The Truth is Out

So it turns out I’m a fraud. I watched a movie last weekend called The Unmistaken Child. It’s beautiful! And, it’s an insta-watch on Netflix. In the film, there’s a scene with a room full of monks eating a meal...In total silence. So it seems I’ve been a little lax in this experiment.

I’m not going to slap myself around about eating with other people and chatting it up though. First, that would be pointless, and second, I’d really like to stop slapping myself around altogether. The past is past and it’s not like I’m in training to join a monastic order tomorrow. Maybe in a couple of years.

Also, there are times when talking with someone gets put a little higher on the priority scale. Case in point: Just last night a good friend of mine called from Portland while I was eating, so I had dinner with him on the phone. In my world, if you’re sitting there dining by yourself, you don’t tell someone you haven’t spoken with in months, “Oh, I’m eating right now. I’ll have to call you back.”

There are nine days left in my non-multitasking eating experiment and I can’t say I’m going to miss it. Hence the nine-day countdown readily accessed in my head. What I can envision, though, is sitting down to eat something while the tv or computer is on, deciding that whatever it is on my plate is too good to miss, and then turning off the other stimuli. As you can tell by some of my earlier posts, this doesn’t happen often. I can put together some serious food fails—but occasionally I come up with gold. When I do, at least now I’ll be aware enough to know that it’s time to pay attention.

Carolina Beach Amusement Park

Oh ye of little faith! You probably thought I had given up my experiment of only eating while eating, or at least stopped blogging about it. But no! I have been to the ocean and waded in the waters.

I went to the beach with my friend who was celebrating her birthday. Well, the rest of us were celebrating. She doesn’t think birthdays are anything to celebrate. I say, "why not?" Who doesn’t like presents? Anyway, said friend invited two of her high school buddies to join us from New York and we drove down to the Carolina Coast.

We had fresh local shrimp. Every day. Almost every meal. The best ones we had were at the Shuckin’ Shack at Carolina Beach, after which we went to the boardwalk amusement park. I’ll tell you, if you ever want to feel like you just walked into a David Lynch film, take a stroll there on a Saturday night during the summer.

My traveling companions have only seen each other one time since they graduated—more years ago than they would like me to divulge here in a public space. Consequently they had a lot of reminiscing to do. I, therefore, had lots of time to savor the food while we were eating.

They were talking about things I wasn’t really interested in—my own high school memories are bad enough—so it was very similar to watching TV. I could just sit there and zone out. There were times that I felt like I was cheating a little…then I’d sit back and concentrate on what I was eating. The only thing I regret is that, being allergic to milk, I couldn’t try the deep-fried mac and cheese squares. Yes folks, you heard me—deep-fried mac and cheese. Everyone else said they were “to die for.” And these are New Yorkers!

The thing is, though, I got used to eating with other people. After four days of not eating alone, I came back home and didn’t know what to do with myself after I fixed dinner. I did the usual dance of trying various chairs around the house and settled once again on the porch.

It’s great to be home and hanging out with the pup and the kitty. And it feels really good to be out of the 100+ degree heat on the scorching sand. But I have to admit, it was really nice to have dining companions for four days straight.

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

There’s no such thing as bad egg foo young. Ok, except for that one time when the sauce tasted like vinegar, but I’m sure there was a substitute chef that day at my favorite little take-out restaurant.

Yesterday I had an especially good batch of foo, but my experience of it was as tainted as that dire day of the sour sauce.

Lately I’ve been somewhat more social than normal and have gotten used to eating with other people. Makes my new non-multi-tasking trend a lot easier. I’ve also been having a very nice time eating dinner on the porch…even if the Bird & Squirrel channel wasn’t on. Yesterday, though, was scorching hot and after a few bites I had to throw in the towel and head back into the air-conditioned cooler air.

There’s something about setting up an expectation that can really trip me up. “Dinner’s been better on the porch.” No matter where I sat down to eat, it “wasn’t as good as the porch.” The kitchen chair wasn’t comfortable. The coffee table in front of the sofa wasn’t the right height. The dining room table had too much mail on it. Clearly, I needed an attitude adjustment.

So I went for a walk with Daisy. She’s a good pup and a happy one as well. Sometimes when we’re walking down the street she’ll see someone she’s never met and yet she’ll start wagging her tail and pulling on her leash like she just saw a long-lost friend. Mind you, if that person then tries to bend down to pet her, she’ll run under my legs like the Terminator is coming after her, but her initial reaction usually is one of excited anticipation. If any being can adjust your attitude, it’s my Daisy.

By the time I got back to the house and snuggled down into the brown wide-wale corduroy Queen Anne chair in the living room, I was ready for the plate-licking deliciousness of my dinner. Yes, those of you interested in home decorating will understand the dichotomy of brown wide-wale corduroy on a Queen Anne chair, but that ridiculous piece of furniture is one of the most comfortable things you’ll ever put your butt into. Life was good.

Was it the walk, or had I just found the right seat? Or had I just changed my mind? I’ll never know. The funniest part of the meal, though, was when I got to the fortune cookie. There in the broken shards lay a pearl of wisdom on a piece of paper with the answer to it all.

“There is no time like the pleasant,” it said. Dig it.

Change is Good

The other day I was telling one of my friends about this 30-day experiment I’m doing. She gave me a stare that looked like she was thinking either, “you just grew another head out of your shoulder” or “I’m calling for a straight jacket in a moment.” Verbally, she was a little more polite. “Why would you do that?” she asked.

Don’t be too quick to judge her. Let me first explain that in the initial few days of not doing anything else while I was eating, I got a little cranky. Maybe even more than a little. So I might have even complained to this friend just a bit.

I’ve gotten some quizzical looks from other friends as well, but for a different reason. You married, or somehow significantly-othered, folks might be wondering what the big deal is. People with families don’t do much else besides talk to the other people their eating with while they're dining. But for us singles, dining alone is usually a time when we’d prefer to have a few distractions going on. It keeps us from realizing we’re eating alone.

As I mentioned in my first post, I was typically doing about four or five things while I ate. Hence my surprise to find out that there were some things that I eat that I really don’t like the taste of. Actually it’s more of a texture thing but I’ll spare you the grizzly details. (Pun intended.) I’ve also discovered that I might really be one of those “food is fuel” people. Unless something I’m eating is knock-your-socks-off good, I don’t like paying that much attention to it.

So, back to the original point of this post—and the answer to my friend’s question. Why would I do anything that’s even a little unpleasant by choice? What I replied to my friend was that when I do something that’s hard, I feel good about it when I’m done.  Not an ego-driven, hey-look-at-me-I’m-so-great kind of good. More of a deep-sigh, relaxed kind of good.

And just like any bad habit that is hard to break at the start—or a good habit that's hard to start—you sometimes change your mind at some point and what, at first, was hard becomes easy. Or what was unpleasant becomes your favorite new routine.

Change is good. Embrace it like it’s your best friend.

Sometimes There's More to Dinner Than Just Food

I’ll spare you the details—and me the embarrassment—of yesterday’s meals. Suffice it to say, if you forget that the salmon in under the broiler it turns out not very different from canned tuna. This might be one of those “note to self” moments.

If I had not banished myself to the porch, though, to eat the over-cooked salmon I wouldn’t have seen the hawk that swooped down out of the oak tree.

Let’s take a break here so I can tell you about my oak tree. Well, even though it sits about six feet from my porch I don’t think I can claim ownership to this majestic fauna. Debates have gone long into the night about whether it’s a white oak or a post oak and whether it’s two-hundred or three-hundred years old. I don’t really care. I’ve seen it lose half its branches to hurricanes and still look breathtaking. Now that it has branched out again—well, let’s just say I really like watching someone’s face when they see it for the first time.

OK, back to the hawk. There it was, diving down, then gliding up over the house next door and into the green space beyond. I lost track of how bad the salmon was and stared off waiting to see if it would magically appear again. No hawk. I thought I saw the branches of a tree across the street bend under the weight of a large bird but it could have been my imagination.

Then I heard this very high-pitched eeeeeeeeeeeeeew, eeeeeeeeeeeew. Sounded just like a hawk but higher and very insistent. Then it dawned on me—Holy Moses!—I think that’s a baby hawk. I think I just saw its mother fly off to find it some food! I don’t even really care if it’s not true. The moment, the thought that it might be true, made up for any culinary disappointments of the day. Any leanings toward sulking I’d been toying with over this self-imposed restriction on my eating habits faded away.
 
I did have a stern talk with Miss Petunia Pittypat, puddy tat about the importance of remaining an indoor cat. There  are predators out there, after all.

Dinner and a Movie, Sort Of

Miss Petunia Pittypat, puddy tat and Daisy

Yesterday’s lunch didn’t turn out much better than the hamburger-as-salad experiment. I made a tuna salad salad. No, that’s not a typo. You take some romaine lettuce and chop it up small enough to mix into an equal volume of tuna salad and combine the two. When I really pay attention to what I’m eating I get far more picky about what I eat. Who’d a thunk? The tuna, despite the mayo involved, seemed dry and the lettuce could have used a companion—say, a tomato. Back to the drawing board.

Turns out, as well, that it really cuts down on your snacking time if you have to stop whatever you’re doing in order to eat. I highly recommend using this method (only eating while eating) for anyone who is trying to lose weight.

By the time I got home from work I was positively famished. So I made myself a snack with one of the mini pitas I bought for the mini hamburgers mentioned in the last post. Got out the rest of the perfectly ripe avocado, sliced up the rest of the farmer’s market tomato and produced one of the most wonderfully yummy things I’ve ever eaten. Put a little Hellman’s on that pita and you’re golden.

I took a page from Miss Petunia Pittypat, puddy tat’s book and went out to the porch to watch a little of the Bird & Squirrel Channel. “But wait!” you say, “Isn’t that cheating?” I thought the same thing myself. How is watching nature so much different from watching TV? Turns out the point was moot as it was late afternoon and seems the birds and squirrels are all taking their siestas at that time of day.

Daisy and I opted out of going to the dog park. Well, I opted out. Daisy is always up for a romp with her furry friends. But we had a great time walking around the neighborhood chatting with other friends who were out socializing. We got so caught up in the festivities that before I knew it my Thursday-night guilty pleasure was about to start: The Big Bang Theory. It’s a very silly show but it makes me laugh out loud and I’m a big believer in the healing power of laughter.

No problem, I thought. I can stall on dinner for a mere half hour since I had that delightful snack after work. When I turned on the TV though, it was tuned in to the TV Guide channel and just passing before my eyes was the listing for a movie I’ve been wanting to watch since it came out. The Bucket List. So much for the Big Bang boys; it was a rerun anyway. How I’ve gone so long without seeing this movie is beyond my explanation. If you haven’t seen it, get it. Now.

This posed a giant conundrum though. Clearly, I wasn’t going to wait two hours to eat dinner, so I wound up eating in installments during commercials. Right after Jack and Morgan both found out they each had only six months to a year to live, I toasted up another pita. After they sat looking at the pyramids, I assembled another avocado-tomato delight. And somewhere during their trip I managed to eat. Turns out you can eat a sandwich in three minutes or less but you can’t savor it as well as you can lingering out on a screened-in porch. Same kind of sandwich, two very different experiences. Live and learn.

Enjoy your meals. They’re all you get to eat.

How It All Got Started

It all started when I watched this TED video by Matt Cutts called “Try Something New for 30 Days.” Well, that in conjunction with reading this article on the TinyBuddha blog. Somewhere in the article the writer, Toni Bernhard, talks about not multi-tasking. Particularly “writing while trying to follow a movie in TV; composing an email while listening to an audio book and eating a piece of toast.” I thought about all the things I do at the same time: writing a message while checking FaceBook, while eating dinner and watching TV. I grimaced. Guilty! I multi-task with the big dogs.

I decided then and there—well, actually, then and then—that I would, 1) try something new for thirty days, and 2) not do anything else while eating. Hence, my first 30-day challenge: eating…just eating.

Harder than I thought.

This, by the way, is not a ploy to lose weight. I could lose about five pounds and be happy about it but let’s get real. It’s just five pounds. No, a good motivator like weight loss would make this a lot easier. I just wanted to pick a challenge that was, as it were, challenging.

My first day was July 12, 2011. Dinner. I got out the organic romaine lettuce, the perfectly ripe avocado, the grilled zucchini, and the left-over mini burger that I had cooked along with said zucchini the night before. I put it all in a pasta bowl and topped it off with my secret blend of Annie’s Goddess dressing and a toasted Asian sesame which shall remain nameless because I don’t want to give them free advertising.

I ambled over to my kitchen table whose top I haven’t put a dish on since I bought the thing about ten years ago and sat down to savor my first non-multi-tasked meal. Then I discovered something very disturbing: I don’t like meat. OK, my friend Shanna brilliantly posited that of course I don’t like a chopped-up hamburger in a salad. Who would? I don’t know. I sounded like a good idea when I thought it up. And I’ve done it before—and enjoyed it—when sufficiently distracted by, say, TV, FaceBook and email...all at the same time.

Then there was the next night. Breakfast and lunch had gone swimmingly with breakfast being the usual cup of coffee I drink while staring off into space. At 6:30 in the morning even I am not capable of multi-tasking. For lunch I heated up my frozen Jamaican beef patty in the microwave at work and went outside to sit by the fountain. I almost felt guilty about watching the water flow in arcs over the pool of water. How was this different than watching TV? I decided that, for the most part, I was at least paying attention to what I ate and let that technicality slide for the moment. “This is meat,” I thought, “and it’s not so bad.” Yeah, but it’s covered up in a sauce that’s spicy-good and wrapped in a flaky crust that melts in your mouth. And there’s way more sauce than meat.

Dinner, though, was another story. I biked down to the taco truck on my way to book club and got my favorite combo of one asada, one carrnitas and the hotter-than-Hades chile-avocado salsa on the side. I settled down to what is normally one of my most-loved dinners, took two bites of the carne asada and sat back in dismay. There it was again, the “this is not as good as I used to think” disappointment with meat. I managed to get the whole dinner down but it sat like a greasy lump during what was an otherwise great book discussion. Tomorrow is another day and I think it will probably be meatless.

In closing for today, let me say a few words here about cheating. I don’t like cheating. It’s bad for the soul. So last night I put the bar of Green & Black’s chocolate in the refrigerator and had to go downstairs during commercial breaks from So You Think You Can Dance to bite off little chunks.

I don’t think it was cheating when I stayed at my desk earlier this afternoon and ate a few banana chips. After all, I stared at the faux-wood top of my desk while chewing and only strayed over to glance at my wall calendar for a second or two.

May tomorrow always be better. Gives you something to look forward to.