When I first moved to the house of the enormous pantry, I didn’t do much grocery shopping. It just seemed wasteful – we already had so much food. This led to some forays into uncharted food territory, but mostly I ended up making a lot of substitutions in recipes that I already used. No sweet potatoes – I have carrots. No cinnamon – I have cardamom. No rice – I have tiny pasta. No spinach – I have kale.
The summer before 8th grade my family drove to South Dakota and did all the touristy things. This meant a lot of eating out, and at many of the breakfast places they had biscuits and gravy. This was the first time I’d ever seen the dish, and as it looks rather gelatinous and bubbly, (think The Blob) when kept in a warming pan, I avoided it. And a bit more than a year later I became a vegetarian, so I never tried it.
Pie in the Woods 