you won't know unless you try

there aren't very many foods that i'm afraid of. for the most part, my experience has been that if you can get over the fear and dig in you'll be pleasantly surprised... or at least not totally disgusted. there are obvious exceptions, most of them in the organ meat family.

then there are the foods that you can't bring yourself to enjoy, even if everyone else can. in my case, these almost all fall into the stinky cheese variety. as it turns out, this impairment is a bit crippling socially. if you don't eat goat, blue, or feta cheese some menus can be pretty limited. plus everyone assumes that everyone else loves goat, blue, or feta cheese and as such tends to incorporate one of them into foods that i otherwise love as some kind of special treat. i've tried, i really have. it's not that want to turn down the delicious looking pork chop or salad. but i can't do it. at least my friends all know me well enough to anticipate my unpopular hangup.

aside from smelly cheese and a few other things i'm willing to try almost anything, especially if it's dessert. so imagine my excitement when nb's brother mailed him a bottle of what looked like some caramel version of hershey's syrup along with a yummy sounding recipe that involved roasted plaintains and nuts, all to be topped with this new discovery.

for the last few weeks we've been tearing through a few pints a week of haagen dazs dulce de leche frozen yogurt (for those of you who don't know, it's low enough in fat and calories that you can eat half the container in a sitting without hating yourself that much and it's quite tasty - i can only imagine what the full fat version tastes like). it seemed to us like cajeta would be right up our alley.

maybe anybody who is anybody knows that cajeta is basically caramelized goat milk and sugar. i had never heard of it before, and was a little surprised about the goat milk part, but once i examined the bottle and figured that if it was marketed in the united states by hershey's it was probably pasteurized i felt better about it. plus, if nb's brother loved the stuff so much that he had bothered to mail it across the country to us it was probably pretty good.

the dessert was beautiful. pretty roasted plantains with bits of walnuts sprinkled on top, capped off with pretty swirls of gooey, delicious looking caramel stuff. i dove in without restraint, uber pleased nb for presenting me with something so marvelous. but the warm sweetness was almost instantly washed away by the distinct vomity flavor that makes me hate all those stinky cheeses so very much.

i tried. i really did. it was so pretty and promisingly exotic... but so very disgusting. even with a good forkful of plantains and walnuts i couldn't get around the barfy back flavor. nb managed to put down a good bit of it, but in the end conceded that it was at very least a bit off-putting.

the experience wasn't a total loss. we laughed about it for a good long time, and, with the help of wikipedia i've since learned some rather amusing things about cajeta. i won't repeat them here. you'll have to see for yourself.