Over lunch today, I considered my eating habits of yesteryear and that led me to consider how far I’ve come recently in breaking out of certain ruts I used to gleefully adhere to.

When I was a young boy, eating out meant dining on grilled cheese sandwiches. It didn’t matter where we were, I wanted my grilled cheese sandwiches. Mind you, our little family didn’t exactly enjoy haute cuisine at the best of times. Small-town Washington state, living on welfare most of the time, you know the drill. At home I learned to make two things: grilled cheese sandwiches and baked mac-and-cheese.

One magical day (which wasn’t, of course, magical enough for me to actually remember now) someone introduced me to the French Dip. I never looked back. I would only eat roast beef sandwiches dipped in au jus from then on when dining out. At home, of course, I stuck with grilled cheese sandwiches and mac-and-cheese.

Au jus wasn’t the sort of thing Mom would pick up from the store, you know? Nevermind the roast beef and the sandwich rolls.

The story of dining out is, for me, a slow series of these discoveries. In almost every case, someone had to browbeat me to the point where I would “just try it.” To say that I’m not the most adventurous soul on the planet may, in fact, be a gross understatement. By adulthood (or thereabouts) I amassed a small collection of dishes I was willing to eat, and would usually eat the same thing whenever I went to a particular restaurant.

Okay, that part hasn’t changed too much in the last few years, but I’m getting better. Part of the “new me” process I began a half dozen or so years ago involves trying new dishes. More and more often I make a point of ordering something from the menu that I haven’t tried previously, and even when I’ve narrowed a restaurant’s menu down to “here’s what I like, to heck with the rest” I generally rotate through those options so I’m not just doing the same-old same-old every visit.

It’s possible that I think too much about food. Or I think too much about what I think too much about. Maybe I just think too much about what other people think. Whatever the case, I think I’m glad that I’m branching out, however slowly and slightly, as I grow older. It’s better that than to calcify in my ways, right?