chance that I won’t eat this. I’m not sure if my mind is playing tricks on me or not, but I swear the taste of that stuff resembles ham.

I know, my mind doesn’t always work correctly. But as some of you know, I am deftly afraid of puking. In the past, burgers and pizza have been off my list of foods to eat, because I puked after eating them … However, they worked their way back onto the lineup after a while (it took pizza about 3-4 years and burgers about 1 year).

There are other foods I’m not necessarily fond of. I don’t really like baked potatoes or any cooked potato product (dumplings, home fries, etc.), but I do love French fries (not crazy about steak fries, though) and potato chips. I don’t really like peas and beans, either – I think it is a texture thing (so if you make chili for me, go easy on the beans). I’m not crazy about pasta with lots of cheese (so I have difficulty at Italian restaurants). Other than that, I’m pretty good (I know, I have a lot of “normal” foods that I don’t like – it is the product of growing up in a household where food experimentation wasn’t really practiced).

On Tuesday/Wednesday, I’ll have part 2 of the ham story – the part about how I was able to manipulate our entire family. BTW, pass along some foods you don’t like.