Vampire Cookies

In which our Heroine yearns for the Wheat Berry. 

Dear Diary,

I’ve just finished ordering over $600 worth of organic, non-GMO foodstuffs.  I am so excited.  I justify my shopping spree tonight by the fact that I feel like having food storage available, and also that I am one of those odd ducks that actually uses the oddity called the wheat berry.  I have a wheat grinder, and I’m not afraid to use it.  Even though it is kind of scary and loud (it sounds like the Chainsaw Massacre in action on my kitchen counter).  Images of bloodletting aside, the results are worth it.  Did you know that it only takes a matter of a few days (presumably sitting on a store shelf) for wheat flour to lose its supposed nutrients and turn rancid? However, if recently ground and then stored in a refrigerator, those nutrients stay intact, plus you get the benefits of high fiber that is usually stripped from white flour.  Oh, and then “They” add bleach to the flour to make it pretty.  Mmmm—I just love a good cup of bleach with my average, everyday, death-defying meal.

Speaking of those kinds of meals… Remember reading the nutrition panel on the back of cereal boxes back in college?  I used to feel somewhat mollified in eating my high sugar breakfasts because all those B vitamins were identified as present, listed out in a clean column next to a cheesy kid’s game—and in exact amounts too!  With military precision, aligned into a column, each one would have the number “25%” neatly labeled next to said vitamins.  A year or two ago I learned how very wrong it is to have this kind of homogeneity in my food.  Think of those delicate nutrients being sifted, damaged in the process, lined up in rows, labeled, and sent on their merry ways inside plastic wrapping.  It seems a tad eerie to me now.  Maybe it’s the crazy rock music I’m listening to right now (Eclipse soundtrack—vampires you know), but I begin to feel that we torture our own food and then enjoy eating it!  I bet vampires get more nutrition out of their meals.

Also on my order list are my new discoveries of: Soft White Pastry Berries (“perfect for pie crusts, cookies, muffins, angel food cakes”), Real Salt (“similar to Celtic, but harvested in Utah,” thus cheaper), and Coconut Oil, organic, extra virgin.  I can only hope that the coconut oil comes in a container and not as a semi-solid brick or some other massy shape.  I’m only a little nervous about the weird items.  But I’ve got to learn sometime, right?  Meanwhile, I munch on cookies full of non-GMO, non-tortured, non-militarized, and non-carcinogenic fresh ground wheat, real butter, and cane sugar.  Take that, vampire cookies everywhere—you shall not have my brain cells!

Rosie the Food Snob Riveter

In which our Heroine eats Vegetables in front of other People 

There are only two words for me these days: Food Snob.  First off, I found a lovely looking recipe for homemade cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving dinner and decided that would be my great offering at the dinner table this year—whether anyone wanted it or not.  As I plugged away at the hour-long process of slowly cooking up pears, soaking cranberries until they popped!, and thinly slicing ginger root, I thought non-stop of how utterly wrong it is that something as potentially beautiful and delicious as home-made cranberry sauce should morph over the years into the molded lump of dull red that slithers out of the can each year during our commemorative meal of bounty.  “When,” I thought, “did it become traditional to slice up a jelly that still has the pattern from the can quivering on its surface?”  (The other and probably less intact side of my brain decided it must have been the Beef Wellington years at the Kennedy White-house.  I have no support for this reason, but some random part of me regards Jackie O as important enough to have influenced decades-worth of Betty Crocker pictures of the Thanksgiving spread in America.) Seriously though, it was my first time ever experiencing cranberry sauce NOT from the can. 

In addition, last week I was at a meeting with some other people during the lunch hour.  The friend who was sitting across from me pulled out one of those highly processed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that you get in huge frozen boxes at Costco.  Its familiar packaged yumminess called out to me as she broke the seal on the bag and pulled its unnatural white oval shape out and proceeded to eat it.  Earlier she had found a baggie of leftover Halloween candy in her capacious mommy bag.  This is how she began her lunch, but the PBJ sandwich was the real headliner for her meal.  Even with the sight of such ambrosia before my eyes, I held firm (mostly because I had to) and pulled out my own lunch bag.  Unfortunately, I made the mistake of setting it on the vacant seat next to me.  Over the course of the next few minutes I saw every person’s eyes flick over and settle on my brightly colored and see-through plastic bag.  Honestly, its like I was showing my knickers or something, for all the shame I felt at being so openly healthy. 

And open I was.  There is a bit of the devil in me at times like this.  I began with the humble but vivid red-yellow apple, next turning to the perfect green of my crunchy celery stick.  I also had exactly one long and perfectly tapered carrot, which was of course bright orange because they never come any other way.  It was the fresh green beans that did it.  Velvety green and looking like they’d just come out of my mom’s garden, I’d just begun on the pile when my friend interrupted the conversation to say, “Wait—is that a green bean?” as if it were an alien life-form.   Realizing her own mistake at sounding food-snobbish, she quickly added, “Its just that I’ve never seen anyone eat them raw like that before.”  Feeling pity, I explained that this is how they come out of the garden.  Then, to add insult to probable injury, I added, “And they are all organic too.” 

It’s possible that I went too far by peeling my luscious oranges just then.  Juices squirted out from under my fingers, permeating the air with a tang that you just can’t process in a factory or shelve in a supermarket.  Oh!  The smell of a good piece of citrus is mouth-watering, isn’t it?  Is there any other word for me at that moment?  No.  Loud and clear: FOOD SNOB!!!

No, I am not eating perfectly.  When I’m tired, I still pull out the easy food.  I figure that if I’m tired and headachy enough to practically feel the cancer growing, then it is probably okay to just eat a microwave burrito.  But I’m trying, and most of the time I am eating WAY BETTER than before the cancer.  I tell you that I feel so much better!  My big realization for the day is that healthy food is called healthy for a reason: it gives you health!  (I know, my rocket-science is astonishing).  By the way, as you read the health line, you should be picturing strong biceps, like this:

I’d like to muster the proper amount of offended-ness from the PBJ vs. green bean face-off, but my somewhat-intact memory tugs at me, gently reminding me of my own past food snobbery—times when I may have been stupid enough to say something like, “Man, you gotta live… How can you eat that stuff all the time? Mmmmnmmn… (satisfied smacking sounds) All those vegetables are nothing compared to this luscious cheese-cake…”

Scoff and Scorn: Another Tangential Conversation, or the Angels will have to wait again

In which our Heroine attends Book club and for once, finds herself Mute.

It has come to my attention that some of you may be scoffing at me for the organic food idea.  I think this may be a possibility because I encounter that quizzical look people give you any time I mention it.  You know, the one that points a finger and mouths, “Crazy hippy extremist.”  Last evening I attended my book club meeting and received a full round of these looks.  At one point near the end (while innocently sampling some cake), I quietly mentioned to the ladies that I was considering going organic.  My answer?  First, a loud and full scoff from one (who for some reason already seems to think I’m an idiot), and disparaging laughter from a few of the others.  At most, I usually receive only half-scoffs and a slight-turn-the-head-away as if I can no longer be looked at full-on.  The full scoff accompanied by intelligent toss of the head from a woman who I respect was hard to take. 

The second part of my answer consisted of a completely unrelated comment about how bedbugs and cockroaches are coming back because we’ve stopped using DDT.  Shock and horror! They’ve even made it to Alaska! Apparently, even the far north has been infested.  I dislike both bedbugs and cockroaches.  I don’t want them sleeping with me.  However, I also don’t want to be bedmates with cancer.  But to tell you the truth, I have no plans to ingest DDT or cockroaches, so why was this even a part of the conversation?

I found myself in a situation so preposterous that I was actually mute.  Therefore, if you don’t mind, I’ll say to you what I wish I could have said to the others.  If you’ll remember, I grew up on a farm.  Whenever the crop-duster plane would come out, flying low in the dusty blue sky and depositing great vats of chemical from its belly, my mother would hastily herd me indoors.  I think we were done using DDT at that point as a country, but my mom still didn’t want me hanging out in a chemical field.  Thanks, mom.  I appreciate your common sense and lack of scoffing laughter.  Though why it was okay to put chemicals on our grain and the hay that would feed our cattle—which we would then ingest— I can’t quite figure out.  It is not my intention to be some extremist who can’t enjoy herself in a restaurant.  I’ve never yet tried any wheat-grass smoothies because it sounds distinctly un-tasty.  But I will if I have to—and I think I do. 

Okay, I’m done.  You may scorn me now.  Scoff on your own if you want, but please don’t write your scoff in a comment box!