Ran across a meme the other day: Name a food you ate as a child that you will never eat as an adult.
That one’s easy. Turkey noodle soup. Turkey noodle fucking soup. Oh my god, how I hate turkey noodle soup.
My mom was a good cook and I liked 90% of what she made. However, at some point she decided that we needed to have a “Christmas tradition” of making soup from the turkey carcass. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t remember it from my childhood though it’s possible I blocked it out mentally. The first time I clearly remember it was at some point after my parents split up.
I’m not the world’s biggest fan of turkey to being with, I’m happy with one meal of it a year and I don’t even especially like turkey leftovers the next day. But every year my mom would boil the turkey carcass to create turkey broth, and then she’d fish out the bones and add whatever the hell else vegetables and these wide egg noodles and if there was some turkey left that went in as well, and what came out of that was this thick, greasy, absolutely disgusting soup that to me tasted like road kill smells and had unidentifiable pieces of turkey things that weren’t designed to be eaten, they were designed to do things like hold turkeys together and allow them to perambulate and my mom and grandma ABSOLUTELY LOVED this soup. And I mean, it wasn’t that mom wasn’t a good cook – she could make a split pea soup I’d eat the HELL out of so I suspect the issue at hand was just that I don’t like turkey soup, but that’s not what made it such a traumatic occurrence.
What made it so awful is that every year, mom would start talking about the damn soup and making plans for the soup, and right after Christmas she’d buy everything for the soup, and then she’d spend half the day with boiling the carcass and making the soup and simmering it and then she’d proudly dish up a bowl.
And I’d say “I’m good mom, I’m not that hungry.”
And she’d give me this hurt look at say “… but you LOVE my turkey noodle soup!” And I’d choke down a bowl of soup I’d just spent the last five days dreading until at that point it was this peculiar form of torture where I not only had to dread that damn soup for half a week and then choke it down, I had to pretend to love it.
All the while feeling sick at heart knowing I was just setting myself up for this same awful scenario in 365 days because I just couldn’t break mom’s heart by trying to explain to her that I really, really don’t like the soup. I tried one year. I really did. And I got the [hurt look] but-you-looooove-my-turkey-noodle-soup bit and you know, it wasn’t worth the price of my soul not to just choke down a bowl of that soup.
But as God is my witness, I don’t eat turkey noodle fucking soup any more now and I never will again. This i swear.