There are a little over two weeks until Another Damn Diet starts and I’m starting to feel the pressure of what will be at least 6 months of privation. It’s like when you’re young, on Summer vacation, and suddenly you’re halfway through August and you panic. As the time nears, you start trying to fit in everything you know you won’t be able to do during the school year. Poodle racing. Exploring ether. Sorting your spleen collection. I’m sure ya’ll can relate. I’m doing that with food.
Now the kids do this whole bucket list thing. The 20 or so things they want to do before they turn 30 because they took “Logan’s Run” way too seriously. It’s a great idea. Life is far too short for dreams and desires to go unfulfilled. That’s just life unlived and ultimately wasted. That’s a big part of why I’m doing this blog. It’s not just about food, it’s about freedom. The freedom to just be, just do, and just feel before I go tit’s up.
I think just before I turned 50, I started hearing it - that metallic, tinkling music of a Jack in the Box and whatever we call God, slowly turning the handle, cranking out “Pop goes the Weasel”. It was slowly playing off in the distance of my awareness at first, but it gets a little louder and a little faster with every day that passes. One day, it will get close enough to be heard clearly and without warning, “Pop!”, and the clown, with its black cloak and scythe will spring out and I, and all I was, will be gone.
Our existence, despite the apparent complexities, is actually fairly simple. We’re here for a good time, not a long time. Nothing in the Universe is free. Death is the price we pay being here. Grief is the price we pay for love. And being morbidly obese is the price I pay for the pleasure of the table. So the diet. Again. Always the fucking diet.
I realize resenting my diet is idiotic. There is no point in being angry at a dachshund for digging. That’s its Nature. You have to buy the ticket if you want to get on the ride. If you aren’t willing to pay it, you aren’t willing to ride and honestly, that OK. Hard limits, boundaries and whatnot. Big fan of those.
Best piece of advice I can give anyone, (because I have arrived at an age where I’m chock full of unsolicited advice, just waiting to get out), is to set and stand by your boundaries. Examine them periodically and make certain you still need them. Expand them when you need to, contract them as necessary, but no matter what, make damn sure you are the one setting your boundaries and not anyone else. To do so is to allow someone else to live your life for you, and chances are, they aren’t going to do it right. Enough of “Another Damn Old Fart.”
Right. My “Oh, shit! Oh, shit! I’m dieting again.” bucket list.
Now that I’m sitting here, thinking about the things I really want to hit before January 8th and I realize it’s not that voluminous a list, because I’ve honestly been shoving everything I want, unchecked, into my face-hole since August.
I’m obsessed with sausage right now. I really want a bratwurst on a hearty artisanal roll, the kind with all the whole grains kneaded into the dough, but still soft on the outside. I want that, with a stone ground or heavy horseradish mustard, covered with proper sauerkraut. Adequately rinsed, sauteed gently in a little bacon fat and seasoned with juniper and caraway, garnished with caramelized onions and way too much Swiss cheese.
Oh, God. Speaking of Swiss, I want a proper Cuban sandwich. Made with the actual Cuban bread. That balance of pulled pork, mustard, pickle, ham and Swiss all smooshed together panini style, that’s just magic. There’s a brewery in my town that serves a passable Cuban, but not the experience I’m looking for, but what they do offer is these amazingly prepared garlic-truffle fries. They aren’t really all that special, they are just nicely executed French fries (pomme frites); crispy on the outside, creamy on the inside garnished with garlic, truffle oil, and the right amount of salt (rare on fries these days - like it’s expensive or something), again. Magic. And if you can’t taste truffles, they’re still pretty good, albeit a tad greasy, but in a really good way. So yeah, I may head over there for that. And since it’s a brewery, that brings me to the next item on my bucket essay. Beer.
I like beer. A lot. But it does not like me, specifically the hops, so I’ve been avoiding it of late as I don’t like it enough to pay the price for drinking it. But if I were, that brewery cranks out some really decent varieties. I used to really dig IPA’s because I love bitter, but way heavy on the hops. Right now, low hop ales are brilliant. Also blondes. Lagers. Pilsners. Oh. There’s this Belgian Wheat I’m really fond of, the name of which I can’t remember right now, brewed with orange peel and coriander.
Hoegaarden! That’s it! How could I forget a name like Hoegaarden? That’s where they grow the sex workers bearing wheat beer! That one is easily my favorite next to local favorites like Karbach’s Love Street, St. Arnold’s Tarnation, and the other National Beer of Texas, Shiner Bock. (Sorry Lone Star, I love you, but you’re kinda weak.)
The Truffle Fries remind me of something I’ll be making next weekend once my duck fat has been freed up from the confit I’m currently making. Duck fat potatoes. It’s a copy of “Crisp Goose Fat Potatoes” served by one of my favorite (now lost to time) steakhouses. Essentially, it’s an enormous tater tot made of leftover potatoes mixed with goose fat, salt, garlic, thyme, and rosemary and then baked in a well lubricated (again with goose fat) muffin pan, served upside down on a plate garnished with salt and a little sliver of fresh garlic. Very understated, but my God the texture. Amazing, crispy outside, the inside so warm and creamy. Amazing. You can do it with duck fat. Or bacon fat. It’s really less about the fat’s flavor and more about the high smoke point, because that’s the trick to getting the texture right.
Oh. Shit. Tater-tots. I still need to get some tater-tots! And those shitty hashbrown pucks from McDonald’s, really the only reason I eat there. And real hasbrowns, cooked with the proper amount of neglect and indifference like you get at the Waffle House or Denny’s. Those are the shit.
My bucket list is coming undone. It’s evolving into a “Food I’m going to miss while dieting” thing. That’s OK. Life is about growth and the evolution of thought and perspective. You stop growing and you’re a corpse at best. Underpaid, overworked middle management at worst.
Obviously, I’m going to miss beer, but I already miss the kinds of beer I like, but beer, even shitty diet beer is a no-go for the next six months, it being liquid bread and all. Mead I’m going to miss like a pain. I love mead. I have ever since my first taste at a local Renaissance fair, God, almost 40 years ago now.
It used to be you could only get Chaucer’s at the liquor store occasionally, which honestly isn’t ideal, so I was used to missing it, but these days, everybody and their brother own’s a meadery and there are some really decent brew’s out there. Thorin’s Viking and Knightly are quite nice for daily drinkers. Odin’s Skull for special occasions. None of which are diet friendly being they are made of fermented honey and then back-sweetened with more delicious calories, I mean honey.
Speaking of delicious calories I’m going to miss, fresh, hand made corn tortillas, the Lembas of the Hispanic working class. Served warm with melted butter. Melted butter brings me to banana bread. Warm, straight out of the oven with way too much butter spread across it, half melted, half getting ready to. My wife makes a kick-ass banana bread. I will miss that.
Ramen. I’ll miss ramen. Not the desperate, anime fangirl ramen, but just plain, Maruchan chicken ramen. The kind I used to get for 10 cents a pack. That’s kind of a staple in the non-diet Fillerverse. For me, it’s a sense memory/texture thing. Honestly, a lot of what I like comes down to that.
Take pulled pork for example. It’s not that I love pulled pork, I mean, I’m a fan, but it’s really about reconnecting with a memory of pulled pork, one that wasn’t so over worked and homogenous. I managed to get a mouthful of connective tissue that had just broken down into gelatin, but still retained its form. It was that, combined with just the right amount of bark and fat, so the sensation exploded along my senses, leaving memory shrapnel scattered against the inside of my skull.
Microsoft Word informs me I’m now on page three if this and I realize I could go on forever, so I’m going to wrap this up.
I think what I will miss most over the next six months, and appreciate the irony that brought me here, is the freedom to eat what I want, when I want. To not have to care about the calories. To be able to buy the questionable rollermeat while on a road trip, or to say yes to the sketchy tamales that can only be purchased from the trunk of an Abuela you’ve never met and will never see again. To be able to say yes to joy and comfort and new experiences. To stare the risk of amoebic dysentery in the face and say, “Bring it.” To live. To be. To feel.
There’s the irony. In order to live a life without limits, you either have to limit yourself or not live. Rational hedonism. I want to keep experiencing the pleasure of the table, to slow down that Jack in the Box, and so I must eschew it for a period. But I promise, I will make it as pleasurable as I can. At the end of the day, a shitty pizza is still pizza. And that’s not such a bad thing.
