Despite the fact that 90% of what I ate was home cooked, mostly from scratch, meals, I managed to miss out on some basics like courgette (zucchini) and aubergine (eggplant) and BUTTER if you can believe it.
My mother was big on margarine. So when I moved out I continued the tradition until one day I made a fateful mistake. It was like in Ratatouille. I was sat in my studio just eating buttered bread having an out of body experience.
My parents were…not great. One of the ways they were not great was that I wasn’t exposed to a lot of new things, so I didn’t have Chinese or Mexican food until I was an adult, not to mention Thai, Middle Eastern, Indian, Japanese, and so on.
So my 20s felt like a decade just full of “holy shit this is amazing” and also a peculiar shame for not knowing such things existed.
Fresh vegetables, grilled or roasted. Growing up, vegetables were mostly frozen/canned (less expensive, kept longer) and I couldn’t stand the texture. Then, in early adulthood, there were a few times in restaurants where I took a few bites of something to be polite/fit in. Lo and behold, it turns out I love vegetables when they’re not all squishy and weird!
Spicy food. I’m almost the only one in my family that isn’t allergic to several spices, so, because my family didn’t cook with them, I didn’t get to eat anything relatively spicy until I was an adult and could cook for myself
Not adulthood but I didn’t eat pizza until my mid teens. I hate tomato, and so avoided all foods with tomato in. I was persuaded to try tomato sauce and really liked it, from there I had pasta sauce, and pizza, which is amazing.
Turns out I only really hate uncooked tomato.
