Pine Mouth

I have a mentor friend of mine named Michelle. Her and I meet for lunch the last Wednesday of every month to chat. We always go to the same hole in the wall mexican restaurant down the street from where we work because it is SO yummy and we like to spoil ourselves when we are together! I just LOVE her!

Well, this past Wednesday, Michelle came up with the idea for us to meet at her house and she would make me this fabulous lunch instead of our norm. Sounded wonderful to me because she is an amazing cook. Many in our church have enjoyed the blessing of Michelle's cooking.

Anyway, she had me over and made this amazing pasta, spinach salad. It had parmesan cheese, tilapia, spinach, pasta, fresh ginger and pine nuts. To my recollection, I had never had pine nuts, so I grabbed a hand full and decided they were yummy, so I had another hand full. Then I proceeded to put 2 more hand fulls in my actual dish.

The food was great and the company was great.

Flash forward two days. I was sitting at home late Friday night and started noticing that I had this weird bitter taste in the back of my mouth. So I got some water and ate some cheese because isn't the cure for anything. To no avail, the taste was still there. Woke up Saturday morning and the taste was STILL there. Saturday night and this morning, same story.

So this afternoon, I got on google and started doing a little research. I put in the search "bad taste in the back of mouth". There were 2 main topics of articles that popped up and there were hundreds on both. I was either pregnant or had eaten some pine nuts recently. As much as I was wishing it was the former, it was a little coincidental for the latter.

Sure enough, everything I read said that there is this reaction to pine nuts that they call Pine Mouth! Who knew? Crazy. And they said in most cases, the pine nuts came from China. I immediately called my friend Michelle to see if she still had the package so she could look which country they are from. But I haven't heard back from her yet.

The worst part is that every article said that the taste can last UP TO 4 WEEKS! 4 weeks y'all! Ughh! Ack!! And there really isn't anything you can do about it.

Please pray for me. :-) And stay away from the pine nuts.