I took pictures, I devoured, I attempted to blog about it. I felt like I had forgotten how to tie my shoes – total case of writer's block. And now that chili recipe is in exile for the next week along with my food soul. I'll explain.
After my husband's accident and surgery, me trying to cut my finger off, and some miserably hot weather, I have not been inclined to do a whole lot of cooking. Something about pain and surgery – whether I'm the patient or the caretaker – seems to dig Junk Food Tierney out from the purgatory to whence she is typically banished. After my shoulder surgery, I ate almost nothing but Easy Mac and beef jerky. I had a Golden Ticket – I was INJURED and in PAIN and I couldn't even shave my armpits and if that is not an excuse to eat my way through the Sad Person aisle at my local convenience store, then I don't know what is.
Anyways, while taking care of my husband after his shoulder surgery, we fell into the same pattern. I should have been cooking vegetables and quinoa and filling our house with intoxicating, healing aromas and maybe burning some sage or something but I am a weak human being of low culinary caliber during times of stress – so I resumed my long-abandoned love affair with Lean Pockets (they're LEAN! Like celery, your body actually incinerates its own FAT when you eat them – the more you know), pickles, sugar-free popsicles and self-loathing. We knew it was time to turn our backs on the dark side when I walked into Super Torta (our local amazing Mexican joint and purveyor of godly burritos) and the guy behind the counter says, “Same, si?” Si, amigo. *sigh* Si.
So after my final meal of vegan-not-vegan-but-basically-vegan chili, I decided to just eat vegetables, fruit and some nuts for at least 7 days, mostly raw or gently cooked. On Sunday, I hit up our Woodstock Farmer's Market and got some greens, green beans, peaches, berries, etc. My breakfast and lunch looked like this, and I grazed on it throughout the day at work:
For dinner, I steamed asparagus and had a handful of nuts. Day one was a BREEZE, I felt so healthy and just, you know, CLEAN (you know?), and I'm pretty sure I lost like 9 pounds and also my pee can now be distilled into pre-natal vitamins, because I am So Full of vitamins.
Well that hippie-dippie bullshit died real quick on day two (today). See, whenever I do any sort of diet improvement or cleanse or anything like that, I crave one thing more than any other – a giant tray of boneless Buffalo wings and a pony keg of blue cheese dressing. So when that horrible craving hits, I try to improvise. This Buffalo chicken kale salad with yogurt-based blue cheese dressing that I made a couple months ago was so good I wanted to ask it to prom:
Tonight, my plan was to steam broccoli, cauliflower and carrots. But I needed my fix in one way or another, and I figure Frank's Red Hot is really just vinegar and peppers so, TOTALLY raw... So I dipped my steamed vegetables in hot sauce. Sans blue cheese (quelle horreur), and I created a barrier with carrots to contain the hot sauce. Because I am an adult, and I know that letting your food touch gives you the cooties. This is probably the least impressive picture of food I will ever post.
It was actually delicious. But I noticed something – a good dip in the hot sauce on say, a bit of broccoli, was overwhelming to my palate. I found myself barely dabbing them in it. If I had wings or fries or tots in front of me, I'd be DOUSING them in Buffalo sauce, and that never struck me as overwhelming. Then I thought about some of my favorite recipes and how they are similar in their simplicity – something fresh, cooked with thoughtful ingredients and a proper technique. When you cook nutritionally void stuff like fried chicken wings and tater tots, slathering it in sauces and dressings makes it palatable. How backwards is that? Instead of enjoying what our local farms can provide – raw and uncooked in most cases – we eat frozen crap and douse it in more crap to choke it down. (I don't mean that, frozen crap. I love you. You're secretly my favorite aisle in the grocery store, especially after mini-corndogs were born)
So this week I will start reminding myself that good cooking starts from the ground up. Learning to appreciate ingredients in their purest form is a good start.
Don't get me wrong though... I will never swear off Lean Pockets, and it will be a cold day in Hell when I don't attack a particularly shitty day with an entire bag of pizza rolls and drink wine through a straw. We all deserve to, and NEED to, indulge ourselves sometimes. This has been a messy blog post... I'm going to sign off and lick the Frank's Red Hot off my keyboard. I'll wash it down with some cucumber water to atone for my shame.
