I eat “breaded” chicken I make myself. I don’t have a recipe for this; I just take my chicken breasts and dip them in tapioca starch, then in beaten egg. Then I roll them in a mixture of half grated Parmesan cheese and half almond meal, which has been seasoned to taste with salt, pepper, mixed Italian seasoning, garlic powder and paprika. Sometimes I’ll try re-dipping this in the egg and then rolling it in the almond mixture again, but that gets extremely messy. Then I drizzle oil over them and bake them at 375 until they’re done. That’s a fairly expensive and time-consuming recipe so I don’t do it very often. It doesn’t exactly kill the craving for fried chicken, but it’s something. Rosie doesn’t like the breading.
I eat Chebe cheese bread when it’s on sale, and I’m going to learn to make a copycat recipe myself.
I eat cauliflower rice. This is another thing that the blame-the-poor crowd would probably tell me was a scandalous luxury as measured in calories per dollar; real rice is exponentially cheaper. But real rice increases my dizziness and head fog, so I make it for Rosie and buy bags of frozen cauliflower rice for myself. I haven’t noticed a significant savings in buying a whole cauliflower and grating it on the cheese grater, especially when I factor in how often I’m too tired to stand up and grate a whole cauliflower and I accidentally let it rot in the fridge. Frozen riced cauliflower doesn’t rot in the freezer, so I buy that. Green Giant and Bird’s Eye make pretty good frozen cauliflower rice. The trick is to ignore the microwave instructions and sautee it with a little salt, pepper, butter and oil. I’ve made fried rice that way, using a regular fried rice recipe; I’ve also put a layer of still-frozen cauliflower rice in place of the noodle layers in lasagna recipes and told myself it was starch. I’m not going to say it’s the same, but it’s something. Bird’s Eye put out a pre-seasoned cauliflower rice blend with four Italian cheeses; sauteeing that with a little cooked chicken is actually quite good. Rosie won’t touch the stuff. More for me.
I eat extra-thick tomato sauce with ground beef, portobello mushrooms and no pasta underneath. Sometimes I spiralize zucchini to go under the sauce, and sometimes I just eat the sauce. Rosie eats gluten-free noodles with a little bit of the sauce on them, but she picks out the meat.
And here’s the part where I’m supposed to tie my everyday annoyances into my tagline, “everything is grace.” Well, it is. Weaknesses of all kinds serve to remind us that we’re not in control. Being too dizzy to brown beef much of the time is a reminder that I’m not in control. Having to learn to like cauliflower rice even though it’s not nearly as affordable or tasty as I’d like is a reminder that I’m not in control as well. I can’t do just what I want– not just fun things but even useful tasks I want to do, like cooking. I can’t eat just what I please whenever I like. I can’t go through the motions of making a cheap meal or a simple fasting meal and pretend it makes me thrifty or pious. I have to think about everything, and be honest with myself. I think humility comes from being totally honest about yourself and everyone else, so I hope I’m growing in much-needed humility.
What’s everyone else been making for dinner lately?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In