Fancy Store-Bought Dirt

This list is eerily close to a set of integer values for a 1-8 scale of how much I like a food, in order, with 1 being hatred and 8 being love. Just switch soft cheeses and hummus (yum!), and cream cheese and ranch dressing.

Weird.

--Nate

I also hate egg salad and ranch dressing, as well as cole slaw. Which is weird, because I like both cabbage and mayonnaise. Just not together.

My number one most-hated food item -- ketchup.

I happen to think prime rib is overrated, but not enough to put it on one of these lists.

Incidentally, does anyone know the genesis of the whole ketchup/catsup dichotomy? And does anyone else know someone who refers to said condiment as "cats-up" instead of "catch-up"? Someone from back in the day did so.

How are you on coleslaw not run on a mayonnaise/creamy base? Shredded cabbage, shredded carrot, vinegar, sugar, pepper, dill, salt, and maybe a little celery seed.

No problem with anything listed, though egg salad I won't trust anywhere, and I'm not real big on hard boiled egg yolks.

The nasty stuff for me is mushrooms, and canned fruit. The portabello mushroom is a monument to the thesis that people will believe anything is gourmet. The invention of fruit cocktail is the endpoint of cubism as a valid art style.

I'm curious about the comment about mayonnaise killing people. Is it just the fat and the high fructose corn syrup and the fact that it tastes kinda vile? Because the stuff you get in a jar is cooked to high heaven, and I think it's pretty tough to get food poisoning from it unless you're just ignorant of basic food safety.

If you've never had homemade mayonnaise, I would encourage you in the strongest possible terms to try it. It tastes absolutely nothing like the stuff you get out of a jar, especially because you can, merely by changing the types and ratios of the oils you use to make it, customize it to what you're planning to serve it with. And, if you make it with pasteurized eggs, it's quite safe so long as you keep it for less than a week. (In practice, I make it with organic free-range eggs a fair bit of the time because salmonella isn't going to end up in a chicken's genitourinary tract in any situation that's not modern factory farming --- but if I'm serving guests I generally stick to pasteurized because people are wonky about eating raw eggs).

Here's the recipe we use (from Scott Peacock & Edna Lewis's *The Gift of Southern Cooking*, one of the better cookbooks to come out in the last five years):

1 tbsp. cider vinegar
1 tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 tsp. sea salt (they say not to use kosher because the shape of the flakes will break the emulsion)
1 tsp. dry mustard
2 egg yolks
1.5 c vegetable oil or light olive oil, or a combination (I usually use a mixture with a 2:1 vegetable:olive ratio unless I'm going for more of an aioli)
1 tbsp. hot water.

Put the vinegar, lemon juice, salt, and mustard into a bowl, and whisk or stir until the salt and mustard are dissolved. Add the egg yolks and beat until smooth. Add the oil drop by drop at first, and then in a slow, steady stream, whisking or stirring constantly until all of the oil has been incorporated and you have a very thick emulsion. Stir in the hot water until smooth.

Refrigerated, homemade mayonnaise will keep for up to one week.

Oh, and my culinary enemies list:

1.) peanut butter
2.) celery

I can tolerate celery seed in a few things, and will choke down celery in, say, an otherwise well-cooked and seasoned lentil soup.

As for peanut butter, I have two rules for my husband:

1.) He's not allowed to get a robotic exoskeleton.
1a.) Nor have his brain implanted into a robotic body.
1b.) Nor encourage our child to do 1 or 1a.

2.) If he eats peanut butter or anything containing same, he has to brush his teeth before he kisses me.

Beyond that, he can do whatever he wants.