On Resentment and the Importance of Cheese, or...
I hate cooking. It’s important that you know this about me. I understand others enjoy it, but it’s one of those highly abstract types of understanding; like, I understand the joy of cooking in the way I understand the infinity of space or the concept of hair that bends to your will. It’s all theory and no practice.
I love food; I love eating; but I am culinarily challenged.
That said, when I started this challenge and looked at the chart of compliant vs non-compliant food, it seemed manageable enough.
Look, you can even click here and see for yourself!
I think, to adults (you know, people with impulse control), this is probably an easy list. It’s, like, what - no bread? No cheese? Pssh. No problem! I’m an American, not some wine-swilling Continental. (And even if I were, I could still swill wine! Wine’s okay!) Piece of cake…well, maybe not cake, but piece of something else that’s allowed…
Cut to…I don’t know…20 minutes into the Challenge when I realize I’m no longer allowed to eat a whole wheat English muffin that I don’t even really like?! Fuck that noise, dude! Are you kidding?? You don’t know me!! You don’t know my life!!
My housemate brings home fried dumplings from the hole-in-the-wall down the street? Deep-seated and abiding resentment.
Ned brings home Cotswold cheese? Wedding’s off. (Oh, BTdubs, we’re engaged. That’ll be a separate blog later.)
All of a sudden, my easy choices - toast, sandwiches, taco-truck-everything, pasta, cereal, pizza, string cheese, basically everything at Starbucks-even-the-healthy-stuff-that-doesn’t-taste-as-good-as-literally-anything-else-even-slightly-less-healthy - the joy of not-thinking, gone.
(…Mostly. I mean, there’s wiggle room for non-compliance, but then the guilt kicks in and…ugh.)
The other day, however, I put on my big kid pants, and I cooked a wholly compliant meal.
I want to tell you that it was a transformational experience - it was not. It took entirely longer than ordering something on Postmates. It required entirely more prep than opening the refrigerator door and grabbing leftover Thai. And what was worse, I had to spend all this time figuring stuff out when I was already hungry because God forbid I remember to take care of myself before the need is absolutely imperative.
…I will say the whole process was made more bearable for me - and quite a bit funnier to the anthropological observers who are my housemates - by my one allotted glass of wine. Small victories…
In the end, the meal was…fine? And it contained, like, more than one category of food? Like, my kitchen M.O. (when I bother to have one, which is rare) is to throw a bunch of chicken in the oven for an hour and then eat it for breakfast-lunch-and-dinner until it’s gone. This time? I sauteed Brussels sprouts, and I even roasted an unknown root vegetable.*
[*I bought it thinking it was a sweet potato. I probably should have known, given that it looked nothing like a sweet potato, that it was not, in fact, a sweet potato. It took me until I was most of the way through dicing it to realize that it wasn’t even orange. I, however, soldier on the face of uncertainty. I threw it in the oven and hoped for the best. A half hour and a remarkable lack of food poisoning later, my Cuban roots (pun not intended, but welcome anyway) came flooding back, and I’m almost positive that what I ate was a boniato.]
The point is, I basically learned to make a meal in order to get through this challenge, and I’m probably gonna have to learn to make more before it’s over. But I feel like I have a better grasp on basic kitchen mechanics, and that’s a decent life skill to have, no matter how you come by it.
It’s 2 or 3 weeks in, and, honestly, I’m subsisting mostly on boiled eggs and yogurt. I still resent having to think about what I eat. I still resent my lack of cheese options. I’ve found I’m pretty chill about being told what to do, but very prickly about being told what not to do. And I lose at least one nutrition point most days because guilt does not always outweigh convenience, laziness, or small but satisfying acts of rebellion.
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