The Food You Used to Hate (But Now Love)

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carnivore
(Niko Neko) #1

What’s a food you used to hate :frowning: before going low-carb/carnivore (or KETO), but now you absolutely crave :heart: or love?

What are we eating today? :cut_of_meat:

(Niko Neko) #2

I never ate dairy previously. My entire life I avoided it. I was diagnosed as “allergic to milk” as a baby in the 1970’s, so I just never had dairy. I was unfamiliar with butter or how to use it until my 30’s when I used it in baking cookies at Christmas. I didn’t know what buttermilk was. I didn’t know how to use heavy cream. I dreaded ice cream as a kid.

Growing up in the “low fat 1980’s” era we had Country Crock margarine spread and ‘American Cheese’ product. School served milk but I never had any.

Now I have a butter dish and eat a lot of heavy cream. :stuck_out_tongue:

(Cathy) #3

Cabbage. The smell of it cooking was enough to make me feel nauseated. Now I adore it, raw, baked, sautéed, and best of all - roasted.

I would avoid it but when my choices changed, I came at it with ‘renewed’ eyes and have learned.

(Walter Hackett) #4

I used to hate eggs but after going low carb they’re one of my go to foods. A couple of fried eggs with bacon and butter just hits different now.

#5

I won’t be conscise. I sooo missed carni threads.

My taste never changed very much and it’s not directly linked to me eating very low-carb but…
Chicken breast.
I used to love Mom’s chicken breast but as it’s such an insanely lean meat with some weird fluffy texture (IDK what I am talking about, it’s a memory :D) when it was made by someone else in a different way, I hated and avoided it for decades. Well I was a vegetarian anyway but I loved good pork (I just didn’t eat it :slight_smile: I had so many other tasty food and plenty of animal stuff as I was a strongly ovo-lacto vegetarian and got lots of complete animal protein every day) and only disliked/hated chicken breast and other lean meats.
As I did vegetarian keto (on and off) for years first, nothing happened there. Then I swapped my plants with (very little) meat… My meat consumption raised, my egg comsumption had to drop… But I ate too much fat as virtually always so I tried to find some edible lean protein source. I always liked my protein sources at 65% fat or above (in calories, of course). That was overeating to me. I have started to train myself into liking/tolerating lean meats. I prefer pork but my SO likes chicken breast and we buy it sometimes (rarely as it’s expensive while not nearly as tasty as pork. unless it’s insanely expensive, possibly. never tried that, I could buy ruminant meat with that money!). So I got curious, remembered Mom’s chicken breast (marinated in cream and garlic and fried covered with flour and egg…?) and made it (without flour, of course but then I realized I shouldn’t complicate it with egg either). And it was amazing! Tender and delicious, moist and easy to eat. Okay, I still don’t want to eat it every week but it’s a nice option now and then. So I like it now. My SO puts it into curry.

Maybe I have another item but not really. Yogurt. I always disliked yogurt, considered it some (sugary) water, it’s almost nothing but water, how can that work? But then Greek yogurt appeared here (IDK when it came, I never saw it as a kid and maybe I didn’t notice it for many years?) and it virtually always means 10% fat. Still low-fat (I prefer sour cream at 20-25% fat but their roles aren’t exactly the same) but well, something. I like that. I overate it for a while (it doesn’t have good macros, I need higher-protein items and little else) but now I can moderate.

It’s easier to say things I used to like and I don’t anymore. Well vaguely and there are waves, I may go back and forth - or just not having any idea if I like them. It’s most vegetables. Except the many green stuff I disliked even as a vegetarian who considered 1kg veg less than minimal (it was a problem on keto). But I don’t even want to think about them. I suddenly lost interest just before I went carnivore for a little while. I was very curious :slight_smile: My body approved. If it wasn’t my circumstances, garden and desires, I would eat carnivore as my body prefers it the most, hands down.
Now I have some fav vegs (nice but I can live without them for quite long) but I am not interested in most, at all. And still strongly dislike most green stuff, of course.

My love for eggs remained but I need way less now.
My relationship with meat has changed the most, of course (even as a kid, we mostly had vegetarian meals) but I always preferred fatty pork. Lean pork is a new thing but it needs marinade just like chicken. Otherwise I get bored in 2 bites even when very hungry. Added fat doesn’t help.

I can’t even imagine that and I had a lactose free year… But my brain deleted those memories :smiley: I LOVE dairy. I depend on it. I merely deny the existence of very low-fat dairy, that’s an abomination and I almost never see that here.I use too much “I” but dunno how to avoid that.
Alas, most dairy is very bad for my macros (too high fat/protein ratio). I would be doomed without quark. Or tolerating lean meats now.

At one point (when I still did carnivore) I wondered about not eating dairy. I probably could pull it off only if I had access to a wide variety of meats - but I would still miss some creamy stuff. Cream, sour cream, quark/cottage cheese, camambert/brie, Greek yogurt, mascarpone, butter - I would miss any of these but skipping ALL of them? Oh my.

(Bob M) #6

Well, if you were low fat, dairy was pretty much out (verboten) back when I was growing up. They had skim milk, but that stuff tastes bad (to me). I don’t remember what kind of yogurt they had, and I don’t think yogurt was big at all.

And if you’ve ever tried to eat non-fat cheese or other non-fat dairy products, some of them are terrible. I gave up eating that stuff and didn’t eat dairy (other then milk or skim milk in my coffer) for years. Occasional ice cream.

Didn’t eat butter or anything else with fat, such as mayonnaise.

I’m back to liking bologna, oddly. Too fatty for me at one time. I also never ate things made with liver, so no liverwurst. I like that now.

I eat the fat on meat.

(Niko Neko) #7

I love cabbage, cutting it thin and sautéing it in bacon fat - amazing. I love cabbage, but it didn’t love me back alas :laughing:

@kitmaker - I wasn’t a big fan of eggs either, but now I have a container of bacon in my fridge and microwave an egg with some bacon for breakfast and top it with smoked cheese if I’m feeling edgy :smiley:

(Linda Miller) #8

Pork belly

(Niko Neko) #9

How do you cook your pork belly Linda?

I like to slice mine into squares and fry it, love pork belly :heart:

(Niko Neko) #10

I never ate yogurt until I was in my 30’s and sour cream was probably around the same time. I discovered Tiramisu too late in life! (and now, it’s dead to me, alas! haha)

As a kid, lived about 45 minutes from the store. So mom bought and used ‘MILNOT’ - it was basically canned milk for exclusive use in mashed potatoes, so that was my dairy experience such as it was. Mom was a bad cook.

She had seen in a 60’s magazine about pork parasites - she was convinced they were riddling the pork, so she cooked bacon to the point you could break a tooth.

One time my Dad wanted cabbage soup, it spent 3-6 hours on the stove until it was green tinged water and the house smelled like cabbage / sulfur.

We had hens, cattle and critters. An orchard and a garden, but both of my parents really weren’t into homesteading - the Youtuber delighted vibe of “oh look the peas! The peas are flowering!” Nope.

They did a reasonably good job, but it was such a mismatch in personality, so that the great parts of being in nature / homesteading couldn’t make them happy (“peas? OMG, stupid peas - I’m going to smoke cigs all day and listen to Abba!”) and the downsides were really going to wash out their resilience and happiness into a gutter of being non-stop miserable. My Mom wasn’t delighted to can tomatoes, she dreaded it with every fiber of her being and was sneaking out to try and undermine the crop, “yup, must be cut worms”

#11

I tasted milk with 1.5% fat, it’s very watery. Don’t even want to imagine what super low-fat milk is like. Slightly sugary water? Yeah it has the tiny protein but that can’t help much. The normal 2.8% milk is already lower-fat but it works for me (in not small amounts unlike whipping cream, that’s properly fatty to me). 3.5-3.8% is better though.
Tasted the low-fat sour cream too. 12% fat. It’s amazing how bad is that compared to the normal 20-25% fat one! Not just weaker so I need to eat twice as much, no, it’s just bad, less creamy and quite boring.
We don’t really have super low-fat dairy here, it’s very rare (or just my mind is good at erasing such info but I am pretty sure it’s both). I don’t even know if I can buy all the normal lower-fat dairy in a small village supermarket, maybe yes, maybe no, these things are popular but there is a very limited area for all the food and household items. Maybe that’s why there is so little highly processed food is there (except chocolate as that is too popular), the normal one ingredient staple food and the non-edible items need a very big part of the whole (already pretty small) supermarket, very little is left for the stupid extra things. I like that. I go in and find everything easily. Long shopping tires me horribly.

But if something is an abomination, 60% fat “butter” is that. It totally ruins the texture and creaminess, it’s awful. I accidently bought it twice when in a hurry, it’s impossible to spot without carefully reading the label. I really, really hate that. About as much as fake mascarpone (with some kind of starch. and it’s awful, it loses all the creaminess and good taste). So one should be very careful when buying dairy.

Sounds like an oxymoron to me. Cheese is all about fat. And more or less protein, usually more but it’s a very fatty item to me so I minimize it, it works as while I like cheese, it’s more like some flavoring to me and I am fine with little. Unless I have some of my rare cheese lover days but I still eat less than my SO. And even he is adorable compared to some people.
Non-fat cheese is, like, vegan sponge cake. Allegedly exists but makes no sense to me as a vital part is missing, ruining everything.
I still don’t believe it’s a thing, actually. Heard about low-fat cheese before (rarely saw it as we have normal cheese here but there are some people who want that so some limited kind is exist I suppose? I think I have heard about it… today I will visit a big supermarket, I will check) and that already is very special as it doesn’t work in most roles one uses a cheese… But non-fat? What does it have then? Is it some solid salty protein water? but even that would need some fat… My brain can’t compute but well, I always ate high-fat. Originally very high-fat. Simple low-carb had one hardship for me: the miserably low amount of fat (it wasn’t mandatory but I wanted to eat healthy and it meant to stop my normal massive overeating. so I did some slight overeating and still missed fat, sometimes horribly).

I got carried away as usual.

Oh so it’s fine to talk about non-carni things? I still will try not to, I really wish to go back to my carnivore-ish for a while, cherry season almost ended and my body wants some lower-sugar times (it wasn’t soooo bad but still, not ideal). Good for the peace of my mind too.
I used to love cabbage and it’s new cabbage season now! I still love that. Sometimes I use it for my meats, raw. Or a snack. Could do worse. Eating at a deficit is my top goal now and it’s not like I did proper carnivore since years, I don’t need that, just ideally very low-carb. Cabbage is very low-carb. A not even big head lasted for many days. And I had a day with plenty when I fried it and added eggs (thinking about pasta with cabbage, well it’s almost that, it has egg, the only important ingredient of pasta if you ask me. I am an egg maniac, my current smaller egg consumption can’t change that).
Never tried it with bacon but I will (I never have bacon fat, I eat bacon and its fat together in scrambled eggs). My lard is pretty tasty too especially when I fry my very fatty (but still a bit meaty) pork pieces into crunchiness.

Me too. Never had mascarpone as a kid. Rarely do nowadays as it’s very fatty and a bit expensive and I inhale it in one sitting… I have a little in my fridge now, it will become tiramisu soon :slight_smile: Sometimes I make cheesecake of it. Or mix it with sour cream and add vanilla, it’s extremely similar to a popular dessert from my childhood (well if I sweeten it too…) but I usually bought the one with raisins back then.
My tiramisu is an almost carnivore dessert, just insanely fatty. And a very small, eaten-in-one-sitting-for-two (as the 2nd but for me rather the 3rd course of a meal) portion requires 12 egg yolks :smiley: (We have decent sides meals in this household, small ones just make us hungrier. And fat doesn’t satiate me well and I have a dessert stomach too.) Very good way to get extra whites! I always can use some extra whites.

Never understood why people use milk in mashed potatoes… Potatoes are watery enough… We use butter. But we usually fry our boiled potatoes (almost all of the 3.6kg my SO has just cooked today. he means business when cooking plants and potatoes has lots of water and the famous “boiled potato is the most satiating dish, by far” thing totally fail with us. satiation is highly individual. lean red meat is what the most satiating to me. and maybe seitan if I can talk about such vegan things here. does it help if I say the secret ingredient in mine is lard? I did try yolk as I put it into basically everything but it didn’t work. the ONLY case it has happened).

Wow, that is possible with bacon? I really fry nearly everything into almost oblivion but bacon gets crunchy very quickly and then one obviously stops… It’s not hard, just nicely crunchy or I think so, I have very little experience with bacon that isn’t in super tiny cubes (it’s tasty and costs half as much as sliced bacon. and I eat about 10-20g bacon per month… sounds a nice thing but I just don’t need it often)…

  1. I am not nearly that impatient. I don’t cook ANYTHING beyond 2 hours, no exceptions.
  2. It’s not bone or hard beef, it’s poor, innocent cabbage… Who on earth cook vegs for that long? They don’t need it… That’s for 3, I can’t even wrap my head around the 6. I would make a blackened crusted pot after such a long time, probably… It’s insane.

I had an anchestor who cooked badly too and I just don’t get it when the mistake is using a bad recipe, basically. It’s not skill to NOT cook something for 3 hours or not adding roux to apple soup (my anchestor… Mom was an honest kid and said it’s bad. our anchestor got upset instead of learning from the kid who could cook better than her…)!

I totally have that :smiley: I lack the love towards garden work. It’s work. A chore. Sometimes the weather is hot. Getting dirty is fine, the fresh air too but it’s. Work. But I do love to see how my plants progress. Sometimes a far neighbour’s sheep eat something but it’s not much. They ate half of a strawberry plant (with all the flowers) this year and they weren’t even in my garden! Poor plant was too close to the fence and it had a hole. Sheep have a long neck and tongue, apparently. Beautiful sheep, by the way, Racka, did you ever eat it? SUPER tasty. When they eat something that is mine, I daydream about eating one. The same if the culprit is a goat, the neighbour has those too.

“Far neighbour” means he lives in another street but it’s a little area 3.5 km away from our village and there are only a few people who live here all year long. Many houses, very many trees, several sheep and goats, few people. Perfect to me. There was a time when a small horse was galloping through the streets, his owner yelling after him. It was glorious.
Oh we have someone breeding Pomeranians too. 20 little marshmallows barking a tad annoyingly 2 houses away…

Is it very apparent I have NO social life at all, with an SO who isn’t talkative while I am? Sorry. The very old carnivore thread had me for years, I managed such walls of text every day, sometimes not even once. I won’t do that again.

Of course not, it is a big chore! We had so many tomatoes at some point. Mom said “oh they won’t amount to anything!” and they got upset or something… :slight_smile:
I can easily get annoyed with canning. In 2019, my single apricot tree (I had 3 but the others died) provided 120 jars. And we ate and even gifted a lot beyond those… That can be tiresome, I tell you.
And it’s ONE fruit tree of many, the most prolific one though. We had only a few fruits from that tree since, usually zero (apricot easily get frost when flowering here) and it will die. Oh well. I am not super sad but we buy another (we did but the it died and now it’s greengage as that is a strong, super quick growing tree, used for all noble stone fruits as a base) as my garden must have every possible important fruits. In all colors if possible, I used to have 4 different colored raspberries, I might have lost the yellow ones (that mixed with red ones and became peachy pink).
Fruit trees are nice as they don’t tend to need work until the fruits are ripe (except watering very young trees). At least that’s my attitude. It works well enough. And the joy includes lots of things beyond eating and those work even on carnivore. Fruits are so very pretty! Even canning is fine as long as it’s not too much.

(Niko Neko) #12

:nerd_face: They give skim milk to fatten pigs - not whole. So that’s very telling right there.

Which country are you in @Shinita ?

I haven’t encountered 60% fat butter but it sounds disgusting. :face_vomiting:

Yup! I drink coffee and it’s not Carnivore :smiley: - although it might be trying to kill me. I’m raising strawberries and might have some when they ripen but I only have a couple of plants :+1:

I need to hunt me down some Marscapone cheese :smiley: I bet if I sprinkle some instant coffee on it it would make a lovely carnivore dessert. :+1:

People in my family line are brittle diabetics about mid-age irregardless of diet and lifestyle, so I hope Carnivore helps me live well longer and skip the family curse :smiley: :+1:

#13

I live in Hungary :slight_smile: One of the European countries where we like high-fat! (High-carb too and overeating is a problem, no wonder.) We have a campaign to eat more fatty pork since several years now and it’s successful. Not like Hungarians ate little fatty pork before… Sour cream is an important staple in our cuisine too. I think even our official guidelines try to make us eat lower-fat but it failed this far. Cheap, tasty fatty pork is everywhere along with zillion other nice fatty food so no wonder, I say. I may be a biased fat-lover but it seems many Hungarians are like that.

It is. And there are supermarkets where there are no proper butter or you need to search for it. MULTIPLE kinds of 60% butter… It’s crazy. Who likes that? If one wants less fat, eat less butter but good, creamy butter instead…

I have few strawberries too. They don’t like climate change, it brought even to these parts droughts and we used to have regular rain. We water the garden but it’s not the same and some plants are more sensitive than others or get too much sun or something. My new ones in the shadow looks good but it’s easier to reach them with the water too.

Yes. I have a very nice instant coffee (okay, I couldn’t find it since months so not right now but I will get it somehow) specifically for desserts. It’s not “proper” enough for a coffee drink but good for desserts… I love mascarpone, I love this coffee and they are good together. (And yolks make nearly everything better especially this combo…)

#14

Ruminant and chicken hearts and livers.