Tag Archives: cooking for one

If necessity is the mother of all invention, then a growling stomach and achy head is probably the mother of previously unimagined food combinations.  Actually, I can vouch for that fact.  Now, what qualifies for ‘food’ or for ‘combination’ is in the eyes of… well, someone besides grouchy and impatient me, who is undelicately devouring the results of all the inventiveness.

It all started when hunger pangs finally led me to my refrigerator. I opened the door, found a really unique and very limited assortment of food items and muttered something like, “Oh, mother!”   hmmm.  I didn’t mean that to sound quite the way it probably does in written form. Maybe I better make that “Oh, brother!”  Yeah, that’s what I said.

This is the “off” week that I don’t have my youngest daughter staying with me. And, during these off weeks, in the truest sense of the word, I’m frequently “off.”  Off kilter, occasionally… off schedule, sometimes… off on tangents (this weekend I actually found myself dreaming of tanned gents, I couldn’t beLIEVE it, that’s the first time since… since forever!, but that’s a whole different hunger blog… for another day, or another year).    geez.  Where was I??

Anyway, when my daughter is not here, I have what I might refer to as occasional ~lapses in judgment~ about food. Such as… incorrectly negatively responding to my own question, “Do I really need to go grocery shopping?” Or such as miscalculating how many veggies one person can bring home, in hopes of “getting healthy,” and expect to actually e-a-t before they go bad, or-r-r-r  overestimating how frequently and in how many ways one person can consume plain yogurt.

When the rubber meets the road (maybe I should use ’meats’ the road? no, no, that can’t be right, there’s no meat)…. I open my refrigerator and find three bags of broccoli (various stages of green), a wrinkled yellow crookneck squash, a red bell pepper, half a cucumber, some wilted lettuce, an onion, a carton of egg substitute, a tub of  I Can’t Be Sure Maybe It’s Butter, double fiber bread, peanut butter, a mostly empty 64 oz (!) container of plain non-fat yogurt, and some chicken broth that has def-f-finitely seen better days.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Bread + peanut butter = Voila!! And, if I hadn’t been eating peanut butter sandwiches since yesterday morning, I would be, too. But since I have, I took that off the table, so to speak.

So. I steamed two crowns of broccoli, sliced some bell pepper, toasted and fake-buttered a piece of double fiber bread and snarfed down yet some *more* plain yogurt, this time with a splash of vanilla. I was actually pretty surprised. It wasn’t half bad. It won’t appear on Rachael Ray’s or Martha Stewart’s shows any time in the near future – but it definitely had color and some tiny measure of ~penache~ ……   Penache: a word of French origin that carries the connotation of a flamboyant manner and reckless courage. Yep, the French have loads of ~panache ~…. they have to, after all, they eat escargot.

Upon finishing my little penache-y concoction, I remembered I have a counseling appointment later today. With that amount of fiber and my digestive processes being what they are on my “off” weeks, I will be really lucky if I escape without having any accidental “audibles” during my appointment. If I do, I hope we will observe a standard Dr <–>patient denial clause. In other words, if we don’t acknowledge it, it didn’t happen. I learned this clause during an interesting dental appointment a few years ago. From my dentist. Of course, he had a mask on at the time.  hmmm.  At any rate, I’ve decided what will be, will be. If my body raises some late-arriving objection to the unusual meal, oh well!  I’m in counseling strictly to get my head together. I’m aFreud no one has said anything about my stomach.