Some Thoughts About Food (just to warn you)

The other day I saw an ad for a pizza that was absolutely blanketed in pepperoni, and I had mixed feelings. The pizza looked... good? I guess, but I didn't want it exactly. I didn't want to eat pepperoni, but I did want the satisfied feeling I used to get from eating pepperoni. I realized then that I had been feeling a little lost. It seemed like all I was eating was beans and rice and veggie burgers, and frankly, that's boring. You know? That's not all I eat, but it felt that way.

And then I checked my email and I had a fantastically well-timed note from my friend A-ME, who is way better at Being Vegetarian than I am because she's been doing it longer. The note was all full of advice and resources and exactly what I was needing. You know the biggest thing I got from her email, though? I should buy a vegetarian cookbook. Duh! How am I supposed to know what to eat? I have never been a big vegetable eater. I like grains and legumes, and every day I find that more and more vegetables aren't as gross as I thought they were (like mushrooms), but I have very little experience with most of them and so felt lost. Not lost enough to want a ham sandwich (even an accidental one), though.

Husbandguy and I had some nice time to ourselves this past weekend. Moomie took the girls for Friday night and all day Saturday so we went to the bookstore. Usually this is kind of a production unless we end up just spending all of our time in the children's section so it was nice to be able to browse the cookbooks without having to say every 10 seconds, "Just a minute, sweetie. Mommy is looking for something. We'll go look at your books in a minute." And I found a useful volume with a ton of information about the different whole foods vegetarians eat and a lot of yummy-sounding recipes that are cross-referenced in the info section. So if I happen to have an eggplant on hand and am wondering what I can do with an eggplant and why I should eat it in the first place, I can look in The Vegetarian Cook's Bible and learn all about eggplant and quickly flip to recipes in which I can use it. Who knows if this is the best vegetarian cookbook or not. At least I've got some help now. And I feel a little more confident. Thanks, A-ME, by the way.

I still don't want to eat pepperoni. I'm not grossed out by it or anything, but it doesn't look like food to me anymore. My family loves it, and HG would live on it if he could, but I'd as soon pluck the leaves off the holly bush by the driveway and eat them. So there's progress!