Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Lily Eats

Following "How to eat Poorly." What I have and will always have

Taking inventory of my cabinets: Two falafel veggie burgers, two cans of wild salmon, or maybe one of tuna, a tin of baby corn--some coconut milk, some matcha powder, an entire spice cabinet and still no mustard seed, all the ingredients except cooking sherry for the soup my father used to make. I used red wine in Oregon and it was just as well except for indisputably savoring of a substitute. Roommate's stocked seven types of rice and I have wheatberries. There's a struggle to remember what Age told me to eat to ease cramps, except I know she said NO SOY, you're enough of a woman already. Lemon pepper my father bought for me because he uses it on everything in spite of my protests that if I wanted lemon and pepper I'd settle both those issues separately. I want applesauce. Bagels I feel bloated after eating but can't throw out at work night after night. Buckwheat groats I soaked and dried to make the world's blandest cereal which really only means you've got to jazz up the milk. Which is made of almonds--and almond butter, and raw almonds, and roasted, and I remember my babysitter telling me on videotape she wanted me to eat so many teddy-o's I'd turn into one. But I just watched Noah carefully and threw down my spoon when he was finished, figuring what was good enough for him was more than enough for me.

Sherry's vegetable soup and her box of zucchini and tough lettuce and apples that are either good or mealy depending (I'm convinced) on whether or not it's raining. One frozen banana. Teas, all kinds of tea, honeybush, Earl Grey, rooibos, loose and bagged mate, chai, double chai, twig, Mendocino Farmer's Market BLend with whole red clover blossoms, teas with silly names like "Evening in Missoula" when it's really just Chamomile & friends.

Precocious butternut and acorn squash. Ziploc baggies of chopped spinach and diced tomatoes I bought from a farm in Woodbine and froze for the winter. I skipped class to go there after I got so angry I ripped the handle off my car door, and for once Noah was more nervous than me about breaking a rule while I kept telling him it was okay to eat apples as he picked. Standing in piles of rotted mash that smelled like cider and I thought of a book I read as a kid. Emily feeds the rotten apples to the pigs and they've fermented and the pigs get drunk and we picked so many apples I was sure I'd make a pie or apple butter. But we just ate them out of the fridge, all three of us all week and at first it seemed gradual but really it was fast, and they were gone. The fall's been that way, till it got hot for three days and ruined things out on the counter and the fruit flies came back.

Each bag has a cup of tomatoes though, I told Sherry, so now we'll have local tomatoes all winter. The spinach is just as much as I could cram in.

Three garlic bulbs with cloves at various stages of decay. Half a bosc pear in a tupperware with no lid. A knot of ginger with suspiciously clear skin and a drawer full of onions onions carrots, in case the guinea pigs ever find their way to the fridge and must move in there. Everyone must survive anywhere, sometimes.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Since Sherry moved

It's been a lot of mornings of mixed ingredients, and incredulity. Look at what we have doubles of, I say. Nutritional yeast, vital wheat gluten? Who else? A note to tell me to eat the sushi she wrapped in toasted nori and left in tupperware. Makeshift muesli we both eat, pushing our glasses up, with raw oats and hazelnuts and cinnamon and (what we call) milk I make in the blender with almond butter when we're out of raw almonds. A friend drunkenly sleeps in his boots on our living room floor while I spill reconstituted goji berries and buckwheat groats in the kitchen. A mother who can't get going and a father who won't quit. Noah is abruptly living with us, so scarce, barely taking up half a shelf in our hall closet. Eating raw cauliflower for breakfast and bowls of brussel sprouts for dinner. A kind of vegetable-rich squatting, all three of us drinking coffee late into the night and sleeping like shaking or devastated or excited toddlers. We eat like we're anticipating something, all of a sudden three people curled into the table I used alone for so many months. We buy coconut oil with his leftover food stamps and I use it to cook or to keep my face from drying out and think of how Tita uses almond oil on her lips in Like Water for Chocolate. Bismarck and Liliana the guineas hide under their pink igloo when I walk through Sherry's bedroom. A giant bale of hay arrives in the mail, and she says, "Gotta feed the piggums," but it seems to me like the rest of us, they half-eat their food and half-inhabit it.