{"id":1347,"date":"2010-02-12T08:45:54","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T13:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.communify.me\/newvinegrowing\/?p=1347"},"modified":"2019-06-07T13:42:26","modified_gmt":"2019-06-07T17:42:26","slug":"are-you-willing-to-give-things-you-hate-a-second-chance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.communify.me\/newvinegrowing\/are-you-willing-to-give-things-you-hate-a-second-chance\/","title":{"rendered":"Are you willing to give things you hate a second chance?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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What if a food you liked was right there under your nose all along?<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nA blog post from Serious Eats<\/a> back in December sounded awfully familiar.<\/p>\n

Ok, we’ve all been there…had something as a child and it made us toss our cookies, pack our lunch or made our parents force us to sit at the table till we were done.
\nFor me it was olives. Growing up in an Italian family, it was hard to escape them, but, I just couldn’t stomach them. Absolutely horrible little things stuck in potato salad, on an antipasto plate or put atop pizza.
\nToday, some olives (mostly lots of olives) with some wine, roasted peppers, bread and feta cheese, how can you go wrong?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The author clearly wasn’t alone — the post drew 74 comments.
\nSome of my very favorite indulgences used to turn my stomach. I’d conduct lengthy surgery on pizza with olives to attempt to remove any shred of the offender. I didn’t understand the appeal of red wine, particularly drinking it room temperature. I loved the smell of coffee but hated the taste.
\nThen my roommate had the Great Banana Revelation. She had always thought she hated bananas and avoided them at any cost. For some reason, one day when she was hungry she decided to eat one she found in the kitchen. Guess what? She liked them.
\nShe realized she’d avoided bananas for years on the memory of not having liked them as a kid. Once she gave bananas a second chance, she changed her mind.
\nWe agreed to retry foods we thought we didn’t like to see what else might deserve reconsideration.
\n

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I gave olives another try and thanks to Zingerman's, I'm now an addict. We typically have no fewer than three kinds in the fridge at any given time.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nFirst up for me was olives. I went to uber-deli Zingerman’s<\/a> and told a helpful employee I felt like I should like olives — I love salty food and anything pickled — but I just hadn’t. He spent the better part of an hour giving me an impromptu lesson on olives, and I left with a container of manzanilla olives I truly liked.
\nI learned I didn’t hate olives. I hated those nasty, black canned olives so common on pizza and pasta salads.
\nDo you think you might like olives if you tried something different? Here’s a Guide to Good Olives<\/a> from one of the founders of Zingerman’s.
\nDating John, a former Starbucks barista, made it easier to make friends with coffee. He taught me about vanilla lattes<\/a>, which were my gateway drug, before helping me try different roasts and different origins of brewed coffee.
\nToday I know I like South American coffee, like Guatemalan, better than coffee grown in Africa, like Kenyan or Ethiopian. I also know a lot of people make their coffee too weak for me and don’t clean their coffee pots very well, which can let coffee oils go rancid, so the coffee I’d not liked before, I might not like today.
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It should be no surprise that the man who taught me to like coffee did this painting celebrating the perfect espresso.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nRed wine came after a lengthy visit to a small winery in northern California, when John and I were the only two people in the tiny tasting room and a very patient expert poured me accessible wines and talked to me about the way to describe what I liked and what I didn’t<\/a>.
\nI vividly remember him pouring me a taste and telling me to think of green peppers. Yes, yes, I did taste green peppers!
\nWhat are the common themes here?<\/p>\n