Fat Girl Gone Thin

Utter exhaustion is the only thing I can think of to describe how I felt this morning. I haven’t felt that way since finals week my junior year of college when my Japanese final got moved up three days.

I got a call last night from one of my vendors for a last minute holiday order of my soaps – in a scent I was entirely out of – which meant many many hours of unplanned melting,stirring, mixing, drying, cutting …rather than running to the closet to grab some of my pre-made stuff.

It wouldn’t have been as bad if I hadn’t stayed up till the wee hours the night before (and I do mean wee, like 3 a.m. wee) and if this order hadn’t been needed by 9 a.m. the next day. Days like today are why I could never be one of those oh-so-healthy folks who refuse to drink coffee. I heart coffee. I heart it very very much. And I heart Starbucks for opening at 5 a.m. even on the weekends.

I tinkered with the idea of taking 15-minute naps while each batch set but I thought better of it in the end. The only thing worse than being tired is then sleeping just long enough to remind your body how great sleep is. Anything under 2 hours is usually always a dangerous proposition for me.

By 8:30 I’d packaged the last of the bars and loaded them in the car when, in one of my most brilliant moves ever, I ran back to the house to turn on my electric blanket. I was so tired that when I got to the store it was still 5 minutes till opening and I didn’t even wait to hand the product over in person. I just wrote a quick note, said I would give a call later, and tucked them in the front door alcove.

Pulling back into my driveway I actually toyed with the idea of just turning off the car and sleeping in the driver’s seat for a few minutes instead of running in the rain all the way to my front door and then my bedroom. Those 50 feet felt like 5 miles!

But I am oh so glad I decided to muster my strength and go inside because I cannot possibly describe what a beautiful thing it was to kick off my shoes and crawl into the warmth of my buttery-soft flannel sheets. Nothing, and I mean nothing, feels quite as good as being tired and knowing you have nothing to stop you from sleeping for as long as you want.

I think it was somewhere around 1 p.m. when I final emerged from my cave. The day already sufficiently shot, I decided to stay in my pajamas and make myself an exquisite dinner to make up for my calorie-free coffee breakfast and lunch. I perused my cookbook collection but the only thing that seemed right for the occasion was my new copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking  – my latest must-have purchase after watching Julie and Julia.

I decided on the beef bourguignon from the recipe that was so predominately featured in the film. All in all, the recipe is not that bad as far as guilty eating goes in the world of french cooking. A tablespoon of butter here and there, a couple slices of bacon, but the dish serves 6, so it didn’t seem all that bad.

What really caught my eye was the part that called for a 3 cups of wine. A whole bottle when you count the glass I poured for myself. A whole bottle! How could this recipe go wrong?

In all it took 5 hours to make. There was boiling of bacon (have you ever heard of such a thing?), then frying of bacon, followed by browning of beef in said bacon fat. Then browning of vegetables in – you guessed it – the bacon fat. But after that things straightened up and it was time to add the wine! A little of this, a little of that, and the whole thing went into the oven for 3 hours.

I thought I could use that long reprieve to wrap presents or do something productive, but a closer look at the recipe had me browning onions for an hour and sauteing mushrooms for 40 minutes and by the time I had done that and washed a few dishes the beef was ready to come out.

The smell in my kitchen was indescribable. It was the smell of developed flavor that only comes from an evening of laboriously preparing a meal. There were about 8 more steps to finish off the dish after it came out of the oven, but I will save you the trouble of reading through all that. Suffice it to say that the dish turned out like perfection, just like Julia Child said it would.

I served it up with some Le Sueur peas. Peas because that’s what Julia recommended and Le Sueur because that’s the brand Samantha describes in Sex In The City, season 4 as “the best” – so naturally, I’ve been curious since. All I can say is, they tasted like peas.

Dessert was a deliciously sweet and fresh pomegranate. The perfect ending to a perfect evening.

I am in love … In love with a cast iron Dutch oven by the name of Le Creuset.

My mother has been trying to get me to buy one of these for years and I have always fought the notion. Sure they make perfectly moist stews and roasts without use of any added oil or butter but in these post-college days where I still find myself moving every two years, the idea of another thing to pack was just too much.

In my defense, anyone who owns one of these will agree with me when I say they are anything but light. My curiosity got the better of me this afternoon and I carried mine to the bathroom scale where this 5.5 quart beauty weighed in at no less than 27 pounds. Twenty-seven! But oh the wonders it can bestow on the cook blessed with the budget to buy one. Indeed, any food connoisseur worth their snuff wouldn’t be caught dead without one of these in their kitchen.

These pots start in the $200 range, so imagine my giddy excitement when I saw a commercial for 50 percent off at Macy’s. Plus another $10 if you downloaded a coupon … And so just like that I found myself wandering the isles of mall parking early this morning in search of my next great bargain.

Long story short, I am now in possession of a beautiful red Le Creuset all my own. It’s been mine for less than 8 hours and already I have broken it in with a simple dinner of chicken and root veggies from my garden. How have I lived this long and not owned one of these!

As for my dinner, I will say that I still need to work on my browning technique, but as a whole my first meal went quite well. One free range chicken from the farmers market, a handful of onions cut in half with another handful of carrots and potatoes and one hour later DELICIOUSNESS!

I can’t fathom why one would use butter or sour cream to top a potato when you could have one steamed to perfection alongside its onion and carrot brothers and sisters. A little chicken juicy goodness on the top and the flavor nearly explodes from your mouth.

So like I said, I’m in love.

As I’ve said before, the holidays are a difficult time to try maintain any sort of waistline. It’s not just all the great food, or the re-allocation of gym time to mall shopping – It’s the season as a whole.

Before the turkey is in the fridge, the Christmas spirit (or Hanukkah, for my Jewish friends) falls upon us and no sooner have we dished that second slice of pie than we are planning seasonal get-togethers. Friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors will soon be conspiring to meet for drinks, dinner and general debauchery. Which is great. How fantastic it is to have an excuse to see those you haven’t connected with in months! What’s not so great is the two-week time frame it falls in.

Inevitably you find yourself double-booking cocktail hour parties with dinner plans, luncheons and potlucks. All these are  smooshed together in the 20 or so days between the pilgrims and St. Nick.

Today happens to be just such a day for me. At noon it was lunch and a catch-up session with old co-workers and at 7:00 it’s drinks and dinner at Purple Cafe for my best bud’s birthday.

Lunch was at a fantastic little Mexican restaurant buried in the heart of Seattle – fantastic food and great ambiance. I haven’t been in nearly a year, but I remembered the place as one of the best in the city. Clean, simple dishes, fresh ingredients – none of that greasy bean/cheese slop you usually imagine when Mexican comes to mind.

So I felt confident in ordering the fajita salad. I’d never had it, but with the prospects of an indulgent, rich dinner just a few hours off, I felt queasy at the idea of ordering a burrito.

The description read as this: “Strips of chicken grilled to perfection, topped with sauteed onions and fresh peppers atop a bed of crisp lettuce.”

Yummy right? In my opinion anything with sauteed onions can’t be half bad. I was excited at the idea of fitting in two great meals in one day with only one serving of caloric guilt. But when the dish came my hope took a nose dive. Just one look at the plate told me that this was about to be one of those barely-satisfying meals that offered up more in the way of chewing than flavor.

Now I’m sure this is the place where someone like Richard Simmons would say to just back away, just eat the lettuce and tomatoes, have the rest boxed up and munch on the emergency protein bar in your purse instead. But what Richard doesn’t know is that I woke up late, got stuck in traffic and had only had a bad cup of coffee in a styrofoam cup in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube at 9:00 this morning.

I was starving! And all the empty calories and grease-laden chicken in the world wasn’t going to stop me from eating this “salad.” What else could a girl do? Order something else? But who wants to pay for two meals and hope that the second one would fit the bill … So I ate the fajita salad – and yes the chicken was covered in some sort of indescribable ketchup-ish sauce and yes, the lettuce had gone wilty under the strain of so much oil atop it. But life’s a gamble, and this sore loser says, next time put your bets on the tortilla soup.

Great hopes for an amazing dinner tonight …

So it’s Christmas time. A week before Christmas actually.

Such a strange time of year … A time when the desire to be dashingly beautiful and skinny is met head-on by the reality of the brie and English toffee adorning the table of every holiday party you attend.

I use the term “dashingly beautiful” loosely of course. I think the most one can really hope for is to fall somewhere in the middle of the ominous sliding beauty scale. Take for instance the dreaded once-yearly family gathering. Sure it’s great to reconnect and re-tell our childhood stories, but let’s be honest, what we’re really looking forward to is finding out if that out-of-town cousin still has purple hair and is working as a bartender and if that in-law-whatever is still tangled up in that pyramid scheme that he thought was a good investment opportunity.

But for the pudgy, the most important part of the family holiday gathering is that you have maintained your place as not-the-fattest of the fat relatives. As long as you are at least one down on the totem pole that is all that matters. Still, it’s a risky proposition – you haven’t seen these people in a year and who knows if someone got their hands on the newest Atkins book or joined Jenny Craig. If that happens and your safety cushion decides to show up in a size 4 mini skirt, you will be forced to fall back on your fantastic job and great sense of humor.  Still, all the corporate ladder climbing in the world isn’t going to stop grandma from pointing out how figure-flattering those elastic waistband pants are to your thighs… or some other horrifically embarrassing scenario.

So in a world of great food and an ever-increasing number of ways to stay healthy while eating well, I’ve decided to forge the way through trial and tribulation and see where a year of dedicated healthy living will get me. I hope you’ll follow along with me, whoever you are out there …