I just ate probably 3000 calories in one sitting. For dinner tonight I ate linguine with a spinach and mushroom pesto cream sauce.
And I made it myself.
Chef is rubbing off on me.
Five years ago I’d be doing sit-ups.
I find a certain satisfaction in this — knowing that five years ago I would have balked at eating something made with real cream, and would have choked it down to please the host, poured salt all over it and pushed it around my plate to make it appear that I was actually eating. Then I probably would have headed off for the gym and tortured myself for having the audacity to eat. Being able to eat and eat well feels decadent. I can’t afford a lot of things anymore, especially good, fresh food. I’m not a food snob by any measure. I can’t tell you what is of quality and what is not, but I know what tastes good.
I never really got the sensuality of food before I met Chef, all those analogies comparing food and sex. He lured me in with wine, cheese, and the wonders of basalmic vinegar reductions, and it began to show on my hips and thighs. I was horrified at first, but the lure of flavor took over. We picked bottles of wine for their labels and tested them together, tried a variety of artisan cheeses, and he cooked me extravagant meals at three in the morning after a night out together. I fell in love with Chef for many reasons, but partly because he helped me learn to love food again.
Tonight, after I ate my dinner, I found myself pinning my hair up and applying some lip gloss, donning a trashy nightgown (thrift-store variety) to sit at home by myself. It feels good, these little things, these small decadencies. This is, in part, why I get so skeptical of people who rip on other people’s dumb pleasures. I can’t afford a show, or coffee, or a night out, so I make myself dinner, lounge in someone else’s lingerie and enjoy the size of my hips.
This is a good, good night.
Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. First, you’re gonna make another one of those*. Then you’re gonna go here and follow the easy instructions. Make sure you choose “Next Day” so it stays fresh. Don’t forget to put the sauce in a separate container. E-mail me the tracking number, okay? Thanks.
* Just to clarify that this is about the food, not patriarchy, feel free to make Chef make it.
Eh–doesn’t sound like anything like 3,000 calories anyway. :) (My steak dinner tonight, on the other hand–for me, a getting a good checkup if always dangerous. But fuck asceticism anyway.)
And I wish you many happy returns of the day.
Ho hum. The rad fem in me (at least the drunk one; sorry!) has to say: you could skip the lingerie (which I had to just copy & paste b/c I can’t spell it, at least durnk) lol and lounge around lovin’ yer hips just the same.
But the friend (at elast the drunk one; sorry again!) has to say (shit, I should not be leaving comments) RIGHT ON.
Whatever makes you happy - I love you and your hips.
Eh–doesn’t sound like anything like 3,000 calories anyway. :)
Oh yeah? I used a whole carton of cream and ate it all. :P
MMMM. Yay for good food and big hips. And also for lounging around not giving a shit.
Puritianical opposition to pleasure, I’m realizing more and more all the time, is a form of social control. I wrote today how I think one reason churches tell people that sex and rock music send you to hell is they want you to have no pleasures outside of those you can get at church, with the gospel music. Patriachal antagonism against women enjoying pleasures like food that can be enjoyed without men almost surely traces back to that social control desire.
“For a long time, to paraphrase a line of Mencken’s, Puritans spent so much time worrying that someone, somewhere might be enjoying sex they tended to overlook the sin of eating with gusto, but they never overlooked it entirely…
[T]he history of American Puritanism is full of people who made a living out of nattering at their countrymen about what to eat, or what not to eat. In the early nineteenth century, Sylvester Graham–he of the flour that begat the cracker–weighed in against pie, of all things. Graham said that Americans were ruining their health by eating pie, and since we have to assume he was including apple, we can count him as one of the country’s first true subversives. Toward the end of the 1800s, we had to listen to the likes of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who once wrote a paper with the delightfully ambiguous title: ‘Nuts May Save the Rave.’ It was Kellogg who, in another treatise called ‘Plain facts for Young and Old,’ laid out the following dictum:
‘A man that lives on pork, fine-flour bread, rich pies and cakes, and condiments, drinks tea and coffee, and uses tobacco, might as well try to fly as to be chaste in thought.’
Chaste in thought! Here, in one of Kellogg’s beloved nutshells, is the main message of the Food Police–a message that transcends simple Puritanism. Its appeal to reformers of all stripes is evidenced by its remarkable similarity to an utterance of the poet Shelley, a man we seldom think of as a straight-laced Calvinist. ‘I hold,’ Shelley wrote in his 1813 ‘Vindication of Natural Diet,’ that the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man originated in his unnatural habits of life.’
And so down to our own day…”
[treatise on how annoying hippie food puritanism evolved into annoying yuppie obsessions with tiny portions and self-control as well as the whole 'being fat as a fate worse than death, not only unhealthy but somehow a moral sin as well' thing: connecting theme, "conspicuous nonconsumption"]
…Control, control. Ivana Trump came up with a good line…one that sums up the whole neurotic preoccupation. ‘It makes me feel powerful to be hungry.’ There’s a line Lillian Russell never used on Diamond Jim Brady.”
–Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller, “The Bad For You Cookbook”
from the same volume:
“When’s the last time you had a good belt of heavy cream? Not half-and-half, not whipping cream, but the real thing. We’re not talking about sneaking a sip from the bottom of the carton after you’ve made whipped cream, but actually pouring some into a glass and drinking it down like you would a cold beer on a hot day…[Try it], maybe at a party, in front of your friends. It’ll be fun listening to them try to talk you into handing over your car keys.”
That sounds like a perfect night.
I occassionally do the same thing, ridiculous lingerie and all. It’s the absolute best. If you find another good-looking chef, can you send him my way?
I love to cook. Getting soundly drunk off of a nice bottle of wine while making dinner is one of my favorite ways to pamper myself. Then I take a bubble bath to remove the smell of garlic and basil from underneath my fingernails, and pour a final glass of wine, which I finish watching a movie. It’s nice to be able to appreciate food without feeling guilty. Chef sounds wonderful.
That sounds decadent and delightful, Lauren. Growing up pretty pour, when we splurged, it was always on food. So once I became older, financially independent, and finally had money for splurging on my own, it went to food and still does. I could max out my credit card eating out every night, buying obscure ingredients for cooking at home, and subscribing to every food porn magazine out there. Lots of my friends think I’m a food snob, and I’m not. I’m just as happy with a pot of homemade bean soup as I am with a free-range steak served with chanterelles simmered in demi-glace from a 4-star restaraunt. For me it is the love that goes into making it and I want to appreciate that love. And I’ve gained weight since I’m able to afford better (more expensive and healthier) and while part of me cares, most of me doesn’t. But its good to hear you are experiencing this love for food now. Better late than never, right? And good on chef for helping you get there.