Hi Shari

First, welcome to the forum, I'm sure you'll find a lot of help and support here. We've grown into a fairly tight knit community.

My situation is similar to yours, about 1/4 of tongue removed, neck dissection, radiation to tongue and neck. However I didn't have a peg tube and had to keep eating orally during the whole process, not very easy the last week or so of rad. I'm assuming at this point you are trying to wean yourself off the PEG and get back to eating orally.

Know what you are going through, to me food tasted like sawdust, just different flavors of sawdust.

I'm guessing you are still on liquids, or at most soft foods. At this stage I was on things like different soups such as clam chowder, mushroom, french onion, noodles and congee. You want soupls with cream base for the calories. The thing is your sense of taste will be skewed somewhat and things won't taste the same as they did before, not for a few months probably. Anything sweet will taste wierd, so forget about chocolate sundaes unless you don't mind the taste change.

Generally at this point try experimenting. Foods are going to taste different no matter what, so if you can cope with the actual chewing/swallowing/physical getting the food down, try some new things you may not have liked before, different cuisines, etc. Just stay away from spicy foods, they'll burn like heck, and possibly inflame already tender tissue.

There are some folks with some great hi calorie shake recipies for the peg tube, since I didn't have a peg I can't help there. May want to do a search of past posts, or some other folks can offer up their favorites.

Hope it helps
Bob