DIET

True Confession:  Every now and again I step off the scale, groan, determine that the time has come again when I have to turn to Jenny Craig.  I know, but it worked before, once, for a while.  And nothing else has stopped the forward march of poundage.  Not my conviction that I know how to eat properly, scarcely, appropriately, because apparently I don't.

The center I once patronized having closed, JC offered me the option to have Jenny-at-Home.  No ghastly visit during which to be weighed, no lectures, no questions.  It did mean a weekly phone chat with a friendly counsellor, which, though the woman assigned to me seems perfectly pleasant, funny, kind, was still a moment to be dreaded.  And every two weeks came a large styrofoam box of frozen and otherwise packaged food stuff.  More-or-less food, that is.  I quickly learned, again, which "food" I could tolerate, which I could not.

Life, of course, continued to get in the way.  I'd have house guests.  I'd be a guest of some other house. There were dinner invitations, trips, impossible temptations.  Like the time when Larry, thrown into the kitchen to feed himself, created a grilled chicken dish with roasted potato salad.  Okay, just one bite of the salad, but I had to eat that chicken, I had to.

Now it has been some 5-6 weeks.  Larry is out of town for 5 days and I have had nothing but Jenny Craig for those 5 days.  No alcohol.  And here's the thing.  I do not feel good.  I mean it.  Bad stomach.  Headache, and I never get headaches.  Phycho thoughts.  I have a freezer-full of "food" to chew through, and I by God will, though I will not order more.  I've "lost" 6 pounds or so.

And, this being August, it's pickle season.  Yesterday my kitchen buddy and I went to The Pumpkin Patch out on Sauvie Island to get our cukes.  This place is a huge old barn with bins and bins of newly harvested everything you can imagine in August, which in Oregon, is so bountiful you have to take a moment and just be grateful.  Seriously.  Fresh peaches.  Pears, tomatoes, green beans, melons, apples, and 10 and 25 pound bags of cucumbers.  We couldn't resist one bag of tiny cukes, they are just so cute!   I like this place better than the Farmers Market downtown, not sure why except that it is in the country and there is growing corn all around and the river is just over the berm and there are just the right number of people.

For lunch we stopped at the Dockside which Vik wanted me to see as the paradigm of a Larry spot.  Old tavern with the locals there in their faded gimme-caps, sassy waitresses, menus that have been velveted by the many hands looking for their favorite sandwich.  Jenny Craig be damned and I ordered a cajun burger with chips.  And laughed to see Vik struggle to contain all the add-ons she'd requested on her burger.

At home, we washed the cukes and laid them on towels to dry.  Into the refrig and Tuesday evening they'll get brined and processed on Wednesday.  Vik left and I contemplated dinner.  Some damn frozen thing, but I made a really good salad and had all the blueberries I could eat for dessert.  And then I was overwhelmed with longing for soup.  My own soup.  I had a surplus of celery and one baking potato and some onions.  In the freezer are blocks of chicken broth I've made, frozen, and bagged.  Bay leaves in a pot on the deck.  Cream, gorgeous cream in the refrig, which really had to be used now.  I made the soup and left it in the pan overnight to mellow and this morning, used the stick blender to make it nice and chunky.  Salt and pepper.  It's so easy, and it's in 2 jars in the freezer now, a promise I will keep when that stupid JC "food" is gone.

I don't know the moral to this story, except to say that it is surely good, once in a while, to be really, truly hungry.  To understand the importance of national food policy, to re-read Michael Pollen, to care.  And to appreciate the life time I've been able to enjoy in the kitchen preparing real, honest food for my family.