I won’t go into any more detail than that, but I have been thinking about food. Lay’s potato chips, for example. I LOVE their ingredient list. Potatoes, oil, salt. Sigh. Also, peaches. I was trying to decide if I want to go somewhere and buy a bushel of peaches to bottle. Once you have home-canned peaches, you will cringe at the thought of those slimy yellow wedges that pass for fruit. Granted, store-bought canned peaches are very symmetrical, clean-edged even. Home-bottled peaches are often fringy around the edges, sometimes may fall apart when you try to fish them out of the bottle with your fork. But the taste…heavenly. Sublime in all the ways that the image of heaven evokes…floating, sweet, bright, happy, loving…
My daughter, E, made breakfast for the family this morning. Buttered toast and sausage patties with syrup. I love the smell of sausage and syrup. This is one of E’s comfort foods, no doubt. She especially likes the ‘pancake on a stick’ you can get in the frozen foods section. A sausage link wrapped in pancake. You gotta dip it in syrup.
I recalled one of the worst cases of stomach flu I had in my youth. Eighth grade…I don’t remember the being sick as much as the meal I got to eat when I was better. Fried eggs, sunny side up with toast and fresh sliced garden tomatoes. One of the best meals ever.
Something funny about food is the craving versus being full. Once you’re full, you don’t really care how you got there. In some cases, you regret exactly that which made you full. But when you’re craving, it seems that nothing else will do. I tell myself this when I am feeling especially lazy and don’t feel like cooking. I know that if I wait long enough, DH will suggest ordering pizza. In the interest of saving money and eating healthily, I try to tell myself that once we’re stuffed, we won’t care what we ate to get there. PB&J will do the job just as effectively. So then I will try to come up with something quick but filling. Eggs del Monaco is one of the family favorites. This is a recipe I cooked from Betty Crocker’s little paperback, Cooking for Two, that my mom bought for DH and I when we got married. Loved that little cookbook. I’ve been able to extrapolate many of those recipes into feeding my family of seven now.
Eggs del Monaco
4 or 5 hard-cooked eggs
1 or 2 cans of ‘cream of’ soup, UNDILUTED
1/2 cup to 1 cup shredded cheese, your choice
paprika
“toast points”
This version will feed five or so.
Heat the creamy soup in a soup pan, simmer gently, then add sliced eggs and shredded cheese. Serve over toast, cut diagonally to make ‘points’ and sprinkle with paprika. In my opinion, the more paprika the better.
Filling, hearty, and depending on the soup, meatless too. I’m not a vegetarian by any stretch, but it so happens that many of our favorite dishes have little or no meat.
Back to thinking about food. It’s different when you’re fasting because you want to. You think about the person or the cause for which you are volunteering to go without food. You feel that you are part of something special, and that your needs are not as important as the person or cause you are thinking of. You imagine that if that hungry family was right there, you would happily give them your meal, because you know you can get more later. But when you are involuntarily fasting, because of an ailment that you would rather not mention to the world’s population, it’s agonizing.
Everything sounds good. Strawberry “fig” bars, last night’s leftovers (oatmeal), slightly burnt grilled food, Taco Bell, sausage patties with syrup, yogurt, buttered toast, Eggs del Monaco et cetera ad infinitum. So I will wait, and drink my Tropical Mango Gatorade, and bemoan my sad existence. I might lose three or four pounds, but I guarantee I will gain it back in one fell supper.
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