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Posts Tagged ‘carbohydrates’

  1. A Day More about Veggies and Books

    August 25, 2011 by The Yum Yum

    After eating the macaroni and cheese for two days straight, I decided I should dedicate some time to vegetables. Gigi fortunately made salad today, along with some grilled/baked (graked?) vegetable and butter beans, so most of what I’ve eaten today has been relatively healthy.

    I am also again in possession of Flintstone vitamins.

    Whether or not I shared with everyone, I think I’ll mention it now: I made an executive decision last week to take a kind of spiritual retreat and not venture out so much. Much of my time now is being spent in prayer, meditation, and various kind of spiritual focuses. Meditation is far too precious of a practice for me to not pay more attention to it, and whether or not everyone knows, I meditate every day and have for something like two, almost three years. Even at this point, I still can’t totally seem to stop my thoughts; it happens here and there, which is very relaxing, though there’s a kind of strange tension that remains when I’m observing my mind and there are no thoughts. It’s not really how they describe it in the books; then again, there are also various “stages” of meditation, so I won’t presume that I actually know more than I do.

    Cooking and eating, being a bit of a religious experience for me as well, have remained high on the list of focuses in my miniature retreat. It’s temporary and only lasting for a month, with the exceptions of previously scheduled events and events that are scheduled ahead of time.

    Tomorrow I’ll be making a dish to take to my friend Kelly’s house. I’ve nicknamed the event MODEL- Mystics On Deck Examining Life. The issue at hand is not knowing what dish to take to Kelly’s, but naturally, between now and the time I arrive at her doorstep smiling and buzzing in a WASPy way, I’m sure something excellent will come up.

    Also, tomorrow I’ll try to repost the Onyx Plate’s blog about her t-shirts so all interested buyers can contact her about them. The t-shirts go along to some degree with the “FOOdie” joke I made, and they actually look really cool for anyone who’s a foodie.

    In other news, I discovered today that not all the Morning Star Spicy Black Bean Burgers were eaten! I couldn’t find the box earlier today and guessed we were out, but lo and behold, I went to check for something in the freezer and found them tucked away. That’s what you get for having people bring massive amounts of okra.

    Truth be told, before writing this entry, I had already written a pithy 500-word blog entry about racism (I’m reading The Help, and my inner activist stood to attention), but then I deleted it as I lost the fervor somewhere and realized writing a long blog laden with curse words wouldn’t actually change anything that happened in the 1960s. Sometimes I can’t get over the stupidity of racists. If I weren’t a nice person, I would probably ask them how their brain functions if they’re so backwards and stupid. Alternately, I would ask if they were in the least bit concerned that there might be a Hell.

    But I’m a nice person, so I don’t inquire in such a manner.

    Beaux

     

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  2. Carboholism: It’s a Family Thing

    July 14, 2011 by The Yum Yum

    By now, most of you, or all of you, should know that my family is genetically predisposed to a form of eating disorder I’ve informally dubbed “carboholism.” This means that we’re carboholics, and carboholics just love carbohydrates. We can’t get enough of them. The absolute perfect meal consists of a macaroni and cheese baked into a sandwich and served with a side of mashed potatoes and breadsticks, all topped off with having a bowl of cereal. If you think this is a joke, you had better think again.

    I will prove the skeptical wrong by admitting that I stopped after that first paragraph in order to grab the last of my Italian breadsticks and start munching on them. These taste superior to potato chips- light, crunchy, and fun to eat. Maybe I’ve succumb to marketing for adults. Woe is me.

    Now another breadstick has just met its fate. You all think I’m joking, but I’m really, actually, truly not.

    My family has a problem.

    Gigi’s problem is well documented and goes back several years to incident that confirmed she indeed has no escape from her love of bread. I went with my friend Lizzy and her mother on an outing to various places one day, and one location had baked goods that they were about to throw out- perfectly good bread that could still be eaten but had to, according to their rules, be tossed.

    Lizzy’s mother wasn’t having it, and so she obtained the bread- huge bagfuls of various kinds of bread which they gladly shared with me, and which I gladly brought home.

    My newfound glory came as I entered Hickory Shade bearing in arms great bundles of joy baked from every grain and kind of bread possible, filling our kitchen to the brim with the delicious, fluffy breads.

    Actually, many of them were quite hard and bland, but that’s beside the point- these were carbs, good, solid, real carbs, and they were absolutely free, and we had saved the people from wasting them. Again, this makes us heroes, and we won. We won so hard that day that we practically created all the awesome sauce in the world for the next two weeks.

    This happened the weekend of Spring Break in my junior year of high school.

    So, fast-forward a few months into the future, and Sarah, Lizzy, and Samantha had all gone shopping with me, and we brought in whatever we had bought that day.

    Gigi walks into the room.

    “Where’s the bread?”

    My friends looked from me to Gigi back to me. I looked at Gigi, puzzled.

    I had no idea what she was talking about. We hadn’t been sent out for bread.

    She said, “I just thought you might have some bread.”

    My friends looked from Gigi back to me back to Gigi this time.

    As I pressed the issue further, I realized that she had been suffering from the day’s bout with carboholism. The sheer overwhelming bliss created by God’s random grace of carbohydrate heaven on us a few months earlier had so steeped in Gigi’s nerves that the slightest crinkling sound had reminded her of that ecstasy and brought her into the kitchen in expectation that God’s great bounty had indeed returned and was surely a sign of Divine Providence and not just a random coincidence within the universal scheme.

    Now, you’re probably all sitting there, chuckling to yourself, saying, “Oh, chuckle chuckle, me, chuckle, Gigi is just a silly goose.”

    Be not deceivéd- the carboholism is a strong set of genes. If I catch a whiff of yeast rolls, I will shank the nearest old lady, steal her purse, and run to buy as many as I can with the money allotted in the purse I just stole.

    Again you are laughing, but Betty Sue Mills is not.

    Cooking speaks to us in a way that requires us to use carbs in everything. Can you imagine making Italian food without some kind of carbohydrate? No noodles? No breads? No potatoes? Would the food even be Italian at that point???

    Carbs do us a great favor. They give us a “filler” of sorts to which the rest of the food we’re cooking can adhere. Noodles aren’t so great all by themselves- they at least need some kind of broth, some kind of friend to go along with them. Likewise with the veggies that we might normally enjoy. Stacking a tomato on top of an onion and adding some lettuce could quickly become messy without some sandwich bread or toast!

    So carboholism isn’t a totally horrible thing.

    But again, watch yourself around me and make sure not to get me too terribly close to any bread factories while you’re with me. If you have no children to sell or purses to steal, I will likely take out a life insurance policy on you just to get bread.

    What’s even more fun is carboholism that involves carbs and sugar. Donuts are essentially fried dough with a sugar glaze on them. Cinnamon rolls are carbs baked with cinnamon, butter, and sugar, and often covered in a glaze of sugar.

    Count. Me. In.

    And brownies? Brownies are carbs with chocolate. Chocolate. CHOCOLATE!

    Need I say more?

    Beaux


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  3. Food: Not Just Physical!

    June 29, 2011 by The Yum Yum

    Okay, so the title isn’t implying that food doesn’t really exist or is ethereal or anything along those lines, but I do want to make a very important point in this blog. I may have already written about this before, and as always, forgive me. I don’t have the time to go back and go through every single one of my blogs to make sure that I haven’t written about something before when I start to write a new blog, and many of you may understand what I mean by that.

    So, the reality is that food is not simply a physical process for us. If you were to ask someone a question about why they eat, they would likely respond that people eat in order to give energy to the organism, to fuel it, to survive and stay alive. That’s all great and well, but that doesn’t really explain much- and that’s not why most of us eat, either.

    The fuel for the organism and body bit is absolutely accurate- to a degree. But that only explains in a very limited way why we eat at all without diving a little more deeply into why food is prepared in an artistic form, why we enjoy cooking a variety of foods, why there are so many different ways to eat the same food, which takes us to a peculiarly human dimension of things.

    Food is not just a physical phenomenon. Food is also very much so a psychological phenomenon- food has a meaning behind it, and humans are master symbol-users and symbol-inventers.

    This blog actually began while I ate a piece of Bapaw’s birthday cake, wondering in my head why, even though I know cake is loaded with sugar and carbs and all kinds of wonderful nasties for the body, I would continue eating it. The ideas comes up to me that even though we have plenty of fruit and vegetables here, I seem to choose foods that aren’t as healthy more often- not that I don’t eat tomatoes, but let’s just say I eat way more potatoes than I do tomatoes, and so the question remains as to why this is.

    Some people would try to explain it in terms of biological reactions in the brain- carbs give the body a kind of high and so on, and we become addicted to them. But I think a better answer is that the food that isn’t quite as healthy is also symbolic of comfort, of happy times, of good memories, of friends and families. Vegan food is great, of course, and I wouldn’t trade the great meals we’ve had over at Kelly’s house for anything in the world. In, fact such healthy food, when prepared correctly (as Kelly does) tastes superior to foods that aren’t nearly as healthy, though this something many would scarcely believe.

    Carbohydrates are the real culprit here. But again, they’re easy to eat- raw tomatoes are more difficult to eat, for instance, because they’re so acidic, and the harsh taste makes me recoil. The same can be said for onions and other vegetables. Perhaps they can be mixed in a certain way that would make them okay, though.

    Anyway, even if pizza or birthday cake isn’t the healthiest food world in the world, it reminds us of something- of happiness, of long-ago, of Friday nights, of something out of the ordinary. Sometimes, the converse is true- we’re reminded of just how peculiar and powerful the “ordinary” can be.

    Sometimes, too, one can have a craving for a particular food, and one can eat something else. But one is still not satisfied in having eaten a meal- one wants a particular food. This happened to me sometime a few months ago dealing with honey buns. I craved a honey bun, and no matter what I ate, my brain told me that I needed to eat a honey bun. The same held true for the Nutty Bars until I had one that was slightly melted at work, and the nasty taste of the lukewarm chocolate disturbed me so much that I swore off those evils sticks of sugary carbs for the next five-hundred years.

    The exception to this process is when I have drunk water instead of something like soda- I forced myself to have water instead of soda, and then eventually the water proved itself to be superior in quenching thirst than soda. This doesn’t always hold true, though.

    Anyway, I just thought I’d write another entry since the one earlier today wasn’t very good.

    Beaux


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  4. My Unhealthy Affair: Confessions of a Carboholic

    March 16, 2011 by The Yum Yum

    So I’ll admit that I should probably rename my pesco-vegetarian self to something more like a “carbotarian” because of the vast amount of carbs I seem to consume.

    I ventured into the grocery store earlier with every intent of buying ramen. On the drive to the grocery store, my mind began to whir and blurt out all kinds of ideas.

    “Wouldn’t it be great to cook some pasta? Italian food sounds good.”

    “Oh, I should get some French bread.”

    “Maybe I should check to see if they have rosemary.”

    Half an hour later and $9 well spent, I have returned to my home with mainly carbohydrates.

    My purchases included the following:

    • One loaf of French bread
    • One souper six-pack of ramen (shrimp flavored)
    • Two packages of bow-tie pasta
    • A box of frozen Pierogies that I plan to sauté

    Needless to say, the only non-carbohydrate aspect of my purchases is the cheese in the pierogies.

    Vegetables don’t appeal to me nearly as much as they should, what with my being vegetarian. Maybe the word is kind of a strange word to use, but anyway, let’s continue on.

    Continuing to read through my new cookbook, I’ve been horrified to see that Deborah Madison speaks of cooking things such as corn, greens, and squash. The idea that I will have to suffer through those recipes makes me shudder terribly.

    The saving grace is the realization about food I had last night: maybe it isn’t that I don’t like these various kinds of vegetables but more that I’ve never had them prepared quite properly. A proper preparation of a dish can completely change the way it tastes, and too often in our culture, we rush through things just to have a sense of accomplishment.

    Well, I’d rather be late and look great than be on time and be a mess.

    One major thing that seems to be missing from the vegetable world is the flavor of savoriness. Meat has a certain savory quality that one just doesn’t find in a tomato or a cucumber. Let’s just be honest about this. So vegetarians by and large make up for the lack of inherent savoriness with oils and dairy products (at least in my best calculation.)

    My friend Kelly prepared a delicious wrap for me once that included a medley of vegetables and some cream cheese, and it tasted as good as any professional wrap one might find anywhere! That shocked me, that it was so satisfying, but then a lot of vegetarian recipes don’t really cross our minds on a daily basis, so we miss the potential for a satisfying vegetable meal.

    That being said, I’m going to push forward and go chow down on some pierogies now.

    Beaux


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