true love

Today's post will serve to enlighten readers on a fact about the author: I love food. I've always loved food and eating, and depsite a short period of pre-adolescent chubbiness, I've always been pretty thin. Being five feet, eight inches with a speedy metabolism helps, no doubt. I've gone through some strange eating phases, such as four months of vegetarianism, three days of the South Beach diet just to see if I could do it (on day four I ate a giant bagel), and a refusal to eat chicken for several months. But the truth remains that I just love eating and everything that goes along with it: restaurants, cooking, trying new foods, alcohol, even grocery shopping.

So today at work there was a big meeting for the executives and therefore a fancy catered lunch. Since there was a lot of leftover food, and I was in charge of helping the caterers set up, I took full advantage and heaped a plate with yumminess. Upon passing my coworker on my way back to my cube to consume the food, she says: "Wow, that's a quite a chowdown plate you've got there. I had you pegged as a bird eater." I laughed uncomfortably and darted into my cube. Now, I didn't think that I had an inordinate amount of food on my plate; it looked like an average sized lunch to me. Either this woman's concept of a lot of food is very different from mine, or she was just surprised to see a skinny woman eating an entire plateful of food. Sorry lady, if you thought all skinny people were skinny because they don't eat, it ain't so.

Luckily, I've found myself a man who is also a good eater. Our first date was a five hour dinner, and the rest, as they say, is history. Many of my best relationships have a history of food as well: my first experiments in cooking with Robert, pinching pennies with Andrea so that we could afford fancy restaurants, talking cookbooks and recipes with Angela. When I was bored last week, I made a lasagna from scratch (and damn was it good--sorry straight male readership, I'm taken). I have an intense desire to grow herbs, despite my failed attempt at maintaining a basil plant from the grocery (we don't talk about this at the Nick/Emily household due to an unfortunate incident involving his sixth floor balcony and a parked car).

So now you know about my love affair with food. It's one that shall continue throughout all my days, unless I start to get fat, and then it's tuna and cottage cheese for two meals a day (basically, the best get skinny diet I can recommend). But until that happens, I will continue to seek out delicious meals and remain unphased when someone remarks at the quantity of food I'm consuming. They can suck it.