My weird friend Mental Mama is doing a challenge called 7 Weeks Of Weird. Since I’m rather weird and have seven weeks to kill, I’m playing along. Here we go.

Week One: Weirdest food/food combination you like that everyone else thinks is nasty.

I’ve been wracking my brains on this one (yes, I have multiple brains. duh.) and not coming up with much of an answer since it’s usually the other way around. For most of my life, I didn’t like chocolate. People always thought that was very strange.

When I was a kid, birthday parties always sucked since everyone always had chocolate cake. They’d hand me a piece, and I’d pass it on to the next person. I’d end up either taking an obligatory piece and choking down one bite, or I’d subtly set it down somewhere untouched. For my birthday, I always had vanilla cake and ice cream.

I also didn’t like beer for many years. I drank alcohol for a decade or so before I acquired a taste for beer. People would make fun of me for not liking beer, while at the same time, I’d drink vodka, which tastes, by all accounts, much worse than beer.

Fortunately, I have come to my senses and I like both chocolate and beer now. I still don’t like chocolate flavored things like ice cream or milk, but I do like chocolate on its own.

As for what I like that everyone else thinks is nasty, well, I’ll try anything once. If you put horse testicles or ocean snot in front of me, I’ll try it. I probably won’t like it, but I’ll try it once just to verify. I’ve ingested everything from tongue to brains to chicken feet. Food is food, right? The thing is, I haven’t really loved any of the weird things I’ve tried so they don’t count. It turns out that prime cuts are considered prime for a reason, otherwise, we’d be eating horse balls instead of steak.

One thing I was sort of averse to before I tried it was the concept of sushi. I absolutely love fish. I could subsist on a diet of fish and accoutrements, and be just fine with that. But, sushi? It’s raw! Fish should be cooked! I’d had raw beef in the form of steak tartare before, but not fish. Raw fish has squiggly communicable things on it like salmonella or fish aids, right?

Then I tried it and found that sushi is my favorite food that’s not made of sugar or coffee. One of my favorite kinds of sushi is roe. Even those who eat sushi sometimes stay away from roe. It’s a similar concept to caviar, but caviar is processed, seasoned and salted. Hard roe is raw, fully ripe eggs from female fish and it looks like this:

Almost all of the roe you find in sushi joints is hard roe. Soft roe is from male fish and well, since male fish don’t carry eggs, I wonder what little round things they might have? Anyway, my favorite roe is Tobiko or flying fish roe. It’s the teeny tiny ones.

Yummy, right? The thing that turns most people off about roe is how it pops in your mouth when you eat it like a way less sugary version of Pop Rocks that doesn’t taste like strawberry or watermelon.

When I describe eating raw, unprocessed fish eggs and enjoying the popping sensation in my mouth (especially as a goldfish–is that cannibalism?), it sounds kind of gross, but that’s not going to stop me from ordering Tobiko next time I have sushi. Mmmm sushi.

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