I'm Hungry!

Ever want to just touch a beautiful photograph of food and hope that it will magically appear as is, right in front of you, ready to eat? :-) I hope that someone will come up with the technology some day!

A novelist by the name of Neal (Neil?) Stephenson actually thought of something related to this in his sci-fi novel, The Diamond Age. In it, the main character could just press a button and food that she wanted would come out of a drawer! How cool is that?! How absolutely lazy is that?! Imagine: having a computer programmed to create any kind of food you want at the touch of a button! Where and how does it get made? Who knows...who cares? In the novel, I think it came from dirt! Throw dirt in the drawer, and some minutes later you get prime rib, fresh veggies, rice, and even dessert. I LOVE cheesecake! (Dirt) cheesecake, anybody?

I recently got some vegetarian recipe books from the library, which don't have photos inside, but which have a very tempting photos of food on the cover. The photos themselves were almost enough to make me get the books alone! But I did my research first, reading reviews on Amazon.com. There are delicious sounding recipes in them...whether I attempt to MAKE them is another story. I ordered from the library all these 15 minute and 30 minute quick and easy meals books. Geez, I must be really getting lazy as time goes by!%-0

Why vegetarian recipe books? Our diet at home is probably 3/4 vegetarian and becoming more so over the last several years. Also, I recently read The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study Done on Nutrition..., by T. Colin Campbell, PhD, a world reknowned nutrition expert. It documented decades' worth of hard scientific study/data linking animal protein to many ailments. Although the author only used one kind of animal protein, casein--from cows, he still made a good case to prove his point: that a whole foods and fresh vegetable diet was the way to long-term good health.

I have attended funerals, visited nursing homes, watched loved ones and friends grow old, get sick and die, since I was five years old. And I've had my lifetime share of ailments; all that combined has made me want to NOT get sick...to be as healthy as I can be. I'll be damned if I spend the end of my life wasting away in a nursing home.:-((

To my mind, going to a nursing home means you didn't take care of yourself properly when you were able to, then you developed lots of health problems--thus becoming more and more dependent on others, and then others can't or don't want to take care of you anymore. That may be rather simplistic, but that's how I feel about it.

Going back to cook books: I'm hoping I'll be inspired by these "quick and easy" recipes. I have a quick and easy Chinese cook book by Ken Hom. That book is falling apart all over the place and has food stains galore throughout!;-) And I got that from a used book store in Berkeley, CA, when I first got married, precisely because it said "quick and easy"!

My dearest friend sent me a surprise for Christmas last year, a book called Heat, by Bill Buford. It is "an amateur's adventures as a kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany". It is really hilarious! An insider's view of what it's like to work with famous chef Mario Batali (and Batali's adventures as an apprentice, also) at his famous Italian restaurant, Babbo, in Manhattan. I think anyone who enjoys food would enjoy this memoir...highly recommended!

I'm no chef. Mario would throw me out: I'm like molasses in the kitchen, unless it's something I do often. But I remember watching Julia Child in the kitchen and cracking up every time she let a chicken fall off the counter or when stuff spilled. I, myself am quite messy, so it was refreshing to see her take joy in her cooking and make a mess and not care! From reading her biography, it was also refreshing to learn she was unapologetic about her often-criticized unhealthy food choices. I think her cookbooks are too complicated for my simple ways!

We don't watch tv unless we're down at my in-laws, who have cable. It's fun for us to catch the Iron Chef late at night! Or other food shows--I just want to be there and EAT their creations! Well, as long as it doesn't involve organs...I'm not that brave! Maybe if I didn't think about it and they didn't tell me, I'd eat it!

I think the bravest food feat I accomplished was eating a giant sushi--wrapped like an ice-cream cone, with caviar and a raw quail egg. It looked quite pretty, actually. But the raw egg startled me...and so did the sushi chef who made it especially for me (for my b-day) and was holding a very large cleaver in his hand--threatening not to allow me to eat anything else UNLESS I ate that big ice-cream cone sushi he just created. For me! Oh my! How could I turn him down with that large cleaver in his hand?

It was pretty good, believe it or not. I asked for tea beforehand to wash it down..."just in case"!