There used to be sun, but it’s gone now. Happy Friday.
One
Discovered something delectable. A lovely person occasionally bequeathes me large pieces of meat, flats of eggs, bacon, and other delicious food items, such as the soul craves, what with all the children I have to feed, and this week he pressed into my icy hand a precooked turkey breast. I had never been the recipient of something like this before. Like buying a chicken already cut into bits, it has never occurred to me to buy something like part of a turkey, cooked or uncooked. What would I do with it? The answer was surprising to me.
Put it in the oven and heat it up.
So that was day one. Heated it up, and ladled it down the throats of the children with prefab baked “French” fries (no French person would recognize them, maybe they really should be called “Freedom Fries”–freedom from caring, that’s what I say).
Day two Matt made a gorgeous turkey and mushroom soup. I was suprirsed by how delcious it was. Not because Matt can’t make soup, but because how great is turkey breast really?
Day three I diced the remaining turkey and made up some sort of strange sauce out of vegetables, turkey, goat cheese, sour cream, cheddar, and stock which I then ladled over non descript “noodles.”
In the middle of a second helping I realized the truth.
Two
Whoever roasted this turkey, and whatever he put in it–I mean, it must be stuffed with something to make it so moist and delicious, something I don’t have access to in my own kitchen–elevated a plain dry breast to heights luxurious. This turkey arrived in a state of magic–chemical magic, I am sure, but magic none the less. Like a ham arriving all salty and ready for a bath of Coca Cola.
Three
So the very thin yough person I have been watching on YouTube, explaining to me how I have already culinarily failed my children by giving them any sugar at all, especially sugary drinks, and how I will shrivel up and die because of spending a rather lot of time in the sun, and how in every way I am a failure of the French ideals, which I wasn’t aspiring to achieve, but maybe hoped would happen without my trying, also made a meal of saying how you should never eat anything with chemicals injected into it.
Just like that article (can’t find it now) about how you shouldn’t eat meat at all lest you die.
Four
And what I ask myself is, what price purity? Because I have a lot of food choices, too many really. But all of them have to circle around the fact that I have to feed 8 people in one manner or another every single day, over and over and over and over. And educate and clothe them (well, I don’t have to educate one of them, he’s already been educated, and he actually does most of the cooking, so I really don’t need to be whining about anything). These people have to eat.
Five
If I were to embark on a French-inspired quest for food purity, what would I have to give up? That’s the question. And the answer is
Six
Literally everything else in my life. I would have to cook all the meals instead of only one per day because the children wouldn’t be able to get their own prefab breakfasts. I would have to wake up at the Rosy Fingered Derrière of Dawn and slew around organic eggs and homemade I don’t even know what. At supper I would have to make supper, instead of watching the evening tide assault on my kitchen as a hoard of unruly barbarians set to, burning grilled cheese sandwiches (the bread comes out of a bag and has high fructose corn syrup in it because that kind of bread is only 83 cents and they eat a whole loaf a day, whereas the kind without fructose costs 2.78 and they would still eat a whole loaf every day) macaroni and cheese from a box, scrambled eggs, sandwiches piled high with grocery store sliced ham, and not the good kind.
And if I had to cook all the meals, I wouldn’t be able to do the laundry, clean the house, do the school, write the blog posts, paint my toenails, repot my seedlings, clean the house, beg people to come to church, clean the house, and report to the government on how it is that I’m doing the school.
Would giving up all these other things to go vegetarian and sugarless be worth it?
Seven
I gonna go ahead and whisper a resounding NO.
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