Sinus Infection as a Weight Loss Tool
Why is it that immediately after the fun and frolic we know as Halloween, germs promptly attack us from outer space, invade our bodies, and make us miserable until April? No matter how many times I wash my hands, alien viruses invade my immune system and shut down my mother board down...for weeks. Don't kid yourself, you're not getting frequent colds...it's just one major huge germ that screws with us for months: you might feel better for a few days or even a week, while the germs are on vacation, then they work overtime and POOF, you have a relapse.
The fashion world should design a Kleenex box necklace...at least we would be in style as we haul around the most necessary item in our wardrobes for six months. I can deal with all the nose-blowing and coughing, for the most part. It's the not being able to taste anything part that wears me out. Taste is imperative to a Foodie, and that's where I bog down.
When I get a sinus infection, as in, every week of my life between October-April, I can't smell anything. And I can't taste anything, either. Wow, nature's serious weight loss tool, right? If you can't taste, then food loses its appeal, so why bother, right? You should be able to drop, say, twenty pounds over the course of a healthy sinus infection, shouldn't you, by subsisting on cough drops and Nyquil?
The problem is that we Foodies, we gotta eat real food, or we'll go crazy, because it's what we live for. Here I am, sinuses packed full of stuff you don't want to imagine, can't breathe except through my ears, and I've been dreaming all morning of a Taco Bell Burrito Supreme. Naturally, at lunch time, I head for the Border, take a bite out of that puppy...only to experience a loss that is comparable to extreme grief. It looks good, it feels right in my hand, the textures on my tongue are intact...but it's like eating cardboard, there's no taste. Wait, cardboard has a taste. This burrito is totally devoid of any flavor whatsoever. The scary thing is that it reminds you of that dreaded essential tool of dieting your mother told you about whenever you complained of hunger...it tastes like water. Nothing. Zip. Nada.
But it's lunch time, which means I'm supposed to eat. So I alternate taking bites of tasteless burrito and blowing my nose, hoping to get the tiniest smidgen of taste in my mouth, but all that happens is that I clog up my ears and spill burrito all over my shirt. I stare at my half-eaten burrito, and do the unthinkable...I throw it away.
I find a mini-Snickers bar leftover from Halloween. This will taste good, it's chocolate, I hope as I pop it into my mouth. Do you realize how awful a Snickers bar is when you can't taste the caramel, the nougat, the nuts or the chocolate? Your brain knows there's a Snickers bar in your mouth, it feels right, but there's no taste. You feel as if you've just eaten a mouthful of rubber cement, and you begin to gag. You can barely swallow that mini-Snickers bar...you decide a glass of water will do just fine...a glass of water?
No wonder beauty pageants are held after germ season...
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
What, Exactly, Made Rosie "Crackle?"
Last night I had the distinct pleasure (I'm serious!) of dining with my husband and young son. It is our Monday night tradition to eat at the local Chik-Fil-A (translation: Mom doesn't have to cook because it's Family Nite).
On Family Nite, there's usually a person wandering around the restaurant, dressed in a very large Chik-Fil-A Cow costume. It is apparent that this poor soul can't see a thing in that cow's head, because he/she/it takes very tentative steps, and when he/she/it attempts to hand you a coupon for your trouble, the coupon is always about a foot away from where it should be, if you were actually being handed said coupon by a person who was not wearing a large cow's head.
On this particular evening, the Cow was distributing those little vented paper hats that 50's-style diner cooks used to wear...or at least, I imagine that they wore them, seeing as how I wasn't born until 1959. In any case, my son made it out of the restaurant with one of those paper hats on his head, and all this nostalgia made me scan the car radio pre-sets until the Oldies station blared loudly enough to make the steering wheel vibrate.
Just as we pulled away from Chik-Fil-A, Neil Diamond's hit, "Cracklin' Rosie" began to play. Now personally, I have always liked Neil Diamond...most of his songs can make you want to sing out loud, or in this case, play it now, play it now, play it now, my baby...
So there we all were, two normally reserved middle-aged adults and an 8-year old boy wearing a paper hat with cows on it, belting out "Cracklin' Rosie" at the top of our lungs. People stared at us as we stopped at red lights. In one special moment of red-light hilarity, I popped open the sunroof, told my son to unbuckle, and he gleefully stuck his paper hat-wearing little head out into the night, screaming, "Oh, I love my Rosie child...she got the way to make me happy..."
How he knew the words to this 35-year old song, at the tender age of 8, I don't have a clue. And yes, he did re-buckle his seat belt when the light turned green.
When Neil was finished singing, my son asked, "Mom, why did Rosie crackle? Was she struck by lightning?" My husband and I looked at each other, silently mouthed "Harvard" as we so often do when astounded by our offspring, and then I said, "Hmmm, well, that could be a plausible reason for someone to crackle...or maybe she was unwrapping a candy bar."
Luckily a Supremes song came on, so we quickly changed gears. My dear husband loves the Supremes...there is nothing like a grown man singing "Someday, we'll be to-gehhhh-thuh" in a falsetto to make you drive as fast as you can toward the house.
If you know the real reason why Rosie crackled, please, do tell.
Last night I had the distinct pleasure (I'm serious!) of dining with my husband and young son. It is our Monday night tradition to eat at the local Chik-Fil-A (translation: Mom doesn't have to cook because it's Family Nite).
On Family Nite, there's usually a person wandering around the restaurant, dressed in a very large Chik-Fil-A Cow costume. It is apparent that this poor soul can't see a thing in that cow's head, because he/she/it takes very tentative steps, and when he/she/it attempts to hand you a coupon for your trouble, the coupon is always about a foot away from where it should be, if you were actually being handed said coupon by a person who was not wearing a large cow's head.
On this particular evening, the Cow was distributing those little vented paper hats that 50's-style diner cooks used to wear...or at least, I imagine that they wore them, seeing as how I wasn't born until 1959. In any case, my son made it out of the restaurant with one of those paper hats on his head, and all this nostalgia made me scan the car radio pre-sets until the Oldies station blared loudly enough to make the steering wheel vibrate.
Just as we pulled away from Chik-Fil-A, Neil Diamond's hit, "Cracklin' Rosie" began to play. Now personally, I have always liked Neil Diamond...most of his songs can make you want to sing out loud, or in this case, play it now, play it now, play it now, my baby...
So there we all were, two normally reserved middle-aged adults and an 8-year old boy wearing a paper hat with cows on it, belting out "Cracklin' Rosie" at the top of our lungs. People stared at us as we stopped at red lights. In one special moment of red-light hilarity, I popped open the sunroof, told my son to unbuckle, and he gleefully stuck his paper hat-wearing little head out into the night, screaming, "Oh, I love my Rosie child...she got the way to make me happy..."
How he knew the words to this 35-year old song, at the tender age of 8, I don't have a clue. And yes, he did re-buckle his seat belt when the light turned green.
When Neil was finished singing, my son asked, "Mom, why did Rosie crackle? Was she struck by lightning?" My husband and I looked at each other, silently mouthed "Harvard" as we so often do when astounded by our offspring, and then I said, "Hmmm, well, that could be a plausible reason for someone to crackle...or maybe she was unwrapping a candy bar."
Luckily a Supremes song came on, so we quickly changed gears. My dear husband loves the Supremes...there is nothing like a grown man singing "Someday, we'll be to-gehhhh-thuh" in a falsetto to make you drive as fast as you can toward the house.
If you know the real reason why Rosie crackled, please, do tell.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
You Eat the Pumpkin... Point Me Toward the Chocolate!
It's November, which means that:
1. Leaves fall
2. Sweaters become desirable
3. People try to force-feed you cooked pumpkin in various and sundry forms
I like a good slice of pumpkin bread, or a pumpkin cookie, or even a pumpkin cream cheese muffin from Starbucks on occasion. But I cannot abide pumpkin pie, no matter how flaky the homemade crust, or how sweet the dollop of whipped cream on top. And let's face it, after you've smelled pumpkin pie spice for roughly three minutes, you've pretty well captured the essence of Thanksgiving, and it's time to move on to better things. Like chocolate.
I'm not dissing Thanksgiving...we all truly have more blessings than we can count. I'm personally a fan of breaking bread with friends, family and even strangers, it's good to have fellowship. But something isn't quite right with a tradition where we strain our respective dining room tables with more food than we can possibly eat in one week, when people are homeless and starving and displaced. My family seeks to overcome this inequity by inviting scads of people we barely know to dine with us...and then of course, asking them to bring a dish. Heaven forbid we run out of green bean casserole.
And then to add insult to injury, after enjoying all this thankfulness and fellowship and gravy, you are considered Un-American if you don't blissfully partake of a slice of pumpkin pie. What? your relatives ask you, How you can you not like pumpkin pie?
I'll tell you how...I prefer not to eat things that remind me of my son's diaper years.
I bet if that good Pilgrim lass Priscilla Alden had known about chocolate, she'd have whipped up a chocolate pie that would have sent Squanto and his pals into the forest faster than you can say "seconds," foraging for more cocoa beans. And today instead of Hershey's, we'd have Squanto's, an American chocolate bar, invented by a Native American. Go figure.
Alas, the pumpkin pie tradition is slow to die. In fact, people continue to find new and interesting (to them) ways to cook with pumpkin. I admit it, pumpkins are very cute. But I prefer to hack my pumpkins into Jack -O'-Lanterns, then smash them into a bazillion pieces when the neighbors aren't looking. As David Letterman knows, there's nothing that says "smash" like a pumpkin.
So all you Martha Stewart wannabes out there, keep your pumpkin pie recipes to yourselves; at my house, we're having chocolate fudge pie, because Squanto would have wanted it that way!
It's November, which means that:
1. Leaves fall
2. Sweaters become desirable
3. People try to force-feed you cooked pumpkin in various and sundry forms
I like a good slice of pumpkin bread, or a pumpkin cookie, or even a pumpkin cream cheese muffin from Starbucks on occasion. But I cannot abide pumpkin pie, no matter how flaky the homemade crust, or how sweet the dollop of whipped cream on top. And let's face it, after you've smelled pumpkin pie spice for roughly three minutes, you've pretty well captured the essence of Thanksgiving, and it's time to move on to better things. Like chocolate.
I'm not dissing Thanksgiving...we all truly have more blessings than we can count. I'm personally a fan of breaking bread with friends, family and even strangers, it's good to have fellowship. But something isn't quite right with a tradition where we strain our respective dining room tables with more food than we can possibly eat in one week, when people are homeless and starving and displaced. My family seeks to overcome this inequity by inviting scads of people we barely know to dine with us...and then of course, asking them to bring a dish. Heaven forbid we run out of green bean casserole.
And then to add insult to injury, after enjoying all this thankfulness and fellowship and gravy, you are considered Un-American if you don't blissfully partake of a slice of pumpkin pie. What? your relatives ask you, How you can you not like pumpkin pie?
I'll tell you how...I prefer not to eat things that remind me of my son's diaper years.
I bet if that good Pilgrim lass Priscilla Alden had known about chocolate, she'd have whipped up a chocolate pie that would have sent Squanto and his pals into the forest faster than you can say "seconds," foraging for more cocoa beans. And today instead of Hershey's, we'd have Squanto's, an American chocolate bar, invented by a Native American. Go figure.
Alas, the pumpkin pie tradition is slow to die. In fact, people continue to find new and interesting (to them) ways to cook with pumpkin. I admit it, pumpkins are very cute. But I prefer to hack my pumpkins into Jack -O'-Lanterns, then smash them into a bazillion pieces when the neighbors aren't looking. As David Letterman knows, there's nothing that says "smash" like a pumpkin.
So all you Martha Stewart wannabes out there, keep your pumpkin pie recipes to yourselves; at my house, we're having chocolate fudge pie, because Squanto would have wanted it that way!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
