Foods I Don't Get

Andy grilled up some venison steak last night. They came off the grill beautiful: juicy with charred grill marks and smothered with homemade BBQ sauce (compliments of Mel's Kitchen Cafe.)  We served them up with a side of  roasted Yukon gold potatoes and steamed broccoli. What's not to love?

But halfway through this very American meal, Andy looked over to find me dutifully, but not very enthusiastically gnawing my way through my steak. "You don't have to eat it if you don't like it," he said. So I sawed off one more bite of steak and gave the rest to him. 

As much as I appreciate Andy's woodsmanly ways that filled our chest freezer with venison last fall, I really don't care for venison steak. I mean, I love it in stew, in pasties, in sausage, in stir fry, in just about anything. And I feel that way about about all meat. If it's part of recipe, great! But a piece of meat plunked down on my plate as the main dish? Meh.

I'm not a terribly picky eater (although Andy probably disagrees . . . I do get turned off by food's texture on occasion), but there are a handful of foods that make me feel like Sam I Am of Dr. Seuss fame:

"I do not like them in a box.
I do not like them with a fox.
I will not eat them in a house.
I do not like them with a mouse.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them ANYWHERE!"

 

1) Dark chocolate

I want my chocolate smooth and creamy. If I wanted bitter chocolate flavor, I'd just stick a spoon into my baking cocoa. And no, washing that spoonful of cocoa down with some milk is not an acceptable alternative to milk chocolate.

2) Cake balls/pops

I like cake just fine, but it doesn't seem to be my go-to dessert.(That would be ice cream and/or pie, apparently.) Still, while I do enjoy a nice cupcake or slice of homemade cake, I have a low tolerance for boxed cake mixes and I despise canned frosting. So who's brilliant idea was it to take a box cake, mix it with a can of frosting, then dip it in chocolate? Cake balls look so pretty and they taste so horrible. Holy preservatives!  

3) Beets

I have a deep appreciation for vegetables. But when it comes to the beet, well, I might as well just go get a clod of dirt and gnaw on that because the "earthy" goodness of beets is spoiled on me.

4) Macaroni and cheese

There was a time, a long, long time ago, when I used to eat macaroni and cheese . . . a lot. And then, I hit my tipping point and suddenly, I could not stomach it . . . at all. It's probably been 15 years since I had my last bite of mac and cheese and while I do think I could choke some down if it was the last food on Earth, I still avoid it like the plague. And no, I don't mean just Kraft Dinner. I mean all the Mac and Cheese.

5) Shrimp 

That smell! That texture! I have tried shrimp many times, prepared many different ways and it still kind of revolts me. The other day I was listening to NPR's The Splendid Table and heard the host, Lynne Rossetto Kasper, say that everyone likes shrimp. The result? I no longer trust anything Lynne Rossetto Kasper tells me.

What foods don't you get? 

 

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Summer Stockpiling - Plus Making Dried Beans in a Crockpot Tutorial

When I moved away from home, I realized there are a few of basic grocery items that I'm not used to buying. My family has a definite "homemade" mentality, and when I was growing up, pizzas and lasagnas weren't pulled out of the freezer or ordered; they were made from scratch. Store-bought bread was an oddity in our house and we never, ever bought jarred spaghetti sauce. It was a sad day indeed if we ran out of homemade jam and had to buy a jar of strawberry preserves, or heavens help us, grape jelly. To this day, grape jelly still tastes like sadness to me.

Now that I'm on my own, I find I also lean towards making things from scratch. It's cheaper. It tastes better. It's more satisfying. And let's be honest, when I work from home like I do the majority of the year, it's pretty easy for me to live a "made from scratch" life.

When I'm home all day, I just don't find it very time consuming to make things from scratch. Homemade bread may require 3+ hours of time, but it doesn't require my undivided attention that whole time. It's easy enough to mix up the dough and leave it to rise to rise while I go do something else, then return to shape loaves, leave again to do whatever, pop the bread in the oven and go do something else while the bread bakes. If I'm smart about it, I can get a good 2 hours of work done during the whole bread baking process. I make my marinara sauce by throwing all the ingredients in a crockpot and let it burble away for 4-5 hours for a total hands-on time of 30 minutes. In fact, I use the crockpot as shortcut for lots of "made from scratch" stuff.

If I'm making this all sound like a snap, let me assure you that it all goes to hell in a hand basket when summer comes around. By mid-August, between working full time and berry picking, I pretty much give up on making things from scratch and I'm buying bread and spaghetti sauce along with everyone else. So every spring I come up with this great idea that I'm actually going stockpile the ingredients I like to make myself in the freezer and have enough to last through the busy summer season.  Honestly, I've never managed to pull this off, but I persist in thinking it's a really good idea.

One ingredient I prefer to prepare at home are beans. It's about half as expensive to make your own cooked beans from dried beans, rather buying cooked and canned beans. You can also better control how much sodium's in your bean recipes by making your own beans. And you can cook up large batches, which saves me the trouble of having to buy canned beans nearly every week. (We eat a lot of beans.)

The other day we were running low on frozen beans, so I cooked up a batch each of kidney, pinto, and garbanzo beans over the course of three days. Here's a pictorial guide to the last batch, the garbanzos.

Take your bag of approximately 3-4 pounds of garbanzos (I purchase my dried beans at the local co-op), dump into a colander and rinse with cold water. Pick through the beans and discard any rocks or broken beans. Dump the beans into your crockpot and cover with about four inches of cold water. Cover and place in the fridge overnight. 

The next morning your beans will have doubled in size. Dump them into a colander, than back into the crockpot and cover with fresh cold water. I usually have the water covering the beans by about an inch at this point.

 

Turn your crockpot on high and walk away. I put an old towel around the base of the crockpot to soak up the water that will inevitably boil over. Be warned, bean water does not smell great, so you'll want to wash that towel that in timely manner. (Lesson learned.)

Check on your beans after about 4 hours. I find it takes most beans between 4-5 hours to reach desired tenderness using this method. It's okay to turn off the crockpot a little before the beans are as tender as you'd like. Like pasta, the beans will cook as they cool in the colander.

Pour into a colander (or two) and cool. Divvy up into 1 3/4 cup portions in freezer bags. Throw in the freezer. Now you have bagged and frozen equivalents of canned beans for half the price!

You can thaw out the beans in the fridge before you use them, but honestly, I'm never that organized and usually just throw them in frozen into whatever recipe I'm making and increase the cooking time a bit. Remember, these aren't salted, so you may have to add extra salt to your recipe.

Now I've got a good summer stockpile of beans, but there's plenty of bread baking and sauce making if I'm really going to make it through the summer . . .

 

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Travel Thursdays: The Food Poisoning Edition

I spend a fair amount of time here at Of Woods and Words dreaming about travel. While I was quite a globe-trotter back in my early 20s, now having reached the ripe old age of 26, my travels have taken on a shorter, more localized flavor. After spending a good portion of my day off yesterday playing in QuickBooks, it's become apparent that unless I give up on, say, health insurance, that trip to Antarctica is still a good five years off.


But when Mama Kat posted a writing prompt on food poisoning, I knew it was time to introduce "Travel Thursdays," a weekly feature on Of Woods and Words devoted to travel tales, tips and "to-see" lists. I can think of no better excuse to share my food poisoning story and start talking travel on a regular basis.

I've spent nearly seven years trying to reclaim Paris. I've watched nearly every Parisian flick Netflix has ever recommended. I've purchased Paris wall calendars. Last Christmas, I sent out Madeleine cards. But, although I'd once planned to minor in French,  to this day, when I think of Paris, I feel tired and slightly nauseous.

During my semester in Ireland, I was part of a group of six girls who decided to spend a long weekend in Paris. As a 19-year-old whose only prior travel-abroad experience had been spending 12 days in London, England, the thought of jetting off to the most romantic city in the world for a weekend seemed positively surreal. The Eiffel Tower, boulevards, croissants, the Seine; it was enough to make me squeal and want to don a beret and jaunty striped shirt. But my stereotypical daydreams of sipping coffees outside a cafe or strolling through the flower garden behind Notre Dame while nibbling a crepe were by far the most romantic aspects of the entire trip.

Too poor to afford a night in the hostel, we spent the night before our flights sleeping in the Dublin airport. It wasn't until we arrived in Paris the next afternoon that we realized not one of the six girls on the trip had thought to throw in a map. Cue sleep deprived wandering through the streets searching for our hostel. As we became increasingly frustrated with Parisian street signage, it started to snow.

By the time we'd found the hostel, we were tired, cold, cranky and hungry. One of the other girls, Melissa, and I ran to the bakery across the street to pick up a late lunch. As I munched down on my baguette sandwich, I thought the mayonnaise perhaps tasted a little extra tangy. Never mind that, I thought, that was probably what Parisian mayonnaise tasted like. I ate the whole thing.

We spent a lovely evening in the Montmartre section, climbing the gazillion steps to the Sacre Couer, visiting the windmills, and taking in stunning nighttime views of Paris's lights. Under the glowing streetlights, we nibbled Nutella crepes and threw spare Euros into the street musicians' open cases.

But I woke with a start in the middle of the night. I didn't feel so good. A vicious growl from my stomach got me out of bed and as I knelt in front of the room's toilet, it became clear that I really, really didn't feel so good. 

The next morning, it became apparent that Melissa and I were the only ones in our group in this predicament. Achy, retching, dehydrated  and shaky, we were also the only baguette eaters in the gang. It seemed that funny tasting mayonnaise was the most likely culprit.

At the Louvre, I wandered aimlessly through the sculptures, feeling as heavy, lifeless and grey as the sculptures themselves. I tried to act disappointed that the bell tower was closed at Notre Dame, but with my shaky legs, I couldn't imagine climbing countless steps just for some vistas and gargoyles. In the Musee D'Orsay, I sprinted up at long escalator to the sixth floor bathroom to attempt to discreetly barf into a toilet.

For the most part I rallied. After sleeping for approximately 16 hours that night, I spent our final day in Paris touring Versailles and the Opera house.  But truth be told, I was still feeling pretty dodgy as we sat in the Dublin train station wiating to make our final leg of the journey home. As we waited, I kept making some pretty uncomfortable sprints to the public toilet. And let me tell you, when the public toilet is one of those European numbers with a pay turnstile that you have to insert coins into to access the bathroom, that is not a great situation to be in.

Even my pictures from that weekend are blurry.

Oh Paris. Je t'aime? I think not. Je puke.

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My Hot, Steamy Love Affair

Andy looked me in the eyes. He'd cornered me by the pantry.

"Are you having an affair?" he asked.

I gulped. I hadn't thought he'd noticed how distant I'd become or how my evenings have been spent focused on matters other than him.  But I had to tell him the truth. I was having an affair. One that was hot and steamy, with just a tinge of danger.

"Yes," I fessed up. "With my hot water bath canner."

It's true.

What started out as a single batch of jam, quickly turned into an obsession. Things have only escalated since the "putting up" post. The last four weeks have been a frenetic flurry of food preservation. If I wasn't out picking berries, I was buying a lug of peaches. I've spent so much time standing at the kitchen counter, chopping, stirring, scooping that I developed shin splints this week.

Here's the damage:

From left to right:5 pints wild blueberry/raspberry jam
4.5 pints raspberry jam (tame raspberries, from Mom's garden)
7 pints peach salsa
4 quarts blueberry pie filling
3 quarts peach slices
3 quarts sauerkraut
4 pints peach jam
3 pints blueberry jam

Like any affair, I feel a little shame about the whole thing. When did I get so stinkin' domestic and focused on home economics? What 26-year-old in her right mind can't wait to get home so she can stand in front of boiling vat "canning things for winter?" I've been known to cackle in delight when I hear the "click" of the can lids sealing. It's all disconcerting.

But while I might wish from the bottom of my heart that I could quit the whole thing, by this point, things are too complicated for that. Anymore, it's hard to relax if I don't have a spoon or knife in my hands. I feel a little lost if my face isn't flushed from the steam of the burbling canner.

Still, at some point, it has to end. (Doesn't it?) Andy's tired of sharing me. Heck, there are even times when I want the life I had before back. I have to promise Andy (and myself) that it will all end soon  . . . right after I make another batch of salsa . . . and pickle some jalapenos . . . and . . . .

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In Which Ada Catches A Fish

The first few weeks of July, before berry season is in full swing, seems to be the time of year when the call of the lake and the boat are most answered. For the last week or so, we've been heading down the lake nearly every night to spend an hour or so at sunset dropping ciscos on weighted lines into the lake's depths and drifting across a reef, waiting for the big one to bite.

Although there are also walleye and bass (et al) in the lake, I've always gone lake trout fishing with Andy. Every time we're out, we get plenty of nibbles, even a fair amount of "robbed" hooks, but during the summer months, I've never seen a fish at the end of my line. (During the winter, I've caught a couple "waterbottle" sized baby lake trout that have gotten thrown back.)

Honestly, I'd started to wonder if this fishing stuff was some really long-winded practical joke Andy was pulling on me. "We never catch any fish," I grumbled to a neighbor who asked after our fishing success on Saturday morning.

But on Saturday evening as we bobbed about, I felt three sharp tugs on my line. I opened my bail, let the fish run with the bait, then yanked up to set the hook and started reeling. When Andy glanced over, his eyes grew wide. "You've got a big fish on there." I'd never landed a fish before and had no idea that when the line makes a terrible cranking noise you should stop reeling and let the fish do its own thing for a bit before reeling some more. With some instruction from Andy, I got the fish to the surface. Andy netted the 4-6 lb beauty and brought it in the boat to inspect. 

"Can we keep it?" I asked.

We did.

I had no idea there was so much meat on a fish. We grilled it up on Sunday evening and I made a simple rice pilaf out of the leftovers yesterday that we'll be eating on for a good long time. I'd always thought trout tasted too "fishy", but this particular "landlocked salmon" was pretty darn tasty.

This is probably the only trout we'll keep all year. They're such slow growing, long-lived beasts that it seems only fair that the vast majority of them spend their days down in the dark, cool lake water. 

Moral of the story? Don't stop complaining.You never know how a well-timed grumble might be answered.

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You Don't Know What You're Missing

Lately Andy's taken to eating avocados.Which is fine. They're loaded with healthy fat and I can think of worse things to eat, even if these aren't exactly a shining example of eating locally.

But the other week, as Andy cut into yet another avocado, I felt I needed to mention something. "Just so you know," I said. "Each one of those little avocados you're so fond of costs $1.99."

Last week, the lowly avocado was up to $2.05 . . . each.

Now, I know avocados don't grow anywhere nearby; that they're getting shipped cross-country to make it to the local produce shelf. I understand that mileage means money, but holy smokes, $2.05 for a little bit of produce, a big portion of which is an inedible pit? These aren't even organic!

The other day, I was talking with a snowbird who had just returned from Arizona. As we talked about the "roadkill" produce we often settle for at the local grocers, she mentioned that in Arizona she can often buy four avocados for a dollar.

"But if you're not used to lower prices," she said, "you don't know what you're missing."

She wasn't meaning to be condescending or flippant. But even I know that $2.05 is an exorbitant price for an avocado. Even I know that our slow internet is really slow and recognize that cell service would be handy thing to have at times around here. These little inconvenient realities of living in the woods aren't lost on the permanent residents. Rather, they're accepted, yet often bemoaned. These things are simply out of our hands.

We're rural, but not necessarily insular and ignorant. As a matter of fact, I've got an inkling about what we're missing.

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Tofu: Terrible, Terrific, or Tolerable? Tofu Tuesday Tutorial 1!

I got a lot of reactions when I posted the quip above a couple weeks ago as part of a "semi-wordless Wednesday" post and I think I might have been slightly misleading. I don't really think tofu tastes like wallpaper paste, although it is a pretty unappealing substance when left to its own devices.  

In an attempt to convert all you tofu-naysayers into tofu enthusiasts, I'm embarking on a multi-week Tofu Tuesday Tutorial. In this four week series, we'll cover how to convert that suspicious white blob of soy into something truly (cross my heart!) delicious.

Ready for today's tutorial? Here we go . . .

Tofu Tuesday Tutorial 1:  It's Actually Pretty Good When It's Pretending to Be Something Else . . . aka Sloppy Toes. 

The post below was originally posted at The Happy Home. 

I grew up in a vegetarian household and ate probably far more than my fair share of tofu dogs as a child. My parents were Diet for A Small Planet generation vegetarians, where it was still believed that vegetable protein was slightly inferior to meat protein and vegetarian cooking was treated as some sort of complex geometry proof. As we grew, my brother and I tasted many recipe hits and misses (barbequed tofu was not a hit) as vegetarian cooking evolved. The joyful result of all those culinary experiments was some adventurous taste buds and the knowledge that food could be just about anything you wanted it to be.

Now that I’m on my own, I’ve incorporated meat into my diet, but we still prepare a large number of meatless meals at the cabin. When we do eat meat, I prefer to purchase organic, free-range chicken and we avoid beef and pork.

Despite the fact that we rarely (if ever) have ground beef in the house, we eat Sloppy Joes on a regular basis. The secret is a childhood recipe which uses tofu in lieu of ground beef. Years ago, my father dubbed the recipe “Sloppy Toes” and the off-putting nickname stuck.  

One bite of this yummy sandwich filling will thwart that inevitable question asked of all vegetarians: “Where’s the beef?” I’ve used the recipe to help tofu-phobic roommates overcome their resistance to soy protein. It’s a great kid-friendly, weekday meal that uses everyday ingredients and happens to be vegan too. The only thing you need to remember is to pull the tofu out of the freezer night before.

Over the years, I've tried to initiate others into the world of Sloppy Toes, with mixed results. Here's my tofu-phobic college roommate Sarah testing it out. (Please note, I was unsuccessful in this Joes to Toes conversion attempt.)

Look at that unbridled enthusiasm!

"Do  I really have to eat this?"

Mmm, delicious!

Try taking the Joes to Toes challenge yourself!  

Sloppy Toes

1 lb. extra firm tofu, frozen and defrosted*

2 tablespoons tamari (or other soy sauce)

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 medium onion, chopped

1 stalk celery, chopped

½ medium green pepper, chopped

1 cup ketchup

2 teaspoons vinegar

2 teaspoons lemon juice

2 teaspoons prepared mustard

2 tablespoons brown sugar

Squirt of hot sauce (I use Sriracha)

Squeeze excess moisture from tofu. (I usually place the cake of tofu between two plates in the kitchen sink and place a heavy object – like a bag of sugar – on top of the top plate to press some of the moisture out. Then I use my hands to get the remaining moisture out.) Tear tofu into small crumbles. Place in a bowl and mix with tamari. Set aside.

Saute onion, celery, and green pepper in oil. After about five minutes, or when onions are soft, add tofu and brown lightly for a minute or two. Meanwhile mix up a sauce of the remaining ingredients. Add sauce to tofu and heat gently for a half hour. Serve on sandwich buns.

*We’ve always used frozen, then defrosted tofu because it seems to have a crumblier texture closer to that of ground beef that tofu used fresh out of package.

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Bachelor Food

Before we started dating, Andy assumed I couldn’t cook.

Whenever conversation turned to food during those early days when we were working together and getting to know each other, I’d usually eaten one of the following for supper the night before: spaghetti with jarred marinara sauce, rice with veggies, or peanut butter and jelly toast. My diet all through college and the years immediately following graduation consisted of meals that could be made in 15 minutes or less and generated as few dishes as possible.

While I’m still no gourmet, I was a decent cook and baker by the time I embarked for college. But given the choice of whipping up a pan of spinach lasagna or ordering Chinese takeout and heading out to the movies, I’d always choose the latter. There was just too much going on in those days of experimental adulthood to crank out culinary achievements more advanced than chocolate chip cookies on semi-regular basis.

I got to thinking about the phenomena of “bachelor food” yesterday, as I cranked out an old bachelor food standby for lunch: an egg sandwich with bacon and ketchup on toast. While I love me a good egg sandwich, when I sit down each week to figure out a tentative weekly dinner menu so I know what to buy at the grocery store, I have never once written “egg sandwiches” down as a menu item. No one ever plans to make an egg sandwich. It’s one of those things you eat when no one else is around.

I once read a newspaper column in which the author professed meals he ate while his wife was out of town consisted of unheated Pop-Tarts and a glass of tepid water. And remember in Sex and the City when Miranda managed to eat almost an entire 9x13” chocolate cake in a single evening? Left to our own devices, there’s no knowing what we might consider a “decent meal.” No wonder we’ve all been trained to be afraid of singlehood!

Does a relationship really prompt us to eat better? Everyone seems to expect newly married men to gain a few pounds in that first year of marriage. And nothing quite wilts the egg sandwich’s appeal than eating it as a meal in company.

When someone else is around, it seems we clean up our act. We add meatballs to the marinara sauce. The rice and steamed veggies turn into a Thai-inspired stir fry. We don’t mind how the dishes stack up because there’s always someone to guilt into help with clean up. We remember our palates like complex flavors. Suddenly we have a hard time imagining eating toast for dinner.

But as soon as I’m left alone for a night? Heck yes, I’m having a big bowl of pasta tossed with parmesan cheese and butter for supper. That’s right. Not even an accompanying salad or vegetable.

Maybe none of us are as far removed from our cavemen ancestors as we might like to think.

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Wordless Wednesday: Meat and Potatoes

I didn't grow up in a meat and potatoes kind of household, but with a chest freezer chock-a-block filled with venison, things are changing around the cabin. No more prissy stir-fried tofu stuff. We're talking venison steak and mashed potatoes.

 As you can see, some of us are more enthusiastic about this than others.

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The Grocery Train Came In

Because the main industry in the area is tourism, anyone who’s lived here for any extended period time has had to answer their fair share of stupid odd questions from visitors. The universal favorite such question among locals seems to be “what’s that big river we’ve been driving along for a couple hours now?” (Lake Superior.) But there are other good ones, like “when do deer turn into moose?” Some, more legitimate, questions just grow weary with time such as, “what’s happening to the birch trees?” (A number of things: for one, birch trees don’t have very long life cycles and they’ve also been stressed out by an ice storm, droughts and invasive insects. Also, they die from the top down, which is a big part of why they look so very bad along the highway.)

And then there’s the one I never liked: “what do you do in the winter?” Part of what makes me so hostile to the question is that after graduating from college, I never knew what I was doing in the winter. Again, because of the tourist industry, a lot of jobs around here are seasonal. But there’s also an underlying implication to the question that makes me prickle. It seemed what they were actually asking was “this is lovely place to be in the summer, but you can’t possibly live here all year, can you?” I was never quite sure what to tell them: that we caught a ride on the steamer down to Duluth every October 1st? That we stayed and hitched up our dog sleds every month or so for the grocery/mail run?

Yes, we live 100+ miles from the nearest movie theater (which isn’t usually an issue, except when Sex and the City 2 has been released and you really, really want to go see it, even though you’re sure it’s going to be even worse than the first movie) but despite what we might want to think, we’re really not in the middle of nowhere. Sure, it can be hard to coordinate things like groceries, banking, laundry, and gas when you live 60 miles outside of the nearest town, but we make it work. In a lot of ways, I think it’s probably easier (and dare I say, less running around?) to drive an hour into town on a pretty much empty highway to run errands than it is to run errands in a metro area.

Still, every once in a while, it’s nice when the grocery train comes in. Whenever Andy or I venture out to the big city, we almost always make sure we do a major grocery run. The prices are lower and selection is so much better. (Did I mention that we live in a tourist town?) We mound the grocery cart to the point where I’ve been asked if I’m preparing for a blizzard. You can see the clerk shuttering as you cajole your cart – which by now has locking wheels – into the checkout line.

Andy was out of town at the start of the week and he brought home several hundreds of dollars of groceries back with him. This is good, because while he was gone, I found we didn’t have nearly must food on hand as I had thought. Once I moved around the basically empty jars in the fridge that had been taking up space, I realized we had only a few things in the house that were readily edible: three bagels, stale rice cakes, and lots of mustard.

Things are looking at lot less dire now. I think we’ll have plenty of food for the next month, at least, although we do have to stock up on fresh veggies more often than that. An arrival from the grocery train is always welcome: it’s one less thing to worry about as the busy summer season begins.

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End of an Era, Ushered in by Marshmallow Fluff

Sunrise after a rainy day 

It’s official: I will go a-waitressing no more. Yesterday I worked my last lunch shift. This means a couple things. For one, today I plan to hand-wash all of the sweaters I wore this winter so I can pack them on the trip and not have them smell of French fries. For another, it means I can start making decent food choices again.

This goes without saying, but when you waitress, your shift always corresponds with mealtime. Although you could grab little snacks as you work, the days I worked, I inevitably didn’t eat lunch until after 3 and dinner often got dished up around 9:30, if not later. By that time, I was always starving and ate the first calorie laden food I spied in the Shack’s kitchen. As much as it pains me to say it, the regimented life of a temp in a cubicle where I was able to schedule each meal and snack was far better for my waistline.

At the Shack we tried to make decent food choices. We try to get around to eating all of the fresh produce before it turns.

 But sometimes, even when we know what’s the right eating decision, our desires get the better of us. There is no better case in point than the fact that we have teeny tin of organic, fair-trade cocoa sitting next to the super family size Swiss Miss.

(What is a super family size any way? 4? 6?) Guess which one gets dipped into more.

I have read The Botany of Desire and while in high school, I read a book called A Teenager’s Guide to Going Vegetarian. I want to be that person who subsists on organic fruits and nuts and who is unmoved by a plate of French fries. I pretend I’m the girl who orders salads when she goes out, but in actuality, I’ve been known to order things called “The Grizz Burger.” (Yup: ½ pound of burger with cheese, more cheese, bacon, mushrooms, tomato, lettuce . . . ) I use the term “loaded” when I talk about baked potatoes. Deep down, I am just American enough to create things in my kitchen that look like this:

 That’s right, marshmallow fluff. A couple neighbors moved out last week and one of them left a 16 oz. bag of marshmallows and a box of Rice Krispies among the groceries for the taking. On Thursday, I couldn’t resist the urge to make a batch of Rice Krispy bars or “crispy cake” as they call it in England. That’s all well and good, except I didn’t need the entire bag of marshmallows to make the bars and have now spent the last few days eating my way through the remaining marshmallows with a marshmallow here, five marshmallows there.

This morning, in a fit of disgust, I threw out the remaining bag of marshmallows. (I think there were about four left.) With the restaurant life behind me, I have much greater control over my schedule and with that comes tighter reigns on both exercise and diet. There’s tofu marinating in the fridge as I write.

Of course, I’m about to embark on a month long vacation. Might not be the best time for such resolutions.

In other news, I’ve found myself missing the novel. After so many months (years) spent with these characters, I feel a little lost without them.

Ah well, I’ll get over it. I have plenty of little tasks to keep me busy today and all week. Both Andy and I are anxious to be far away for a little while and the trick will be to get stuff done this week so there’s nothing to fret about while we’re away.

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