Okay, perhaps this is not a typical first food memory,
but it's one of my favorites. I've been watching the box set of Freaks and
Geeks and during one of the episodes, the "geeks" dare each other to drink a disgusting combination of
ingredients (salt, sardines, pickle juice...) for money. O how the memories came flooding back. When my brother and I were in elementary school, we used to do the exact. same. thing. We used to stand at the refrigerator and goad each other into drinking conconctions we created. Our rules were that you could only use three ingredients (to cut down on disgust-osity) and we could only pick items from the fridge.
Just like on the TV show, pickle juice was a favorite starter liquid.
Thinking back on it, the experience was actually very helpful. It taught us about flavor combinations, and we certainly drank enough MSG-laced brine to learn about umami at an early age. In fact, both my brother and I went on to have food-related jobs. Bro was a line cook at restaurants in San Francisco and Germany. I dabbled in catering and now write about food. Maybe it all started with a little kimchi juice-mayo-grape jam cocktail.
Anyone else do this?
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