The reason I try not to talk about when the next death witch things comes out is shit like this- things got delayed a bit, my brain went spongey over the weekend and I struggled to get anything done, and then I got sick yesterday. I'm working on it, but the bit I thought I had done wasn't as done as I thought, and I've been hacking at it all day. hopefully by the end of the week, if I can get all the stupid out of the draft. I at least have a draft to work from, which is a huge amount of progress.
I wanna tell y'all about getting sick, because I'm so mad. but after here I'm going to discuss some digestive issues in frank tones that some might find unpalatable, so proceed with caution. I know some people can't handle poop talk.
so I made a sort of french onion soup yesterday, which was a triumph of over 20 years of effort trying to get over a childhood aversion to onions.
mom used to tell me, you see, that when I was very young I ate onions like apples. she told me this every time I refused to eat onions, or when I tried to refuse to consume foods with onions in them (I was not allowed to do this, the best I could do was eat around the onions and she'd be upset with me about it).
I grew up feeling guilty about this, but my aversion to them was quite genuine, and from what I can tell, the time period when I would have 'eaten them like apples' is also when I was non-verbal and still in diapers- on both fronts, I was what you might call a late bloomer. I was made to feel guilty and childish for avoiding onions my whole life, so I've been working for most of the last twenty years- and that's not a joke, really more or less since 2006- on overcoming my aversion to them.
I used to gag if I bit into something and unexpectedly encountered an onion. I didn't mind the flavor of them so much, I like garlic, so it seemed to be just the texture caused the aversion. I've put a lot of work into shifting my palate and changing my mind. a few years ago I had a sandwich that had a bit of raw onion on it and I didn't mind it. I didn't repeat the experiment, it was by accident, as I'm still not fond of the texture, but I could at least encounter accidental onions without barfing.
well I thawed some porkchops yesterday, and when they were thawed they were oddly sticky and smelled sour and so, naturally, I threw them away.
disappointing, but I thought- you know what? I watched that anti-chef video earlier about the french onion soup. I have most of the basic ingredients to hack together an onion soup. I can ease back on the onions, so it'll more be a beef soup with onions. I even have some butternut squash soup I made that's frozen.
(I, unfortunately, do not much care for the flavor of butternut squash on its own. I can eat it, but I don't enjoy it, it's kind of unpleasantly vegetal to me. I get why some people would like it, but it's just not for me. It's not a strong flavor, however, and I thought it would add some pleasant body to a soup that I thought was likely to turn out thinner than I usually preferred.)
and it all worked out spectacularly. the soup was amazing. genuinely one of those life changing kinds of things to eat. the butternut squash soup added a velvety body that didn't bring too much of the flavor I found unpleasant, serving as a sort of an almost herbacious background note. It was perfect.
I was so proud of myself, too, I'd spent a long time working very hard to get to the point where I could eat onions on purpose, even caramelized onions. See, I've made french onion soup before, and everybody who tried it said it was the best french onion soup they'd had, I did a wonderful job, and I found it absolutely unpalatable then. So I know I can make a decent soup of this. I actually wished I'd added another onion, I felt like it could have used more onion flavor.
several hours after eating the soup, I was on the toilet googling whether or not onions made some people get the turbo shits. I was getting gas, too, that was... distinctly oniony. Like, I'm aware that the culprit can be sometimes hard to discern in cases of gut disarray, but there is a pretty obvious trail in this particular case.
so I now believe that the reason my child self stopped eating onions was it made my tummy hurt and then I'd shit my brains out, which is a perfectly reasonable reason to stop eating fucking onions.
I still have soup left, too.
about 2 in the morning, during my second shift on the toilet as I experienced some of the worst gastrointestinal distress I've had since I got food poisoning two winters ago, I was sat there wishing my mom was alive. not just for the usual reasons, but so I could wake her ass up at 2 am and bitch her out about the fact that she gave me no end of shit my whole life for not eating something that, it turns out, makes my intestines try to leave my body at high fuckin velocity.
(Which, to be clear, she 100% should have known, because again, I was non-verbal and in diapers when this change would have taken place.)
anyway I'm feeling okay now, but I've spent most of today feeling bad and I'm going to have to throw out all that beautiful soup
(while I could probably save it, every time I see the containers in the fridge it makes me queasy. it's unfortunate, but on the off chance that it made me sick because something was bad in it, I can't give it to someone else, and I just can't make myself even strain it and reuse it. I did some research and in theory that should be okay, but I got SO sick that I just can't stomach it. I'm extremely bummed about this.)
