With a tweak-tweak here and a tweak-tweak there . . .

I rarely make any little edible thing without messing around with the recipe (classic or otherwise). And I married a supertaster. Folks, you know what that means. Endless potential drama–dare I say it, a recipe for disaster?

Happily, it means instead tremendous room for growth and creativity on both our parts. I think after fifteen-plus years of togetherness we’ve managed a lot of dandy discoveries. And you know what? We’ve eaten well along the way.

The gift of massive quantities of papillae–tastebuds, those squiggly little fellas that make the mouth sing with salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami joy–makes one vulnerable in all of the good and bad ways possible to the information glut those gluttonous sensory detectors are zapping through one’s system. As an ordinary non-supertasting superhero, I find it hard to imagine surviving the experience of having extra helpings of sensation when eating divinely delicious stuff. When food and drink are superlative, it’s already so intensely exciting that I can be overwhelmed and left speechless and limp and hardly able to conceive of the prospect of time itself re-starting. All else falls into shade.

That this can happen not only over a masterfully executed and presented breast of pheasant with chanterelles served over handmade pappardelle in champagne cream but just as well and deeply felt over a tasty tuna salad sandwich is part of the beauty of experiencing food as more than mere physical sustenance.

That the great and the humble have equal power over gustatory happiness means that all of you out there who are under the supertaster spell are even less immune to whatever punch is packed by lunch. No surprise, then, that kids born with an extraordinary supply of papillae are quick to respond with particular strength of feeling, and very often of will, to what is put on their plates and in their little rosebud mouths. The bitterness in cruciferous vegetables is more potent to such an eater than to others and may taste downright poisonous. Sour cream? I don’t think so, Grandma! Aromatics alone can drive a poor supertaster around the bend.

So I’ve got me a guy that in his youth wouldn’t eat eggs unless prepared exactly to his specifications, very possibly because only under those ideal circumstances were the sulfurous undertones of the seemingly dainty egg tolerably controlled to bypass his micro-detectors. Like his father before him (also, I suspect, a supertaster), he is averse to the presence–nay, immune to the charms–of raw or strong onions or garlic, vinegar, grapefruit juice, buttermilk, a multitude of herbs, and ripened cheeses. But being a naturally hungry boy and an enthusiastic appreciator of good food, he learned many ways in which those things can be tamed and massaged into behaving in a friendlier, more mellow manner.

Thus I have a so-called picky eater on my hands, but one who despite his aversion to a wide range of strong sensory aspects of food still adores many kinds of highly flavored cuisines and a number of dishes one mightn’t expect: a long list of Mexican and Indian foods are high on the favorites list, sushi a longed-for treat, and Thai curries like mother’s milk to him. Since we live surrounded by equally hungry friends and family and a wealth of dangerously fabulous cooks, there’s no doubt we will continue to discover both the boundaries or limits of our respective foodly tolerance and the wonders of what lies on the other side when we manage to navigate our way across and over those edges.

Around here, asking what’s for dinner is nothing short of an invitation to examine one’s entire existential paradigm–that of the moment, at least. Excuse me, please. I think I hear the kitchen calling me.

PS–The bar cookies above are almond-crusted grapefruit bars, made simply by taking a favorite lemon bar recipe and substituting pink grapefruit juice for the lemon and almond “flour” (ground almonds) for the wheat flour. My spouse had no interest in them, of course. But our guests and neighbors and I all found them quite tolerable!