Cooking and Eating, Eating and Cooking

All the way home from work I was fantasizing about a carrot salad. [Hey, you have your fantasies, and I’ll have mine.] Mom made the best carrot-and-raisin salad I’ve ever tasted, and even though my sister gave me a copy of Mom’s recipe I haven’t been able to duplicate it. So I brainstormed on the drive home: carrots, yes, still need to use up more of those matchstick carrots that I bought for the so-so yellow split pea soup, and then I guess raisins, but I only have golden ones, what about dried cranberries? and then two or three green onions chopped up, but what for the salad dressing? OK, balsamic vinegar it is, just a splash, and a tiny amount of olive oil. All this to marinate in a small bowl while the leeks wilt in a bit of butter and I peel the potatoes for soup. Just enough leftover chicken broth in the fridge to cover the vegetation in the pot, and a good fat pinch of dried rosemary that is one month older than BittyBit and needs to be used up. And the salad eaten while the potatoes tenderize, then the extra vinaigrette tipped out into the sink and a last hurrah with the cornstarch and some milk, and the soup goes into the same bowl because it all gets mixed up inside, anyway. Seconds on the soup, and the rest of it set aside to cool while I split a banana lengthwise to broil it like the recipe in my new Williams-Sonoma Cooking for Yourself, and some butter and apricot jam melting nicely together in the microwave while we try not to cremate the banana, then a quick drizzle of apricot syrup and back under the broiler it goes. No vanilla ice cream like the recipe specifies, because I’d already had my caloric indulgence for the day [a gi-normous double chocolate muffin after I got to work, though let the record show that I virtuously bypassed the free cheesecake at work], so a few good-sized spoonfuls of 1% cottage cheese, though I wished it were ricotta, for a high-protein and reasonably sane dessert. Followed, a couple hours later, by another small helping of soup.

Holy moly, I think I’m channeling Molly Bloom.

I was afraid that sometime along dark-thirty my gizzards would figure out that we consumed more onionesque goodness in one night than we usually eat in a month, and there would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, not to mention my own personal rendition of the “1812 Overture”, complete with cannon-fire and the Nabbersnackle Choir.

I must have been OK, because I don’t remember waking up. And there were no firemen pounding on the door. And since I survived that, there is one last serving of soup that would do very nicely for dinner tonight, except that I have another dance tonight. And I am taking the last of the so-so soup for lunch. I nuked one very small potato last night and diced it up. I hope it’s an improvement. I don’t think it would be very smart to have split pea soup for lunch and potato leek soup for dinner. Not if I don’t want to be jet-propelled.

I did use a different bowl to eat my dessert. And I also stopped mid-brainstorm at the Natatorium on my way home, to pick up a current schedule. I haven’t been in months. First my feet hurt too much because I needed to have the toenails taken care of, and then there was the whole post-surgical ook, but now I think it’s safe for me to take my toes into a public pool, and safe for the other swimmers if I do. I know where my swimsuit is. LittleBit helped me find the bag to carry it; now I just need to locate my spare towel before leaving for work on Monday morning, as I plan to try water aerobics on the way home that night. My membership year is up in March, and I should know by then if I’ll be staying in town after LittleBit graduates, or moving to Foat Wuth Ah Luv Yew.

And now that LittleBit is on the road to seminary this morning, I am heading over to the Y for a gentle workout. I’m trying to remember if the downtown Fort Worth YMCA has an indoor pool. I haven’t been there since I was pregnant with LittleBit and her dad was taking the massage therapy class. I’ve slept since then [but as we all know, not much]. It would save me a nice bundle per year and per month if I could get my chlorinated exercise and my non-chlorinated exercise in the same facility.

No, this is not a bunch of resolutions you are seeing in print. This is the natural result of a great night of dancing on Monday and the wish to enjoy future dances even more. I miss being able to hit the floor with the first song at a dance and not sit down all night. Though it would cut into my knitting-at-the-dances-because-there-is-nobody-I-want-to-dance-with time.

Oh darn!