“Tastes good”: A Call for Recipes

It’s nearing the end of May, close to 2 months after the tests that showed I was cancer-free. Thankfully, I am mostly healthy. My biggest issue these days is eating and anything related to it.

I can’t really taste much of anything, and I struggle swallowing a lot of things.  I can taste strong things like vinegar, rhubarb, Gunslinger hot sauce, sweets, and blueberries.  Nothing tastes like it should.  Blueberries taste sour. Wine tastes awful. Beer tastes weird (but at least it tastes). That’s pretty much it it. 

It can take up to a year for taste buds to come back after radiation, and sometimes they don’t come back at all.  So we’re just having to wait and see.

Since I get no pleasure from eating, it’s hard to look forward to it. I love to cook, but it’s difficult to make some things since I can’t taste it to know if needs something. I love to make salsa, but it has no flavor. I’ve begun to focus on baking sweets. Apple-blackberry cobbler, sourdough cinnamon cake, oatmeal bars.  It seems like I’m just maintaining my weight through Ben & Jerry’s and homemade oatmeal bars.

We’ve run through a variety of Mexican, American, Italian, and Middle Eastern recipes with no luck. In fact, Suzy feels guilty if she says something tastes good.  We’ve redefined a meal as “good” if I can swallow it, and “tastes good” if I can taste anything at all.

I can generally taste some sweet, although not in the traditional sense.  It’s not fruity sweet for example, just sugary.  The other day I had an iced coffee with milk and 4 sweeteners.  No taste.

In one of my less bright moments, I put some water in the kettle on to make a pour-over coffee.  Came back, made the pour-over, added milk and sweetener.  I was surprised when it was cold – I hadn’t turned on the kettle!  So I zapped it to warm it up, drank it, and it tasted just the same as always.  In all seriousness, I told Suzy how I never knew you could make pour-overs with cold water.  She just laughed and said what I was drinking may have been coffee-colored, but it was definitely not coffee!

It has been suggested that I should enter a hot-pepper eating contest. We laughed that it wouldn’t be fair.

I reached out to my nephew Mike, since he has the widest cooking range of anyone I know.  He sent me a number of recipes from Thai and Indian to African and Afghani.  Suzy and I went to Lee Lee’s International Supermarket — a huge grocery store full of ingredients I’ve never heard of plus some things I am not quite ready for.  Some of the jars in the fish sauce aisle didn’t look very appetizing.  The fresh fish department had a sign that said “sorry, but we are out of live fish!”.  (The exclamation point is mine.)

We bought about 25 previously unfamiliar ingredients.  First, we cooked Green Curry Chicken.  No luck.  It was tasty I am told, but not for me.  After the meal I decided to just bite into a Thai chili to see if I could taste it.  I didn’t taste anything except pure heat and burning.  Lots of heat, lots of burning. It took some pastry with milk, then rice mixed with milk and olive oil (first time there was ever an advantage to not tasting) to calm my mouth down. So evidently hot-pepper eating contests are not in my future, taste buds or not!

Next we cooked Chicken Tikka Marsala.  I was surprised and was able to say it tastes good.  So maybe I can taste the Garam Masala spice?  I can’t guarantee that it tastes the same at it did to others, but it did “taste good.” 

So please send your recipes, especially those with strong tastes or unusual spices.  Maybe I can get to say “tastes good” more often.