Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Food is Sexy

I can still remember a meal I had 14 years ago.  It was a little upscale place in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.  I wore a black wool cocktail dress, with low heels.  My fellow patrons were my best friend Joe, and my friend Paul.  I started with a martini, and the appetizer of salad with crab cakes.  We moved to a beautiful bottle of cab sav, and I had the salmon with a weird but delicious berry crust.  The dessert was a tiramisu with honey-spun topping.  We were there for about 3 hours.  The bill for the 3 of us was nearly 250.00, no small sum in 1998 (no small sum now!).  I wept at the end of the meal, it was that glorious.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am a foodie.

I love food.  I love making it.  I love eating it.  I love finding new, weird foods.  I love shopping in markets, just browsing and grazing and picking up little handmade things in jars.  I love finding things that gross me out the first time I try it, and that I slowly grow to love (hello, Unagi!).  I love gadgets that make food, make it easier to get the food, make it easier to make the food look sexy.  At some point, I have owned every major foodie gadget out there, from a cheap slap-choppy thing, to an industrial bread maker.  I grow my own veggies, make my own salsas and dips, and lick the plate clean at the end of the day.  I love working around food; I've been everything from a car hop in a 50's themed place, to a dishwasher, to a salad girl at my best friend's mum's eatery, to a bartender at a corporate giant, to management at an high end bistro.  I drool over magazines that show new cake decorating techniques, or how to grill the perfect steak.  I mock cake wrecks.  Even now, with no time and even less room to cook, I still work to make things my family will enjoy - my child's food is all hand prepared by me.  I record my in-laws while they cook, hoping to learn secrets from them, and I try their recipes to more or less failure when they leave.

I love delicious, rich, decadent, delightful, sexy, food.

The trick, then, becomes finding the love in food when it is blander, less exciting, less sexy.  And I know, 'diet' food doesn't have to taste 'diety', but let's all be very very honest with ourselves:  CAROB DOES NOT TASTE LIKE CHOCOLATE.  ICE MILK DOES NOT TASTE LIKE HAGGEN-DAAZ.  AN APPLE DOES NOT TASTE LIKE KRISPY KREME.  Lying and saying, "After awhile, it tastes just the same, even better!" insults my intelligence and your own.  It's going to suck.  But, admitting that salad without dressing won't taste as good as salad with a pound of cheese, bacon bits, croutons, and 1000 Island dressing is a step on the way to accepting that yes, you are going to have to eat it if you want to lose weight.

Wish me luck.  Have a cookie for me.  Send me recipes.  All of the above.

2 comments:

  1. Actually, to me, a pear/apple/orange is far tastier than a cookie. Although, admittedly, both contain huge amounts of sugar.

    It's partly based on what you were brought up to expect as a sweet thing...

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  2. Are you on Pinterest? Follow me there:
    http://pinterest.com/hellojodi/
    I have tons of great recipes on there. Well, I think they're great.
    I have a 90/10 approach: I eat super healthy stuff (that still tastes good) 90% of the time than eat candy the other 10% of the time. That works well for me.
    And dieting just plain sucks. We are going against our biology by eating in a calorie deficit. Our brains turn on us because of it. I can only eat in a calorie deficit 3-4 days in a row. Then I eat normally for 1-2 days. Not indulge, just eat exactly as much as my body needs. Then 3-4 days again.
    Those are things that work for me. Anecdotal evidence and all that. Best of luck figuring out what works for you! Just remember: just because it works for most people doesn't mean you have to do it that way. Prefer skipping breakfast? Look into intermittent fasting. Like to eat a lot in one sitting and find 6 small meals a day too paltry? Do what works for you!
    Point of this ramble: you go girl!

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