Friday, December 21, 2007

Otter Eats, or Inverse Cravings

One of my colleagues started a "bagel club" at work. The deal is that you provide good bagels one friday and you get to eat the bagels all the other fridays. Someone convinced the gang to make it a "breakfast club" only without molly and judd. And here's why. One guy wanted to make waffles. Really wanted to. Enough that he packed up a giant cooler with yeast batter, fluffed egg whites to stir in, homefries, fruit, fresh whipped cream, orange juice, and syrup. Fabulous way to start the day.
waffles with blueberries and strawberries and cream and ham

After the waffle breakfast, I really wasn't hungry by lunch. I had a little can of something out of my emergency rations so I wouldn't get overly hungry in the middle of an experiment. But it turns out you can still get hungry for healthy food when looking at a cookie starts to make you a little ill. I usually have salad for dinner four times a week. This week it was mostly cookies and nibbles of stuff like deli meat and cheese on tortillas. By the end of this week of cookies, I was hungry for fiber. I needed something green.

Usually the danger of shopping while hungry is two-fold: buying too much, and buying too much junk. I have been eating so much holiday food (mostly cookies) this week that my body rebelled and sent me out for salad. I hit the Trader Joe's for more baking chocolate (I need more chocolate hotties - my dad ate all of them before my mom was un-sick enough to want to eat) and spent most of my time in front of the refrigerated veggies instead trying not to buy everything. I managed not to buy a pre-made salad or sandwiches because all the ones I wanted I could make from the stuff in my cart or fridge and still bought about 10 large veggie items. Raw ingredient type things, but still a lot of veggies for a single otter.

I wound up making such a big spinach and bok-choy-mix salad before adding the green beans, broccoli, avocado, corn, tomatoes, and cucumber that I decided to do a wilted salad rather than cut back on spinach. I put the cucumber back in the fridge, but everything else went in the dish. I had also picked up some pre-cooked chicken chunks which came with teriyaki sauce and decided to hard boil some of the remaining eggs that I hadn't used for cookies. I sauted the green beans with shallots in a little butter. Blanched the broccoli in the egg water, nuked the chicken, then tossed the broccoli, frozen corn, spinach and greens mix in the beans with the warmed chicken. I decided to use half a pouch of sauce and stirred it in at the end with the tomatoes.

This went into my big bowl, which I topped with avocado slices, hard egg slices, a twist of salt and pepper, and the juice from half a lime. I realized recently that stir fry gets a great kick from a generous splash of fresh citrus - orange, lime, whatever - tossed on just before eating. It was gorgeous, it was green and protein, and I totally scarfed it down even as I thought of taking a picture. My body was so craving it, and it tasted so good, my eyes rolled back in my head several times during the inhaling process. It's possible I've never savored anything so rapidly before, except maybe that first pizza after a week in a backwoods canoe when I was 14.

Thank goodness I ate before "Bear Eats" came on. I admire his adventurousness, but eewww. I don't think I can keep watching or my eyes might roll back in my head for a different reason. [changing channel] Well, except for monday and other ad hoc days, I'm off work until the new year. And all I can talk about is food with fiber. Yum. What foods are you craving this time of year?

1 comment:

Up My Mind said...

I'm so with you! I've had enough sugar and sweets they really are making me feel ill.

Of course, I've been fighting sinus issues all last week. For the last three days all I've eaten is Chicken Noodle or Vegetable Soup. Yummmm. The cold makes me want warm stuff. So I'm also craving Beef Stew. Oddly enough, I'm also wanting plain ol' ham & cheese sandwiches for lunch.

No More Cookies.