Don't Have A Cow

What do I dream of most?

What do I crave?

What illusory scents and textures wake me in the middle of the night, wafting, beckoning? Begging to be savored, to be consumed?

Carbonara. Oh, sweet pagan gods of grease and pork flesh, do I crave carbonara.

And. . .let's see. . .

Burgers.

But that's about it.

What I crave the most is something less tangible. I think sometimes I'm craving 'hearty'.

Or maybe, 'familiar'.

Maybe this: 'comfort'.

I can't name it, exactly. It's a little demon faerie, armed with both pitchfork and halo, hovering about my shoulder, jabbing me and calling:

Fulfillment! Grease! Iron! (yes! maybe Iron).

Or, possibly: tradition. Stuffed. Sated.

I have been truly loving my crispy tacos with feta and slaw (Mr Vesuvius and I eat ours with avocado and fried jalepeno chips). Eating chili with lots of beans and no beef makes me happy because you don't really need the meat in chili--you've got all those beans! And I feel healthier for that. Stir-fry is good because you feel so downright saintly consuming all those heaps of vegetables in one sitting.

Noah is supportive but not a vegetarian himself. He's been dreaming of rotisserie chicken.

I tell you, after what I've read, I don't think I will ever crave chicken again. Chick-fil'a? No thanks. KFC? Definite pass. Fried chicken in summer, well. That might be a little harder.

After two meatless weeks I bought Noah a steak to say thanks for the support. It wasn't hard for me not to eat it, and I wonder if I'm losing my taste for these things already.

I read a book (don't worry, nothing gory, just an amazon page). I was horrified. I was shocked, enraged. Enlightened. I cried at the accounts of cruelty and sadism. I considered the ripple effect. The environmental angle. I thought, 'there is no way I can eat meat after reading this'.

I wondered how this happened to me.

Me! Meat-eater extraordinaire.

Tonight I'm making vegetable soup with sweet basil. I'm going to buy some nice hearty bread and maybe make these little gruyere toasts. I won't be processing my fresh basil and chopping my carrots and onions and leeks while dreaming about ground beef tacos or turkey burgers or steak with blue cheese. Truly.

But I will be haunted, later, by that thing, that ghost. That unnameable yearning. Maybe it's called: habit.

Or: memory.

. . . burgers and steak on the weekends, tacos with beef and melted cheese, harvest soup, beef stroganoff, barbecue chicken, pulled pork, ancho pork, corned beef hash. . .

Or: ancestry. Some things run in the blood.

Comfort, tradition, habit. I think I'm hedging closer.

Or maybe it really is the carbonara.