Friday 5 January 2007

Salad Makes Me Grumpy

So it’s full of chlorophyll, folic acid, various vitamins, and fills up space that would otherwise be home to chocolate and (non-weetbix-based) cheesecake, but c’mon! If it were really as delicious as perky wholegrain-fed proponents of health food make out, everyone would be eating it: fussy children, steak-and-potato men, those whose sole exercise involves transporting doughnuts from the box into their mouth, and who only leave the house if four burly firemen cut a hole in the wall and carry them out on a door…

If my diet were a pantomime, salad would be the wicked, green-hued stepmother who does away with my sweet, sweet, refined-sugar mum, and I alone would be able to see through salad’s seemingly wholesome appearance to the bitter, stalky truth beneath.

“No!” I would cry out, as salad crept up on my sleeping fast-food dad, a murderous glint in her cherry tomato eye. “Not the mandoline!”

But I would be too late. Pretty soon my new wicked stepfather (vegetable juice) and my three detestable stepsisters (nine-grain bread, bran cereal and ‘occasional small treat’) would have moved in, and before too long Lonie would no longer be a polony, but some horrible soy sausage sold only in health food shops run by fruitarian hippies.

Grim digressive phantasms aside, I believe the blame for my recent real-life nightmares can be placed squarely on a salad-prompted sugar-withdrawal. This morning I dreamed I was in a bleak post-apocalyptic world with two old acquaintances I’d never liked much. There was something about a terrible deadly contagion and a doctor driven insane by the pressures of stemming its spread, such that he descended into heinously un-Hippocratic behaviour, but the salient point for me was this: The diet must have worked, because I looked great.

Glum as it makes me, bring on the salad. I want the body of my nightmares.

6 comments:

Food Kitty said...

I want the body of my nightmares too - I look scarily like Linda Hamilton in Terminator when she is doing shudder chin-ups on the side of her upturned bed. Puts a new meaning on "in your dreams" doesn't it? But, the upside is - if you are dreaming you are asleep (good in itself) and not eating (better).

Dream On, Baby.

Food Kitty said...

PS forgot the salad bit.

Pea and Lettuce soup is good...(I know you don't think so) just chicken stock, peas, frozen is fine, iceberg lettuce shredded and bit of mint.cook. blitz. better finished with cream but that's bewteen you and your kilos.

Also, stir-fried lettuce - little sesame oil - as you well know, 30 billion people can't be wrong

Jingo said...

It's a good thing I still have my youthfully good metabolism. Hopefully the days of salad are a long time away.

Lonie Polony said...

So spake one in their salad days...

just jokes jingo ;-)

Lonie Polony said...

I think my uncultured palate is a lost cause, foodkitty. Just can't accept a cooked lettuce dish. Eat some caviar and foie gras for me - I need the indulgences in case God is a gourmand. =)

River said...

I quite like salad, it makes a nice entree to my chocolate cheesecake dessert....