Hey, Slim!

This is really not quite working out as planned.

What was the plan? Brilliant wishful thinking: upon our return to the States we will be visiting places like SF (where they have healthy-ish restaurant food), *I* will have control over our meals because I'm cooking, and we'll have access to great produce...all of which adds up to eating healthier and getting slim after 20 duck-fat-infused months in HK.

Eh, not quite.

The trouble started long before the nut butter. But let's talk about the nut butter... E's friend S-- has a little side business with an 80-something-year-old friend making two products, an outrageous pecan-almond-everything nut butter and an equally decadent dried cherry and sesame-encrusted cashew granola. They've discovered that if you mix the two products together the result is more addictive than heroin. The dopamine hit just from the texture alone, let alone the taste...well, let's just say the jar that S-- brought up up to Maine was quickly dispatched with a spoon.



Before the nut butter there were many other dangerous things, but this one bares mentioning: fresh strawberry ice cream at Coquina in Ashland, Oregon. We'll eat fresh produce and get skinny, eh? What about if someone takes beautiful fresh berries and wraps them in all of their bright sweetness, into fresh cream and produces a stunning little ball of pink frozen goodness that tastes so dramatically different from those old strawberry-jam-flavored ice creams of the past...I mean, how could I resist? I don't even like ice cream (very much -- seriously!).



Ok, and then I discovered Patricia Wells's book Trattoria, which is totally amazing. It's like a crib list of all the magic tricks of simple Italian cooking. Last night: chicken with onions and red peppers. Imagine laquered, luxuriant ribbons of pepper and onions almost like filo dough layers and a broth infused with fresh herbs and chicken fat of course. And we had it over buttered-bowties, because were we going to waste the sauce? Remember, this was the part where *I* would have control because *I* was cooking? Ha!

If slimness is the goal, clearly we need a better plan. Except, we don't really want one.