If I ever get back in the kitchen for more than long enough to make coffee, I’ll write about it.

Meanwhile. You ‘n y’mama ‘n ‘em please go to Rockville.wholefoodsmarketCooking.com/contests and vote for my boeuf bourguignon. And make it. It’s good.

At this point, the supermarketa rotisserie chicken is your Very Best Friend. Because you can do any number of things with the  flesh of that bird, particularly if you are, as I am, getting ready to leave the youngsters  to their own devices for three or four days.

In this instance, said bird became the makings for a dozen chicken enchiladas and a chicken pot pie, which will standbetween the  heathens and starvation while I am in Florida eating Cuban food.

Here’s how you prepare for four days out of town when you’re me. You stop by the grocery and pick up a chicken and a bag of frozen mixed veggies. You already have pie crusts and cream of chicken soup at home. You shred up a leg quarter and about half of one breast to make a cup or so of chicken, mix it with the soup and the veg and the cheese, dump it in a pie crust and top it with another one. Wrap that in foil, stash it in the fridge,and there’s one meal.

Then you can shred the rest of it and wrap it up in tortillas with diced green chiles and cheese, cover it with Las Palmas enchilada sauce,  then sprinkle that with more cheese, and you’ve got another dinner. Then you lay out two pounds of ground beef to thaw, so you can make chili at oh-early-thirty in the morning, and with a Stauffer’s lasagna, voila, the urchins are fed for the duration.

They are on their freakin’ own for breakfast and lunch. Somehow, I do not believe they will starve.

Meanwhile, I will be enjoying some lechon asado and some picadillo and some plantains in Orlando. You and y’mama ‘n ‘em check in on the kids while I’m gone, ok?

Chorizo, eggs, ranchero sauce, cotija, tortillas. What's not to love?

I wish I had a picture of last night’s dinner. But the SD card for the camera was still in the laptop at work, and my phone has decided it doesn’t want to take pictures any more, so we have none. Nor did I take any today when I had the leftovers.

White beans, tuna and tomatos. Now, I love each of those ingredients, but I’d never considered combining them until I commenced reading food blogs and seeing that the combo was a common one, and in fact, a classic Italian prep. Warm, as a pasta sauce; cold, as a salad.

I opted for room temperature, as a salad.

I had a GOOD can of tuna from the Culinary District — one of those five-dollar jokers. No Starkist or Chicken of the Sea. Italian tuna, canned in olive oil. (I don’t think you can even GET mass-market tuna packed in olive oil at the grocery any more.) I had a can of Great Northern beans, aka cannelini beans. I had good Mennonite tomatos. And I did not want the spaghetti and meatballs everyone else was having.

So I drained the tuna, saving the olive oil in a cup; dumped it in a bowl. Drained the beans, not saving the liquid in anything. Dug out a good tablespoon full of capers from my salt-packed jar, rinsed them and let them soak in hot water a bit. Added a splash of balsamic vinegar to the olive oil and whisked it up. Dumped everything except the tomatos in together and gave it a stir. Spooned some out on three slices of Mennonite tomato.

Sweet Baby Jesus. I am going to have to try this with grocery store tuna, just to see if the fancy stuff is that much better and is what takes each of these elements out of its natural state, which ain’t too doggoned bad as it is, and elevates it to new heights and a totally different flavor profile. If a salad can be rich and hearty, this one is rich and hearty. The balsamic vinegar cuts the richness of the olive oil and the tuna, the beans provide a smooth, satisfying counterpoint, and the capers give it a pop of flavor. And all of it plays just marvelously with the bright freshness of the tomato.

Damn, it was good! And I didn’t even add the basil that was suggested.

I still love the old-fashioned, classic tuna salad — mayo, sweet pickles, hard-boiled egg, tuna — and it won’t disappear from my menu (although I may go for a year or more than not make it, but there’s a local deli that does a marvelous version). But this — this is something different, kinda like you can have chili or you can have hamburgers and love them both, but they’re both ground beef.  (Speaking of which, I think I’ll make some chili for the kids to eat while I’m gone Sunday-Tuesday.) Makes me wonder what all else I can do with some fancy tuna.

Tonight, though, I’m going to be stewing some chicken in some coconut milk for a Caribbean-inspired stew, in honor of the fact I got me some Jimmy Buffett tickets and will be doing the Fin Dance at Verizon Arena March 1! You and y’mama ‘n ‘em come get you some chicken stew, and we’ll put some Jimmy on the Bose and enjoy ourselves.

I think I'll call it "A Study In Brown." Also, I'll call it good.

I did at least complete this dinner. It’s a very monochromatic dinner. No matter. It was good.

I’d ordered a nice pork shoulder roast from the PJF people, planning on braising it in apple juice in an attempt to approximate the flavor of that marvelous pork shank I’d had at Murphy’s in Atlanta last month. I didn’t quite get there…but it was a pretty doggoned good way to cook pork roast, I have to admit.

I browned the (still mostly frozen; don’t tell anyone) roast in my Dutch oven, decanted about a pint of apple juice over and around him (her?), and dropped a quartered onion in the pot. I pondered for a few minutes, and added some caraway seeds (maybe a half-teaspoon?), a half-dozen allspice berries, and four or five whole cloves. Then I cut a circle out of parchment a tad smaller than the pot, and stuck it down inside and over the roast, because I didn’t want all the liquid to cook away while I was at the racetrack losing my ass.

I’ve always read that the parchment thingy works. I can now testify, at least anecdotally, that it does. There was very little, if any, of the juice that had cooked away 3 1/2 hours later when I got home. This is a Good Thing when you’re going to braise something a long-ass time and not be at home to add liquid. The things you learn.

Anyway. I let it braise for another 45 minutes or so while I hydrated myself with a glass of wine and started some side dishes, and then pulled it out and popped it onto a rack in a hotter oven to give it a nice overall crust. I strained the solids out of the juice, put it in a saucepan to reduce, and used some of it to baste the roast while it was browning. I was going for that wonderful sticky-sweet crust Murphy’s got on its pork shank, but I didn’t get it. Still, I damn-sho wouldn’t throw it out of bed.

I used a little more of the sauce in a side dish for which I have to credit Michelle at Thursday Night Smackdown. She had, in a stroke of what I can only consider genius, caramelized onions and combined them with fried apples to strew over spaetzle with pork chops. Genius. Genius, I tell you! So I promptly caramelized me some onions, threw some apple slices in the pan and let them get soft, and helped everything along with a splash of the pork sauce.

Can I just say Sweet Baby Jesus here? The pork was good; the apples and onions were divine. It just looks funny to type “apples and onions” as a single dish, but try this stuff. I’m telling you. It’s marvelous. Killer good.

Before I left for the track, I took the rest of the slaw mix from Friday night’s okonomiyaki and made up a hot vinegar bath for it, hanging with the caraway and allspice and clove theme. Made a good, very different, slaw; if I ever didn’t want to do red cabbage with German food, I’d do this. And it ought to be just kickass with brats or knockwurst. Just sayin’.

Gnocchi. Residing in my freezer as we speak, for when I get ready for 'em.

Roasted turnips and parsnips rounded out the very, very beige-and-tan plate. They were good, but they were not what this dinner needed. It needed a green thing. If I had it to do over, I’d'a roasted the broccoli I had on hand to roast with the next night’s dinner that was going to be duck confit over butternut squash gnocchi, which was one of my unfinished weekend projects because my stomach took that opportunity to inform me it was missing gluten and was Not Happy About It. So I roasted the confit leg quarters, and made the gnocchi, both of which are now residing in the freezer, and I’ll deal with that another time.

Lovely little duckies, they are. Now they're shredded duck meat in confit in the freezer.

The other unfinished project had to do with baking, and I’ll get to that in another post.

So that’s it for paving the road to hell with my good intentions. I’ll do the same next weekend, since I will barely have time to get to the market and pick up my fresh farm milk! both sheep and cow variety! before leaving for a three-day conference in Orlando. So making cheese will have to wait until the middle of next week, and boy, am I a happy camper about THAT!

So that’s it from the Chez Brockwell kitchen tonight. You and y’mama ‘n ‘em get ready to head on back to work with me after this long weekend, and we’ll see if we can’t pick backup on some of these projects later in the week.

A fitting and suitable breakfast upon which to go gambling for the afternoon.

You lucky people are getting two posts in a row here, because I just posted the one I wrote early this morning on the iPad, which pretty much sucks for posting, not least because I cannot download photos to it (or if I can, I can’t figure out how), and because I cooked a damn fine brunch today and I am killing time waiting for the confit duck legs to come out of the oven so I can put the pork roast in.

The dark specks are bacon fond, which makes the latkes Methodist.

This morning, we had Methodist latkes, country bacon and over easy farm eggs with apple butter from the community market.

Honey. I am replete. Two Sweet Baby Jesus meals in a row. I may not can play the horses worth a diddly-damn, but I can surely cook this weekend. Or am batting 1,000 at it right now, in any event.

These are Methodist latkes because they are, besides being consumed side by side with bacon, cooked in bacon fat. Even if you’re Reform, I don’t think that flies, at least not without a primal cringe. Forgive me, my Jewish friends. I’m glad I’m nominally Methodist, as much as I’m anything; could not deal with cringing over my pork and shellfish.

These are also gluten free latkes. No matzoh meal for me in these babies; the onset of the gluten free diet has caused me to accumulate about a bajillion different kinds of flour, including potato starch. Seemed reasonable to me that the proper GF flour to put into latkes would be potato starch, no?

Potato starch, yes, with a note of caution. These were some Extremely Wet Potatos, which, even after I drained them in the colander for 20 minutes and pressed liquid out, took a significant amount of potato starch to bind. They turned out just a touch gummy. Next time, I’ll put the grated potatos in some cheesecloth and wring it out first.

Methodist Latkes:

• 4 russet potatos
• 1 medium yellow onion
• 2 eggs
• about 1/2 cup potato starch flour
• salt and pepper

Peel and chunk up the onion and pulse it a few times in the FoPro. Leave it there while you peel the potatos; chunk them up and add them to the onion, and pulse them long enough to get them grated to your satisfaction. Dump the whole mess in a colander lined with cheesecloth and let it drain for 15 or 20 minutes while you do something else. Come back and gather up the cheesecloth full of drained potatos and wring and squeeze them until you’ve squeezed out as much moisture as you can.

Put the wrung-out potatos in a bowl, add the eggs and hit it with a dash of salt and pepper; stir. Add potato starch a little bit at a time, just until it looks like the batter will hold together when you fry it.

Fry about four slices of bacon in a skillet. Take the bacon out to drain, and in the hot bacon fat over medium high heat, put spoonsful of latke batter. I use my 1/4 cup measure; it makes them about the size I want, which is between 3 and 4 inches across. You may need to flatten thems slightly. Let fry until you can see a nice bit of golden brown around the edges, flip, and brown the other side. Let drain on a rack over paper towels in a warm oven while you fry the rest of ‘em.

Top with an over-easy egg, also fried in the bacon fat. Ignore the twinges of conscience about your cholesterol and arterial condition. It’s Saturday. You can eat whatever the hell you want to, particularly if you are going to the track afterward.

Which I am fixing to do. It’s 50-cent corned beef sammich day. I plan to buy four, discard the bread, and use the corned beef in hash tomorrow morning.

I’ll see you and y’mama ‘n ‘em at the finish line.

Make you some of this. It's Sweet Baby Jesus good.

Who’d a thunk it? You take a pancake, and you add tasty things like shredded cabbage and chopped green onion and shrimp and assorted Far East condiments. And you replace the syrup and butter with a spicy mayo. And for good measure, you cook some rice and add some Japanese pickles that have been residing in your fridge.

And, et voila, or the Japanese equivalent thereof, you have okonomiyaki, a 30-minute dinnner which has the advantage of being Sweet Baby Jesus good.

These babies were the winner of a Food 52 “Your Best Street Food” contest a while back. I’m not sure how I missed having them when I visited Japan, but I will NOT make that mistake again.

To wit:

• 5 eggs
•  2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 2 tsp sriracha or chile garlic paste, to taste
• 1/2 cup all purpose flour ((I used a gf version that’s a mix of rice, tapioca, garfava and sorghum)
• 1 bunch green onions, trimmedd and chopped,
• 2 cups shredded cabbage,
• 3/4 cup minced shrimp

Spicy Mayo:

• about 1/3 cup mayonnaise,
• 1 tsp or so sriracha (to taste),
• 1 tablespoon or so soy sauce.

Whisk together the sauce ingredients and set aside. Beat the eggs with the chile garlic paste, the sesame oil aand the soy sauce. Add the flour and whisk in until the luumps are gone (this takes a bit more work with gf flour, I discovered).  fold in the cabbage (I will confess I used slaw mix), the onions and the shrimp.

Heat 2 or 3 tablespoons of neutral oil over medium high heat. Spoon out batter into pancakes; the Japanese version is generally full skillet size, but I do not place that much trust in my pancake flipping ability, not when there’s hot grease involved. So I made mine about palmsized.

I’m not real sure how anything this easy can be this good. I garnished them with some sesame seeds on top, not having any bonito flakes in the house, that being the other suggested garnish. They’re tender, eggy, the shrimp adding that note of, well, shrimp, and the onions and the cabbage get cooked just enough to be crispy-tender.

I’m telling you. They are Sweet Baby Jesus good. I had some sweet chile sauce on hand, so I used a little of that on the side, committed the major faux pas of putting soy sauce on my rice, and commenced to eat myself silly. I WILL be making these again, yes I will, because they are so easy as to be unfreakingbelievable. I can see how you can make a clean-out-the-ffridge meal out of them — you could sub diced ham or bacon or beef or whatever for the protein, add most any shredded green thing — broccoli, zucchini, whatever — throw in a muushroom or two, add some carrots; I suspect your combinatins would be limited only by your creativity.

I’m off to the market, then back home to put a pork roast on to braise while I am out losing my arse at the track this afternoon. I was perfect at the betting window yesterday — did not cash a ticket — and I expect to do the same today. No matter. It’s a gorgeous sunny day, if cold, and the horses are running at Oaklawn, and I’m eating well, and all’s right with the world. Hope all’s right in you and y’mama ‘n ‘em’s world, too.

Chuck roast; underappreciated, but the best thing that ever happened to winter.

I continue to have a love affair with chuck roast. It makes the most delectable wintertime dishes, and it heats up your house so nicely on a cold, wintry, rainy day. And it just yields itself to whatever preparation you want to do to it — pot roast, carbonnades a la flamande, vegetable beef soup, stewed up in some kind of chili- or goulash-style prep.

Or bouef bourguignon.

Getting happy in the pot.

You will recall I was making bouef bourguignon on Sunday, with plans to eat it on Monday. And I did, and we did, and it was just outstandingly wonderful. I’m always amazed at how a watery sauce, banished to a low oven for half a day, turns so glossy and thick and shiny and unctuous, and just flows over the lumps and crevices of your mashed potatos (I LIKE my mashed potatos lumpy, thankyouverymuch) and the heavenly scent just wafts up to your nose….

No words. Just looking at it makes my stomach growl.

Have mercy. Sweet Baby Jesus, but this stuff is good.

Without further ado:

• 1 3-4 pound chuck roast
• 1 yellow onion
• 4-6 cloves garlic, or more, if you’re a garlic lover, or less, if you’re a vampire
• kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
• 3-4 carrots
• 1/2 can tomato paste
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 pound boiler or pearl onions
• 1/2 oz. dried shiitake mushrooms
• 1 750-ml bottle of red wine
• 2-3 cups beef stock
• 2-3 sprigs of thyme
• 1 sprig of rosemary
• half a dozen fresh sage leaves

Prep: Whack the roast up into roughly 1 1/2 inch chunks; salt and pepper well, and set aside. Blanch the pearl onions for a minute or two, enough to loosen their skins; use about a cup of the onion-blanching water to rehydrate the shiitakes, and set those aside. Peel the onions and set aside. Thinly slice the big onion, and mince the garlic; cut the carrots in 1-inch chunks. Tie the thyme, sage and rosemary together in a bouquet garni.  Get out the wine and pour yourself a glass. Now you’re ready to cook.

In a heavy ovenproof Dutch oven, heat the oil over medium high heat and brown the meat in batches; you don’t want to crowd it because you want it to sear nicely on all sides, and if you crowd it, it’ll just steam and turn a nasty gray. Gray meat = not good. So brown it, good, on all sides, and put it in a bowl. Lower the heat to medium and throw in the carrots and onions; saute those for a few minutes, until the carrots start to brown and the onion gets soft and translucent, while you’re scraping up all the nice brown fond from the bottom of the pot. Fond is your friend.  Add the garlic and the tomato paste, and swirl that around and let it cook until the tomato paste turns a nice reddish brown. Add the mushrooms and their water, the meat with any accumulated juices, the wine and the bouquet garni. Cover it and bring it up to a boil, then stash it away in a 325-degree oven for at least four hours, preferably five, and you can go as long as six if you feel like it. Check it occasionally, and add the beef stock if it gets to looking too dry.

You can bring it out and eat it right then, but it really improves if you let it sit in the fridge for a day or two or three. Then you can return it to the Dutch oven, put it over low heat and let it warm. Resist the urge to add some water — as it warms, it will liquefy more.

I used to love to serve it over egg noodles or just with a big fresh baguette, but that was Before Celiac Disease, or BCD. I can testify, though, that it is Just Fine over mashed potatos, and would be equally fine over polenta.

I brought leftovers for lunch today. Lucky me.

The best part about it is that it’s not really labor intensive, and it can be merrily cooking away on Saturday or Sunday and making your house smell marvelous, and then you can bring it out and heat it up during the week, take 20 minutes to boil and mash some potatos, and Voila, you and y’mama ‘n ‘em have a dinner that looks and acts and tastes like it took half a day to cook and that is a serious treat in the middle of the week.

It’s almost worth cold weather.

Yum. Do you good with a grilled cheese sammich, it will.

I love tomato soup. There’s a restaurant here in town — Cafe 1217, of which I have waxed eloquent more than a few times — that makes a marvelous one. Mine is just about as good.

My version is loosely based on the Pioneer Woman’s sherried tomato soup. And as long as you have el cheapo cooking sherry — I suppose you could sub white wine, but as I never have white wine, I’m going to stick with sherry — and tomatos, you can make it. It’s a bonus if you have homemade chicken stock. The only other ingredients are salt, pepper, onions, garlic, heavy cream, and a little basil to finish it off.

I don’t measure, as you know, but roughly:

• 2 pounds fresh, ripe tomatos, or a 28-oz can (or 2 15-oz cans) of diced tomatos
• 1 medium onion
• 4 or 7 cloves garlic, depending on your taste for garlic
• 1 1/2 tbsp butter
• 1 1/2 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 can tomato paste
• 3 cups chicken stock
• 1/2 cup cooking sherry
• Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
• 3/4 or so cup heavy cream

Heat your oil and butter over medium heat in a heavy saucepan. Mince the onions finely, and add them to the butter/oil. Mince the garlic and add it. Sweat it until it’s nice and soft; you’re not aiming for caramelization here. Add the tomato paste and let it cook gently while you’re dealing with the tomatos.

The secret to peeling tomatos easily -- a quick bath in boiling water.

I don’t like tomato skin my my tomato soup. It rolls up into little chewy tubes and doesn’t look appetizing. So I want my tomatos peeled for tomato soup. And I’m all about easy, so I’m going to peel my tomatos the easy way. I’m going to put them in a bowl, bring a teakettle of water to boil, pour the water over the tomatos until they’re submerged, and let them sit about 5 minutes.

When you pour off the water, the skin will have split on the tomatos, and it’ll slip right off, but the texture of the underlying tomato is unchanged. It’s a marvelous thing.

"Double, double, toil and trouble..."

Chop up those tomatos roughly — into quarters, and each quarter into three or four pieces — and dump them in the  pot. Using a cutting board with a juice channel around the edge so you get all the good tomato juice in there with them. Add the sherry, and bring all that to a boil over medium heat. Let it cook until the tomatos cook down a little and start to break down. Add some kosher salt (maybe 1/2 teaspoon) and a few turns of the pepper grinder. Add the chicken stock, leave it at a good simmer, and let it cook 30 minutes or so.

Post-pureeing and addition of cream.

At the end of your 30 minutes, come back and, depending on how smooth you want it, either puree it in a food processor or blender, or with your immersion blender, or put it through a food mill. The immersion blender is fine by me. Return it to the pot, lower heat to very low, and add the cream. You can also grate in some Parmigiano at this point; honestly I forgot about it.

Ladle some up into a mug, and top it with a bit of basil. It would have been better had I made the rosemary cornbread croutons, but y’know, I didn’t. Sue me.

If I had learned already how to make gluten-free sandwich bread, I’d'a made me a grilled cheese sammich to go with it, but, y’know, I haven’t. Sue me twice.

It’s cold and rainy out, and this is just a marvelous taste of warm summer. If you’re not blessed with a surfeit of Mennonite greenhouse tomatos, as I am, it still tastes pretty damn good with canned. You and y’mama ‘n ‘em make you some.

Breakfast. Yes, sir. This one will stay with you a good portion of the day.

Particularly when you pair it with this. Pumpkin bread, sweet potato butter. Yum.

Jeez. What is this just-having-Saturday-and-Sunday-off business? You’d think we were getting back to a regular work week, or something. It just ain’t natural.

Yesterday seemed to be taken up with all sorts of busywork — farmers’ market, grocery shopping, laundry, etc — up to and including sitting on my happy arse for two hours, shut out of my kitchen, because the plumbers were installing my new dishwasher. The old one had breathed its shuddering last on New Year’s Day, and this house ain’t gonna be without a dishwasher, no sirree.

So I have a new, quiet dishwasher that scours dishes marvelously clean, and I am a happy camper. But it did cut into my cooking time yesterday.

I scored two whole fryers on the “used meat” counter at the grocery, along with a family pack of chuck roast, the whole lot for under  $20. You can’t beat six or more meals’ worth of entree for that price. One of the birds went into the oven as soon as I got home, and about half of him went in chicken enchiladas last night. The other one is in the freezer awaiting his turn to roast.  The rest of the chicken from Bird One is in the fridge, and I think it will get diced up and go in potato-corn chowder sometime this week.

Today’s cooking started with a big breakfast — bacon, eggs, roasted sweet potatos sprinkled with barbecue spice rub — and continued into a loaf of gluten-free pumpkin bread, because I felt like it. I followed essentially the same drill as last week’s GF banana bread, except, well, pumpkin. And I added a half-cup of turbinado sugar, used two eggs instead of one, added some egg replacer and some baking powder. It’s quite acceptable. I won’t throw it out. It will make good breakfasts with some of the pumpkin butter I bought at the market recently.

Then it was on to one of the chuck roasts. I whacked it into stew-meat sized cubes (Stew meat was on sale for $2.99 a pound; the chuck roasts were $2.20-something. Seriously? How hard is it to cut up a boneless chuck roast?), and browned them in my Dutch oven. You need to do this in batches, so the meat will really brown, and not steam; you are not “graying” the meat.  Took them out, threw in onions and carrots and garlic, while I had some pearl onions blanching. (You could use all regular onions, but I like having the little baby onions in the stew.)

The onions only want a couple of minutes’ blanching in boiling water, just enough to loosen their little skins. I drained them through a strainer so I could use part of the water to rehydrate a handful of dried shiitake mushrooms.

While the mushrooms were hydrating and the onions were cooling, I added some garlic and some tomato paste to the veg in the pot. Swirled that around a bit, added a few tablespoons of the shiitake water to help it along, added the onions. Let them cook for a bit, then added the meat back in, with its accumulated juices, the mushrooms and their water, and most of a bottle of red wine (less the glass I drank last night) and a bouquet garni of sage, thyme and rosemary. Brought it up to a simmer, and moved it to the oven, where it will reside for several hours until the beef gets falling-apart tender. Then it’ll cool and go into the fridge, to come out tomorrow night for dinner, with garlic mashed potatos.

Tonight’s dinner will be steak and mac and cheese for the kids (Child C and Future Son-In-Law 2 are coming over) and baked sweet potato for me.  Later on today, I’m going to use some of my extra Mennonite tomatos (really, two pounds a week is too many tomatos for just me, I guess…) and make some homemade tomato soup for lunches this week.

I’m getting pretty good at cooking on the weekend the stuff we’ll eat on all week. We’ll have bouef bourguignon Monday; leftover chicken enchiladas with refried beans Tuesday; I’m out of pocket on Wednesday so NS will cook himself a frozen pizza or order out; chicken corn chowder on Thursday, and damn, there I am at the weekend again!

OK. Back to the kitchen. I think I’m going to make a loaf of rosemary corn bread, too, to make croutons to go with the soup. Because that just sounds good. I hope you and y’mama ‘n ‘em’s team wins this afternoon, as I don’t give a rat about the Falcons and Giants.

I have been off gluten for a full week today, excepting the one “oops” when I bit into what I thought was a peanut M&M only to find out it was a pretzel one.

So I’ve had a quarter-inch of pretzel worth of gluten. If that kills me, well, I just die, I guess. We all will, if we live long enough.

I guess my system is adjusting. You’d think, sans gluten, that I’d be hungry, looking for things to make up for the missing carbs. ‘Tain’t so. The only evening I’ve come home hungry was yesterday, when circumstances conspired to make me miss lunch, and I grabbed a praline on an empty stomach, and that made me thoroughly queasy, so I wound up not eating anything anyway.

Without going into too much graphic and not-entirely-pleasant detail, I guess my digestive system is adjusting. Lord knows, I should certainly lose weight. F’rinstance, today, I had a half of my last gluten-free roll, which was stale enough it did not resurrect well in the toaster oven, which was why I just had half of it; some yogurt and some granola, and that was breakfast. Lunch was a chicken breast and some fruit in a salad when we got to the Embassy Suites, our fave spot for a working lunch, only to find that those dirty dogs had done away with our favorite Cobb salad (and they did used to make a FINE Cobb salad, let me hasten to add). The chicken breast/apple/orange/strawberry thing is a sad attempt at substitution. I had a praline or two along during the day (from the Christmas/New Year’s goodies I took to work). And I made butternut squash soup for dinner, for which I have absolutely no desire, so I guess I’ll put it in the fridge and look at it for a day or two.

I’m mildly hungry now, but I don’t want much. The only evening meal I’ve eaten all week was Tuesday, when I came in in the notion for potato salad, and made myself a big bowl of it, and that was supper. (I do love me some potato salad.)

On the flip side, other than this godforsaken cold which has now moved into my chest, leaving me barking worse than Lucy, I feel better than I have in a while. I have more energy, and seemingly more muscle strength than I had. I’ll be interested to go to the doctor in a month or so and get some comparison bloodwork done to see how much different my profile looks.

Gluten. Who’d'a thunk it? Nobody knew anything about gluten intolerance until maybe, what, the last dozen years? Is it something that just evolved, or did significant numbers of people suffer from it for years and just not know what it was?

As I find myself consciously eating more natural foods, local foods, fresh foods that aren’t soaked in preservatives and inoculated with chemicals of one sort or another, I begin to wonder what all the “better living through chemistry” that my generation was really the first to experience has wound up doing to us. Is it signficant that there seems to be much more cancer among my contemporaries than among my parents’ contemporaries? Did every third kid with whom I went to elementary school have ADD or ADHD, as seemed to be the case with my girls’ generation, and we just didn’t know what it was and labeled them “bad kids”? Celiac disease? Lactose intolerance? Say wha’?

When I think about it, when I was a kid, about the only things I ate that were processed foods were breakfast cereals (to some extent); sandwich bread (not a lot; I wasn’t a big sandwich eater); chicken and eggs; milk and dairy; and whatever junk food I could talk Mama into buying. We raised our beef and our fruit and vegetables, our pork for a while, and after that we bought a whole pig from a neighbor who raised them. We didn’t have chickens because Daddy hated chickens, and I’m not sure why we didn’t have a milk cow, but we didn’t. There was not a fast food restaurant in my home town until I was out of high school (the Dairy Queen and Tastee Freeze were more like local diners than fast-food).

I have done my share of eye-rolling at the “natural foods” thing. I have also shrugged off vegeterian and vegan diets and the skepticism toward red meat (I do love me a piece of good, rare, tender cow). But I find myself reaching more and more for the brown sugar instead of the white, or foregoing it for honey, and passing up the canned vegetables in favor of the frozen (always less-processed) or fresh. (I still, however, cannot pass up a bag of caramel Bugles, possibly the unhealthiest snack food known to modern man, at the stop-n-rob.)

I dunno. I guess I grew up eating natural, and eating local, and maybe I’m working my way back to my roots. Minus the gluten.

Tomorrow night, the Hogs take on Kansas State in the Cotton Bowl. You and y’mama ‘n ‘em get ready to call the Hogs; we need to wind up with a win.