Food Rules...

I am a picky eater.

And I'm very OCD about food!!

I love food but I have some crazy arss rules about it. :)

Every person who has ever worked with me is cracking up right now and shaking his/her head in affirmation. :)

The secretaries who worked with me always laughed at me almost every day.

Let me give you a run down of the rules.

No...they don't make sense...

to anyone but me! :)

I think they are beautiful, reasonable, and just smart!! LOL!!

#1. No mushy food. 

Mushy food is gross.  I can actually get physically ill just thinking about mushy food. I'm not kidding! EW! :)

That means no milk on cereal..for 20 years, I took my cereal to work with me every morning in a baggie and I ate it dry. Oh how people used to giggle about that! :)

It also means no ice cream cones...put mine in a dish please...the cone gets mushy and soggy.

#2. Absolutely, positively NO TOUCHING of foods on the plate.

This rule is non-negotiable!!

If food is touching, I can sometimes eat the parts of the individual pieces that did not touch the others...but the communal material is done! :)

One time, one of my secretaries brought me a divided tray as a surprise gift! :) I LOVED that tray!!  I cannot stand when the juices from one thing runs into something else.

I don't even like gravy on potatoes, or gravy over biscuits and gravy and I have to eat them very fast if I do eat them because of rule #1. Things get mushy as a result! :)  I prefer to keep things separated and dip.  Nothing worse than a mushy biscuit covered in gravy. :) 

The first thing I do when I'm at a restaurant is separate my food with adequate spacing! :) At home, I often use multiple plates!  If a breadstick lands in the sauce, it's done.  Violation of two rules...touching and now...mushy.

Brian used to love to get the Bubba's Benny at First Watch Restaurant for breakfast. It's basically some kind of bread (biscuit/pancake?) topped with hashbrowns, eggs, and gravy.  It made me physically ill to look at it.  SOO many rules broken there!! :)

Hey..I can now use the same fork, knife and spoon for different foods..that's progress, right?!! ;)

#3 NO BONES.

That one is simple...I do not eat meat that has a bone on, near or around it.  I just don't want to see the skeletal remains.  I have gotten better with age and can now have something served that way, but I immediately cut the bone off and it must be taken away from the table. 

I cannot stand to watch anyone clean the meat off a bone while they eat.  One of Brian's favorite things to do is to suck the very last piece of flesh off a bone while I sit there trying to block out the visuals and sounds just to gross me out.

It's not funny Brian!! :)

When I was a Principal, I had lunch duty for 2 hours a day.  The ONLY thing that drove me from the lunchroom was kindergarten kids and chicken legs.  I simply could not take it. 

When I was pregnant, the custodian used to tell me to just stay upstairs and not come down on chicken leg day!! The cafeteria manager always called up and made the secretary warn me when it was chicken leg day, and then he laughed his head off!!  I had to suck it up and I usually made it down for all grade levels, except the sweet little kindergarten kids who sucked those bones until nothing was left!! It was like the movie "Gremlins"!  LOL!! I almost got sick every time!

Cringing right now as I type that!!

EWWWWWWW!!

#4 NO Leftovers!

Yes....I went to bed hungry a lot as a child as a result of this one.

Leftovers violate so many rules but the biggest one is that they turn mushy when they are reheated.

There are a few exceptions and I can do a couple of things, but 99.9% of the time...no way! :)

#5 No lunchmeat.

Cold meat??

No explanation needed. Shuddering!

#6  If food that was once warm is now cold, forget it

Kinda goes with rule #5...but applies to food that has been heated and then cooled off because I didn't get to it fast enough to eat it while it was hot and not mushy.

SOME foods can be reheated and be okay, but very few. If I don't get to it right away and it can't be reheated, I don't eat.

#7 Party Food Rule

This one is important...any food that is something that has been cooked and has been out for 2 hours at one of my parties is trash. People FLIP out when they see me dumping it after that amount of time, but....

Ew.

Why challenge the Gods of Salmonella!!

And I don't keep any other food (even dry stuff that would be "good") after the night. It's been out and among many hands...can't do it....like President Bush said, "wouldn't be prudent"! ;)

#8 Community Food

Can't eat community food very often.

Buffets and cafeteria lines...no WAY!! The thought of somebody coming through and sneezing below the sneeze guard or touching the lettuce to get the right piece or one million other things...  Oh boy...that'll put me right over the edge!!  YIKES!!!

Crazily enough, I can do brunches but I head straight over to the "made to order" part of the "buffet"! :)

This rule is one of the reasons that staying at the Ronald McDonald House is tough for me to do in Philly...that and I don't ever have enough time to do the laundry and clean and remake the beds before we leave for our flight without getting up at 3:00 am (seriously) which sort of defeats the purpose of sleeping at the RMH! :) And...the fact we can never get it because it's crazy booked!!  It's nearly impossible in Philly.

I just don't want to share a box of cereal with ten other families who may have been digging through it to get the toy! LOL!!  I'm a germaphobe...someday I'll blog about that...it's a whole nuther story!! :)

#9...NO Rare meat.

blood on my plate is a meal-ender as well!!

That one really needs no more explanation!!

And...

That pretty much covers it!!

FYI...Brian KNEW this stuff before we got engaged!! 

I'm pretty crazy about my food rules and I pass on a lot of food...usually I pass and go straight for ice cream or donuts! They are pretty safe. :)

And THAT is why I have gained 15 pounds!! LOL!!

Hope these rules made you giggle.  I know they are nuts but I bet some of you are saying, "YESSS!! I agree with some of those"!

I'm not alone in the food rules world...maybe I'm the only one with this many...

but I'm not alone!! :) LOL!!

Have a GREAT day!!