Secret 12: If it started in water, let it stay there

Seafood is NOT a part of my diet. In fact, it's safe to say that anything that started life in the water can stay there as far as I'm concerned. I have voluntarily eaten a fish once in my life and that was only because I was in Denmark staying with a host family and we had been warned to eat whatever they served us so that we wouldn't come across as rude. I ate it (and didn't even visibly gag) but it wasn't easy. I am quite content getting my omega 3 from the green beans and walnuts that I regularly consume.

When I was in high school I worked in a seafood restaurant. It's the perfect solution to not gain weight and work in a restaurant at the same time: just don't like the food there! I did suffer through the tastings because we served a wide variety of fish and new stuff came off the boats everyday. We had to be able to tell the customers that we had tried it and "Mmmm, you should too!" and describe it to them.

One of our biggest sellers was fried calamari. If anyone asked what it was we would explain that it was tubes and tentacles. Of course, being young and still not much past the age of finding fart jokes to be the funniest thing we'd ever heard we didn't call it that amongst ourselves. No, we called it tubes and, um, testic... Well, I won't finish that because who knows what kind of internet search would find me then and anyhow I think you know what I mean, yes? So one day a group of guys comes into the place. They were roughly college age and they were HOT. When they asked what it was I was so hormonally distracted looking at the buffet of eye candy that I completely forgot myself and just blurted it out. They looked SHOCKED. And then they started laughing as my face reached new levels of red and they said "Well! You're tip just went up 5 bucks!" I could have gone straight through the floor... (And I found yet another reason to dislike seafood).

Photo from here.