DAY 3

BOO-yah for KEEN-wah!

(Which is, as I should have told you already, how you pronounce quinoa. If you didn't already know. Which, you probably do, since I am usually way behind on trends. Even food ones.)

Anyway, tonight I again sauteed the leftover quinoa-veggie-pork mix in butter, almost, but not quite, browning it a little, and then I added raspberry wine vinegar. And that was GOOD! VERY!

A side note about that raspberry wine vinegar: First, to my mom and my kids--it's NOT WINE! It's VINEGAR. I don't know why they use the word "wine"! If you don't believe me, take a swig. To everyone else, don't be tempted by the whole line of flavored vinaigrette stuff available at the grocery store. Yes, there are raspberry vinaigrettes that look like just healthy oil and vinegar with a little more flavor, but the labels tell you that they have maybe more sugar, spoon for spoon, than ice cream. Look at the different flavored vinegars and olive oils instead.

Which reminds me--nobody out there is actually going to mistake this whole project for advice, are they? Good honk, I hope not! I have zero training, knowledge or expertise in nutrition, health, science or medicine. Heck, I can barely cook, even. In fact, I would welcome any knowledgeable, or marginally credible, or just-not-too-terribly-kooky input anyone else would like to share. (A good place to start would be the quinoa debate that is brewing on my comment section on day 2. Help! Carol? Anyone?)

I guess if I am going to throw this open for public comment like that, I should define the whole project a little more clearly.

Which would be a good thing to do if only I were a little clearer, myself, on where I am headed with this.

Maybe it would be easier to tell you what this is not about. It's not about going vegan or vegetarian or locovore or all-raw or all-live or all-green. It's not low-fat, good fat, high-carb, low-carb blah, blah, blah. It's not about rules. It's not about deprivation or sacrifice. It's not about weighing myself in or beating myself up.

What it is about is the fact that America is getting fatter and fatter, and so am I. It's about de-toxing me from my sugar addiction. (And you can debate all you want about the existance of a true "sugar addiction". All I know is me. I am an experiment with a sample group of 1. And I know I have intense emotional connections to sugar.) It's about the fact that my kids have no idea what food looks like before it's pounded and bleached and enriched and fortified and hydrogenated and salted and breaded and canned and bagged and creamed and injected with sugar and salted again before heating. It's about learning to enjoy real food, learning to choose it and prepare it and taste it and smell it and appreciate it and want it and be satisfied by it.

It's about living a life where I have enough.

There is my manifesto.

And that is why I have no trouble telling you that I DID have one (1) chocolate chip cookie today. (I tried to give it away TWICE! When not even Eli wanted it, I took it as a sign from God that it was my cookie. And it was...divine.) Yes, I ate that coookie. But the rest of the day, I ate real, whole, fairly fresh vegetables and grains and meat and dairy with no sugar and no artificial sweeteners. And it was enough.