Get hooked up.

I was going to talk about free food today, but I'd rather talk about the larger issue of which free food is only a part, and that's getting hooked up locally.

This is sortof an amorphous concept, but it's way key. Here's one aspect of it: I get free shrimp and free oysters and occasionally free all sorts of other sea creatures because I signed on to be an oyster taster over to the aquatic foods lab.

Every few months they'll do another experiment where they, for instance, compare oysters from all over the continent to determine whether there are any qualities specific to oysters from a certain area.

Or the industry will come up with some revolutionary (and always revolting) method of processing oysters for shipping or storing and we oyster tasters will be required to eat the proceeds and report the patently obvious: "freezing oysters and then hurling them at a wall to bust them out of their shells and then sweeping up them and a few bits of their pulverized shells and throwing the whole mess in a big ol' plastic bucket, refreezing it, and trucking it halfway across the country may save you $0.03 per oyster in shelling/shipping costs, but it loses you money in the long run because unless they're a stressed out middlemanagement demon tasked with stocking the buffet table for a cocktail party in the ninth circle of hell, there is no one on earth or below who will buy that nasty 'product.'"

By declaring myself willing to eat swill occasionally, I make myself eligible for the occasional supertreat. For instance, sometimes the oysters are good. If you like oysters, good oysters is a reason to eat bad oysters, and that's really saying something, because there is nothing worse than a bad oyster. Nothing. I don't mean "bad" as in "spoiled"--a spoiled oyster isn't the worst thing in the world; eating it would bring on merciful death. I mean bad as in gravely mistreated. But good oysters make it worth it.

Sometimes? They have extras? And they send us home with bagsful. Bags full of live, fresh, salty, happy, icey, bivalved darlings. Two, three, four dozen.

It is worth it.

So that is one of a few ways I'm hooked up. Get hooked up. Find out what's around locally. Nose around. Take all offers.

Now we wait.

We won't know until the big gala Friday who won, me or Slick. I myself don't care. After I ate the six tacos lengua and the quart of guacamole, I ate a chocolate bar and two garlic knots and I drank a Newcastle and part of a Yuengling tallboy and I started to eat a pizza but then unaccountably I stopped after half a piece. I just didn't seem to want to continue with the project. Weird. Anyway, right now I'm having a nice salad with ginger dressing that I made my ownself with fresh ginger and tahini and then couldn't touch for a whole week because it had soy sauce in it and soy sauce has salt and salt might make me retain water and lose to Slick. After my salad I'm going to have some cold pizza. When the pizza is finished, I will desist with the carbohydrates in an effort to go from bloated stunted highschool girl to robust highschool gir, or maybe even totally ripped highschool girl. But I am not going to throw away perfectly good pizza. I hope that Slick is right now tucking into a plate of fajitas or a cheese souffle or a Boston cream pie, and I hope it is delicious. Now that I am living decently again, all of my animosity is gone. I feel a great fondness for the meringue formidable. He never tried to be no jockey, that's for sure.

Bacon, lettuce and tomato salad

I certainly couldn't eat one of these today, what with Slick breathing down my neck and Earlton cancelling classes right and left, but back in the early days of the competition, I ate a number of these delicious bacon, lettuce and tomato salads. Here is how it is done:

Get a big mixing bowl and fill it with bitter greens--mesclun or what have you. I get from the farmers' market, where they have such as baby mustard.* Chop up a b-load of tomatoes, fry some bacon, maybe say four strips, throw on mayonnaise, crumble your bacon over, salt and pepper, stir, consume.

Two more pounds down. No notion what Slick is up to. Results supposed to go up tomorrow. I'm nervous, but I still got a couple tricks up my sleeve.


*"Such as" used that way is stolen from Roast Beef.

Green on Green Violence

Okay, so I explained about how to make pesto with kale (actually collards). So then what you do, you have your pesto in the 'fridge and you're using it in omelets and such, and then one day you make

Green on Green Violence
You wash some kale (actually collards) and rip it into random sized pieces and sear it. Then you put it in a dish and you put your pesto on that and some green pepper chunks and some chunks of parmesan. So it's just a MESS of green. Onto that you pour a little more olive oil and maybe some salt and you stir that around.

CONsume.

Economy Nosh
It's true how it costs more per unit of vegetation at the farmers' market than it does per unit of vegetation at the grocery store. It costs astronomically more per unit of cheese-shop parmesan than it costs per shake of dehydrated whey-influenced Dilithium Kristilz(R) or whatever the crap is in the shiny green cardboard cylinder with the yellow plastic shake/pour top. Or maybe it is a red plastic shake/pour top. Anyway, this is all true, about how you pay more for the edible comestible.

However, when you eat nothing but farmers' market fare and snob cheese, you eat far less. So a couple of units of vegetation will last you the week. So you come out better off moneywise. Mmmmhmm, you sure do.

For the past week I have lived on:
home food:

1 bunch chicory
1 bunch some other kind of lettucey ditch weeds
2 bunches collards
4 green peppers
1 can of sardines
about two Tbs feta cheese
pesto
eggs, 4+ per day
about 3 cups dry-roasted mixed nuts
4 peaches
parmesan
various fresh herbs

restaurant food:
1/2 a roast duck
a tilapia, fried hard like they do it at the good Mexican places
roasted vegetables
seared tuna
three oysters

You notice how there's no WHOLE GRAINS in there? That's 'cause I'm not eating them. That's why I'm not hungry. That's why I'm not spending $200/week on food. And that's why I'm going to win.

Downshift!

I am eating oranges and drinking black coffee, and I am happy again.

I was going to do this gradually by trending off swill onto "healthy whole grains," but when I looked at the maniacally grinning multiracial yuptastic couple on the Kashi box this morning, I Just. Could. Not. Go there. "Good Friends" my fat, raddled ass. Tonight the brown rice, the whole wheat bagels, the bread, the rotini, they go. They all go. Out, you bastard Kashi. Out! I'm glad I managed to finish the challah. But the storebought sourdough is untouched and I don't care: it's going. It's all going, probably to the home of a certain underweight lad I know. I dumped what was left of the carton of OJ down the sink, though. I couldn't inflict that stuff on any lad, no matter how underweight. Nasty weird opaque boiled tasting swill. Down the drain and straight to hell with you! Away! Away from me and mine.

Coca-Cola, Chapter III

Huge breakthrough!
Coca-goddamn-Cola is starting to taste good. After only five days of relentless, dedicated pounding, I have succeeded in destroying my taste buds. They have succumbed at last to the mighty, syrupy fist. Can colossal weight gain be far behind? Signs point to hell no! Hooraaaaaaay!

Lunch: an emotional roller coaster.
I consumed a "P'zone." I made the air quotes when ordering the P'zone, and the Pizza Hut lackey said, "Do you want it with quotation marks?" I was all, "Har!" Then he said it was going to take fifteen minutes and my balloon popped: booooo. Then when I was waiting in the car for it to be fifteen minutes, George Carlin came on Fresh Air: yaaaaaay. But it was an old one because George Carlin died yesterday: boooooo. Then, totally unexpectedly, the Pizza Hut lackey brought the P'zone out to the car, so I did not have to walk in and get it: yaaaaaaaaaaaaay!