...tastes like itchy

I'm allergic to nuts.

I actually don't know ~which~ nuts I'm allergic to, I've just avoided all things nutty since I was two years old. Well, at that age, I was having them avoided for me.

It all started one day when my mother, unaware of my condition, was lovingly pushing me in a cart through Safeway when she came across a display of walnuts. She carefully chose one, bit off a small chunk, fed it to me and then stood back in horror as she watched her cherubic little darling swell into something that resembled a hungover John Merrick.

She sat up all night listening to my breathing patterns after a doctor at the hospital sent us home with a 'just keep an eye on her and she should be alright'.

So...ever since...I've never eaten nuts. There's a couple I've ingested by accident...it's a crap shoot, really. I've come through some of those times completely unscathed and other times it has resulted in a very uncomfortable evening of finding an uncrowded walk-in clinic. But I've not been to the hospital since...so I doubt I'm the type that will keel over if a peanut touches one of my M&Ms.

Which puts me in the (seemingly) unique position of not knowing what nuts taste like. I know I've had them, but had I known there were nuts in whatever I was eating, I would have not eaten them...you see? So, I don't know what the taste ~is~, exactly. Not all nuts taste like danger to me, so it's difficult to say. Plus, ~quantity~ is a factor. Say I were to eat something and find nuts in it...the next mouthful may be the mouthful that changes my day from carefree to constricted throat. So, if I suspect something's amis, it's best to abort the whole eating mission altogether.

Which is what I was trying to explain to the kid at the coffeeshop today when I told him I was unable to identify the 'different' taste of my iced vanilla latte, but needed to know if it was nuts because I didn't know what nuts tasted like. He was very cool about it and gave me a new one, but he was all, 'dude...you don't know what nuts ~taste~ like? That is so, like, weird.'

My mother, in her unending struggle to not let her baby be denied any of life's pleasures, bought me No Nut Butter...a peanut butter substitute made, I think, of peas...not sure. I'll check the label. Anyway...I don't like it. According to my boy and blackmana...it tastes almost like the real thing, so if that's the case then I suggest it's an acquired taste that I have not acquired through years of being handed a pb&j sandwich and sent to watch cartoons. The boy eats it now. Which brings me to another funny event when I offered to make him toast one morning and asked what he'd like on it.

"Peanut butter and marmalade!"

"Really??", I asked because he's often a joker.

"uh...yeah...of course"

See? I don't know what goes with peanutbutter. I hear jelly. I hear bananas. Hell if I know.