Foodies, Food Costs and Body Shamers

Our St Patrick's Day buffet here at my independent living community was both traditional and amazingly good. I say that as someone who doesn't particularly like Irish food. It included stew, of course, corn beef, cabbage, soda bread, a chocolate concoction with Bailey's liqueur and doctored-up mashed potatoes that were so  good I wish I could have stuffed them in a pillow case and snacked on them through out the night. Unfortunately, during and after that meal I drank so much water that I literally made 14 trips to the bathroom between midnight and eight AM. 354 steps according to my fitness watch. Twenty-five steps per around trip. I did the math.

 My CCC gives us a $320 food allowance that we can spend any way we want between their fine dining room and their lunch cafe or snack case. We can even invite outsiders to eat with us and blow the whole amount in one for two sittings. The amount hasn't changed since they opened in October of '21 although the price of their meals has. For example their nightly specials are up to $14.70 (yes, 70 not 75) from $10.75. That only covers a meat and a starch and it's $5.00 extra if you want a vegetable, salad or other side order. Their meals not on special are around $17 for salads on steroids or salmon, $21 for a steak plus the sides are separate. Soup used to be $4.00 a cup at noontime but is now $5.00. Noon specials are $12.95 for mostly sandwiches and fries or chips. If you're careful---which I am---I can eat one meal a day six days a week, and make my allowance last the entire month…until there's a holiday buffet in the month which are $25 to $30 and always well worth it. Others here with families who take them out to eat often have money left over at the end of the month and since it doesn't roll over they look for friends to buy their meal for them. I have benefited from their generosity when a holiday buffet is in the month and I run short. No on wants to leave money on the table for the management.

The lunch special this week was waffles with strawberries and cream, which I lust after (but never order) every time it comes around. If I had ordered them I would have had to do in front of The Body Shamers. One in particular loves to point out how much sugar or white flour is in whatever I'm eating. I've rarely see her eat anything but giant salads or shrimp. Another woman I frequently have lunch with takes a more subtle approach, telling me that she couldn't eat that omelette or grilled cheese sandwich on my plate without gaining weight. 

I'm the second heaviest person living here and I know how they talk about the other fatty behind his back. "He takes too much bread." "He always orders extra sauce and gravy." "He struggles to walk but doesn't use the gym to help control his weight." "He cooks at home, too." "He gets lots of food delivered."

I never raid the table after everyone leaves to round up the bread left over in the baskets like Mister Fatty up above does. But I understand his obsession with doing so. Some of their breads are to-die for and half the women here don't eat carbs so it goes in the trash. I try never to sit next to him at the community farm table because all he talks about is his gourmet cooking which glazes my eyes over. There are two of us here who claim a life time of not having an interest in cooking so we joke about putting space between this guy and us. Grabbing a random seat at a table for 12 or 14 is an exercise in diplomacy. I don’t want to sit near The Body Shamer-in-Chief either or the woman who complains about everything she puts in her mouth. Don't get me wrong, I love the community tables because you can sit back and listen and they are a source of endless amusement with everyone's personal foibles on display and their past histories that get revealed. 

Just yesterday I learned that The Body Shamer-in-Chief used to be 80 pounds overweight before giving up sugar and white flour. Took her a year and a half and she claims that didn't involve any additional exercise. That fact put a whole new spin on her pointing out how much sugar and carbs I consume with my food choices. Maybe she's trying to help? Maybe she thinks a person in her eights doesn’t already know about the cause and effect of food choices? How I need more salads in my diet? When she's not eating salads she's drinking Champaign with a shrimp cocktail so I've taken to asking her if she knows that shrimp are bottom feeders who eat the poop of other sea creatures. It’s a childish tit-for-tat but her being a former principal of a grade school I'm sure she knows that. She's a take charge kind of woman who I really do like but someday I'd like to wrestle her to the floor and force-feed her donuts until she goes into a sugar coma.

Today I did something I haven't done since I was in my teens. I made waffles. A year ago one of the Skinny Minnie twins was selling brand new, Weight Watcher waffles makers for $5.00. I snapped one up for two reasons: 1) I love waffles and 2) I was/still am trying to grow a friendship with her. She, too, was a former fatty-fatty-two-by-four and has been going to Weight Watchers for over 40 years. The box of batter mix I bought back then I got the waffle maker was about to expire so I spent my Sunday morning mixing and baking and cleaning up and the waffles turned out perfect. It was a lot of work but I ended up with enough to freeze and pop in the toaster later. I have a half of box of mix left and will do it again when I can buy some fresh strawberries and cream to top off the waffles. Eating them at home without hearing a choir of comments about how sweet they are or how long someone would have to walk to burn off the calories will be my dirty little secret. 

Eating at community tables seems to bring out the food critics in all of us as we watch each other do things like pick all the onions, olives or candied nuts out of salads, or count the snap peas on our plates. Mr. Fatty is a pea counter and complains if he didn't get as many as someone else at which point someone will often share their peas with him. We all have our food foibles. I hate the rabbit-like eaters the most who leave half their meals behind while I am a member of the Clean Plate Club. I guess their moms never told them about all the starving children over seas. It's bad enough that I have to worry about my own guilt when children are starving and food is being thrown out. 

My teeny tiny next door neighbor is also in the Clean Plate Club but her dog helps her walk it off. Cause and effect. Yes, I do get it. I've gained and lost 50 pounds three times in my life but I just can't seem to find the motivation to go through that torture again. Being a one person assist in my future nursing home room, instead of a two person assist, is all I can come up with for motivation and so far I'm not altruistic enough to put saving their backs up against a year of always feeling deprived when I'm at a lunch or dinner table plus spending hours in the gym every day. My motivations before were: 1) finding a man, 2) keeping him once I found him, and 3) going into knee replacement surgery without a 30% chance of dying on the operating table. My lack of funds for a whole new wardrobe is also a deterrent and being so close under the noses of The Body Shamers who would surely notice if I start eating like a rabbit and that would only drive me back to closet eating. Been there, done that before. I don't take praises well when it comes from people who think they are helping when they point out good food choices. Makes me want to make bad decisions behind their backs just to prove something I don't entirely understand. But I know I'm not the only fatty-fatty-two-by-four who has done that. What's that all about? ©

Until next Wednesday.

Embarrassing Meltdowns and Moles that can Kill You

Boy, did I have an embarrassing meltdown last week in the fine dining room. It’s so embarrassing I don’t even want to write about it and expose my childish behavior. But this issue has been doing a slow boil since I moved in to my continuum care complex and in Stephen King's non-fiction book on writing he says words to the effect if you're not willing to be brutally honest in your writing you're never going to be a good writer.

So, here's what happened when the new manager of our dining room came over to our table to ask us how our meal was and the filter in my brain stopped working. “Who cuts the pies around here?” I asked as I moved my piece over next a table mate's, lining up the outer crusts back to back. Her slice was over 2 1/2 inches wide while my mine was a scant 1 1/4 inches. Another person at the table spoke up and said uneven serving sizes has been an ongoing problem here since they opened. And before I knew it I jumped into my theory that "the waitresses always give me the smallest portions because I’m fat."

That night the lady who got the larger piece of pie was a tiny little thing who usually leaves part of her desserts behind because she eats like a bird. I’ve seen that happen so many times around here and it drives me nuts. Growing up I had to sit at the table until bedtime if I didn't clean my plate and even though I'm in charge of myself now, I still can't stand seeing food wasted. When people want to linger over dinner and there is still food on their plates I have the hardest time not asking them to taking napkins and covering up the uneaten food, an old Weight Watchers trick. Out of sight out of mind.

Aside from that, sweets are my drug of choice and the wanting equal serving sizes is an issue that also comes from my childhood when my brother and I used to fight over who got the biggest serving of our desserts. Finally my mom made us start a new thing of one of us cutting and the other being the first to choose. We kept a ruler in the kitchen for this nightly ritual and it cut down on the fighting but as long as we lived together the measuring and cutting was part of our sibling relationship.

That night when I announced that the waitresses were body shaming me with their decision on who gets the larger portions I realized that I was speaking loud enough that the people on both sides of us could hear me, I wanted to be teleported out of the place never to be seen again. The new manager has only been on the job two weeks and probably wears a size two dress but she knelt down next to our table and softly said, “I’ve got a pie cutter on my list of things to buy. I’ll get this resolved.” My biggest shame in this is that in my heart I know the waitresses aren’t doing it out of malice---or even necessarily on purpose if I were inclined to be fair minded. We have three college students from Ethiopia, all from the same family and they are super sweet and respectful, polite and well mannered thin little girls who are very religious. They come from a family of nine and one of our waitresses is studying to be a lawyer, another is going into bio-engineering and the third is just in her first year. 

Speaking of young people, I went to see the PA associated with my dermatologist who did the biopsy on my cancerous ankle mole last June. It’s not healing up and I’ve been sending photos of it each month to the doctor ever since but this time I insisted on going into the dermatologist’s complex. I could have waited six weeks for the doctor or take the PA right away. The PA turned out to be a kid who looked all of twelve years old and he was as petite as the Ethiopian sisters. I’m used to young doctors but this kid, truly had a baby face that he tried to age with big horn-rimmed glasses. It didn’t work. 

He suspected there was more going on than just a slow heal on a part of the body that, in general, is slow to heal because of circulation issues in our extremities. He gave me three choices and I went with door number one which involved a deeper biopsy to makes sure they got all the cancers cells the first time. He said that because the mole was in a slow healing place, they don’t generally go very deep. Not sure if he was just covering up for the doctor or what but it is what it is and the damn itches like crazy.

I just got this second biopsy report back and now I'm scheduled for a "live mole surgery" that could last one to five hours, depending on how deep they have to dig. And won’t that be fun. It's the surgery where they scrape a layer off, put it under a microscope, then keep repeating until they are sure they got all the cancerous cells. At least I'll be three weeks out from having my second carpel tunnel and trigger thumb surgeries on my right hand.That takes place October 17th. Trying to keep our bodies working gets more time consuming with each year, doesn't it. ©

 

The Widow's Kitchen

I eat out a lot and it’s a good thing because I’m a failure in the kitchen. My meal planning and grocery shopping skills are non-existent. If you follow the ‘Living Richly in Retirement’ blog you’ll know that Barb posts a lot about budgets, buying on sale and planning and to understand my approach, just think the opposite of what she does. I don’t follow sales nor budgets. In fact I rarely look at the price on grocery items. In my defense, I’ve never had to feed a family of hungry kids and before my husband’s stroke, we spent our entire adult lives eating the main meal of the day in restaurants. It worked better for our crazy schedules, thus my cooking skills are not honed to perfection like most women's my age.

So what to do I eat? I wing it mostly. When I’m hungry I open the refrigerator or freezer and stare inside. When I’m not on a ‘winging it’ kick, the sum total of my planning consists of taking something out of the freezer at bed time and putting a notation on my planner for the next day such as: ribs in the crock pot by 12:00 or cook salmon for dinner. I usually have chicken, pork, salmon and beef in the freezer---cut up and packaged in single cooking and serving sizes. I only cook once or twice a week but always on Sundays. I also like to bake scones on the weekend but that only happens once or twice a month. Before I got on the scones kick, I baked artisan breads---my only claim to kitchen fame. When I’m winging it I get by with Stouffer’s or Eat Well freezer-to-microwave meals. Heck, I've even been known to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner. Once in while I’ll make chili or soup, eat part and freeze the rest for later. For breakfast if I don't have scones I'll make oatmeal or cream of wheat or I'll have an Atkin’s Protein Drink if I’m going out for lunch later.

I might be an old dog but I can learn new tricks. Recently, I’ve discovered how to make chicken wings in the crock pot. I’m having them later today in fact. But with all my crock pot cooking I cheat. I’m using a half-a-pack of Tavern Wings Seasoning Mix. Oh and I’ll cheat with soup as well. I like Bear Creek mixes that I’ll add something extra to…like ham cubes to the bean mix. I used to make chicken soup from scratch using a rotisserie chicken carcass but I got so scared that I'd chock on a bone that I quit so now I just cook an extra chicken thigh occasionally and add that to a Bear Creek mix. But nothing is better or easier than a rib-eye steak marinated in a half-a-pack of McCormick Grill Mates Brown Sugar Bourbon mix or pork ribs in a crock pot with Maple Sugar Ribs Seasoning Mix. Sugar? Oh, yes, it’s probably my favorite food group, but sadly we can’t eat it three times a day, seven days a week. 

Vegetables. I can hear the healthy eaters ask if I get that food group into my diet. I buy salads and eat them at least once a week under protest. I cook fresh cauliflower, broccoli and snow peas weekly and fight the dog for eating them raw right out of the refrigerator for snacks. And I always have organic carrots and potatoes in the refrigerator to add to the crock pot or to cook in the microwave. If you’re going to buy anything organic, it should be the root vegetables because they contain more pesticides than vegetables that grow at the top of the plants. We once knew a farmer who grew carrots for a large cannery back in the day when it was still legal to use kerosene for week killer. He told us to smell the carrots in the supermarket for a hint of kerosene and he was right, you could smell it if you were looking for it. They've outlawed kerosene used this way in most countries now but I’ve never forgot that lesson so when organic carrots and potatoes came along I jumped on that bandwagon. Experts will tell you the same thing about organic root vegetables being worth the extra cost, while the others not so much.

And fruits? I’m glad you asked. I buy three bananas every couple of weeks. I buy strawberries in season and I alternate buying red raspberries and blue berries every other week year-around. I buy three pounds of apples in the fall and make apple sauce with them in the spring. I don’t like apples but they're my winter security blanket. It's a quirk I'd explain if I could but I've can't.

I love reading blogs like the one mentioned above. I know if I ever have to tighten the reigns on my grocery spending, I’ve got a lot of room and a road map for improvement. On the plus side, I don’t waste food. I grew up in a household that respected the privilege of having food on the table. We ate left overs every Friday night---things like hash made from left over meats and fried mash potato paddies. Mom served bread pudding, too, made with stale bread and by far bread pudding is still my favorite comfort food. And I never leave food behind in a restaurant. I put an ice pack and an insulated bag in the car for take-out boxes when I know I'm going to be eating out that day.

There you have it, my widow’s kitchen expose. All my shameful and embarrassing secrets have been unmasked and, yes, I know my haphazard approach to eating is not healthy. And for sure, no old duffer is going to set his sightings on marrying me for my cooking skills and I'm okay with that. However, if I ever meet Guy Fieri from the Food Network, he'd better be wary of me setting my sights on him. I do love a man who can cook. ©