A Big-Ass Bag of Shallots
I'm not the kind of person to make New Year's resolutions, but I do welcome the custom as a time to reflect on my life and make improvements in it. Throughout 2004 I made an effort to cut out any “easy foods” in my diet - easy foods being anything that can be grabbed off of a shelf and stuffed into my mouth. Having those kinds of foods around just made it too easy to snack all of the time. So I started buying foods that I actually had to put some effort into in order to prepare them for consumption. Nothing fancy, put having to boil water or heat something for twenty or so minutes made it a lot less likely that I would snack so often and increased my chances of eating healthier foods. Now I've made a decision to start preparing meals from raw ingredients - actual cooking; looking up recipes and creating food out of various ingredients and spices and such.
Tonight I just spent about, literally, two hours at the grocery store painstakingly shopping for various foodstuffs. God bless Broadway, with its all night grocery and porno shops. The whole experience has absolutely confirmed my existence as a “bachelor”. Hopefully, if I prepare enough meals, I'll earn the label “bachelor who can impress the ladies with his culinary expertise”. Sure.
I brought a shopping list gathered from various researched vegetarian recipes and I was just befuddled by the whole experience of shopping for raw ingredients such as produce and spices. Really. I've basically spent a lifetime of eating prepared foods and having to pick out basic necessities was confounding. I bought items that I might have never even seen before: turmeric, bay leaves, tarragon, and a big-ass bag of shallots. I don't think I've ever even eaten a shallot, but a recipe for vegetarian soup stock calls for a lot of it. I didn't know what most of these things looked like, so I had to circle the produce section over and over again. I never did find the fennel.
I can home at around 1:30 am with some of the basic ingredients for vegetarian tom kha (probably my favorite food in the world) and just to be on the safe side... pizza, but pizza from scratch - handmade dough made from flour and beer. All this cost me almost a (for me) whopping sixty dollars, and at the end of it I still didn't have anything I could eat without a lengthy preparation, but I guess that was the whole point of this little excursion, isn't it? I'm considering it all an investment in my future. I'll (hopefully) be eating a lot better and, of course, impressing scores of ladies with my homemade meals.
Of course, I am munching on a bag of Jelly Bellys (one of my other favorite foods) I bought as I write this. What can I say? I'm hungry right now.
Tonight I just spent about, literally, two hours at the grocery store painstakingly shopping for various foodstuffs. God bless Broadway, with its all night grocery and porno shops. The whole experience has absolutely confirmed my existence as a “bachelor”. Hopefully, if I prepare enough meals, I'll earn the label “bachelor who can impress the ladies with his culinary expertise”. Sure.
I brought a shopping list gathered from various researched vegetarian recipes and I was just befuddled by the whole experience of shopping for raw ingredients such as produce and spices. Really. I've basically spent a lifetime of eating prepared foods and having to pick out basic necessities was confounding. I bought items that I might have never even seen before: turmeric, bay leaves, tarragon, and a big-ass bag of shallots. I don't think I've ever even eaten a shallot, but a recipe for vegetarian soup stock calls for a lot of it. I didn't know what most of these things looked like, so I had to circle the produce section over and over again. I never did find the fennel.
I can home at around 1:30 am with some of the basic ingredients for vegetarian tom kha (probably my favorite food in the world) and just to be on the safe side... pizza, but pizza from scratch - handmade dough made from flour and beer. All this cost me almost a (for me) whopping sixty dollars, and at the end of it I still didn't have anything I could eat without a lengthy preparation, but I guess that was the whole point of this little excursion, isn't it? I'm considering it all an investment in my future. I'll (hopefully) be eating a lot better and, of course, impressing scores of ladies with my homemade meals.
Of course, I am munching on a bag of Jelly Bellys (one of my other favorite foods) I bought as I write this. What can I say? I'm hungry right now.