A decade later and still laughing

[izbnso]

Reading a post about a husband who won’t eat ricotta or cottage cheese reminded me of a dining experience that my husband and I had during our engagement.

We had a weekend trip to my old hometown and it just so happened to be an old friend’s birthday. So we took her out to eat. It was the first time my husband to be had met my BFF from high school and they both wanted to impress each other. Everyone was on their best proper behavior.

We went to a very chic Italian bistro place in the down town area. My BFF, at that time, wasn’t remotely an adventurous eater. She didn’t eat anything she hadn’t heard of or eaten before. She didn’t even like her food to touch (she had cafeteria style plates at home with dividers in them) and she had no idea what any of the food on the menu was.
My husband to be and I tried helping her select. She finally settled on a calzone (although she had never heard of a calzone before) when I told her it was like a stuffed pizza and that the ricotta cheese was the cheese she had had before in lasagna.

Just to prove it was a safe bet, my betrothed ordered one too; his with onions, hers without. I ordered the veal.

Our meal arrives. They set to their calzones with forks. Two bites in they decide that their orders had been switched and they traded plates.

Well into the meal (I’m almost done with mine) we are chatting and eating and all being very prim, proper and polite when the waiter comes by for the first time to ask if everything is alright. You could tell it was perfunctory because he didn’t really stop at the table so much as try and glide by. At which point my BFF (a striking over six foot blonde) plops her fork down and says “Actually, this is the gnarlyest s**t I have ever eaten in my life.” So much for prim and proper.

I about fell out of my chair, my veal was quite good and I immediately figured that she had only encountered a food she didn’t like. Not so, my sweetheart chimes in to second the opinion that the food is horrible.

No one had said anything while they were eating, and remember mine was good. So I take a bite off my honey’s plate, how bad could it be? My tongue had never before and hasn’t since made an involuntary movement. But the second that calzone hit my mouth, my tongue tried to remove itself from under the food. Rancid ricotta.

If you want to know what rancid ricotta taste like, the only thing I have to compare the taste to is a disgusting childhood memory. Some friends of my older brother had some contraband from a joke catalogue, fart spray. It is supposed to be used to stink up a room. They jumped from behind a bush to ambush us and some got sprayed in my mouth. Do I need to say more?

I start laughing, tears running down my face laughter. Two of the most important people in my life had just sat eating that gack for the last half hour, and neither of them had said a word. While I’m laughing the two of them are finding colorful ways to describe just how horrible it was. All that I can manage is to do is croak out “Why did you eat it?”

Answer, neither one of them wanted to appear rude. But the initial flavor was why they had switched plates.

The waiter looks like a deer in head lights and declares that that cheese had just come off the docks that afternoon (and therefore must be quite delicious) and begins to give the impression that we aren’t being truthful about just how funky it is. His disbelief was probably due to me laughing so hard.

Wrong thing to insinuate, my (now) husband asks him how long it sat in the sun on the docks and if the waiter’s mother happened to sit in it, giving it its distinctive flavor. Then he asked for the check. I asked for a mint. We got the check, paid in full and left. I didn’t get a mint. We had to stop at a gas station and bought breath mints for everyone.

That was ten years ago. We still laugh till we cry every time we tell the story. We still can’t believe we paid for the meal, and we still can’t believe we didn’t make the waiter try the calzones.
To this day he won’t go near any dish at a restaurant that has ricotta in it and for the longest time he wouldn’t suffer it to be in the house. I finally smuggled some in for a lasagna I made for our daughter’s birthday back in January. He knew it was in there, he just asked that I not talk about it.

So ricotta in our house is “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”