A Powerful Salad

Salads automatically feel healthy. No matter if they are doused in a creamy ranch dressing with only lettuce leaves, croutons, and the dressing on the plate. They can have more calories than a hamburger but still have an element of "healthy" to them.

Salad dinners empower a person. They are healthy while still being rich. To enjoy them require a couple of things: a love of vegetables and a variety of vegetables and other salad items for it. Like a party, the more diversity in the salad produces the better flavor results.

This was a power salad night.

Standardizing

Standardization simplifies meals. Same thing for breakfast, same for lunch, and then something different for dinner. Diet and health guides often recommend it to save calories and control quantities eaten. Others fall into it for convenience sake.

Breakfast is the easiest to simplify with choosing a standard cereal. Few have the time to ponder morning meals and thus give up on options and even cooking. The meal gets modified on an upgrade basis, find a healthier cereal buy it, add blueberries, or change the milk to soy.

Lunch varies more. People often eat determined by leftovers, time, and opportunity to eat out. These variable can effect the quality of taste, pleasure, and calorie count of the meal.

Dinner is normal to vary throughout the week and the month.

Each meal can be new and exciting but the task of choosing and creating a different meal, every meal, every day can wear out the mind and detract from it. The idea of standardizing a meal can reduce stress, effort, and health concerns while allowing for a good meal to repeat itself in a simple fashion.

A Light Fish

A light fish fell into place for dinner. Apoka could not believe her luck of finding the fresh fish at the market.

Well, luck had a big part in the plans.

Apoka went looking for an impressive meal. A simple meal meant to leave her guest with more than a positive feeling about her. While the invited boy had shown interest in the past dates, Apoka did not want to leave anything to chance. Her night would shine in the womanly art of cooking. She never felt less feminist and yet so anticipatory proud.

Fresh fish came onto the menu when she daydreamed into the fish counter and noticed an error. The fish she had looked at before was now re-priced in error. The mistake came home with her.

Into the make-shift kitchen, she felt a desire for long counters and matching pots with a variety of aprons to match. The unpacking of the groceries bought special for the night tarnished her image of the kitchen.

Such nice, white fish did not deserve to be hacked into fillets by her dulled beyond sharpening knives that didn't manage to cut nor match. The promise of perfection from her moment at the store dulled. She might not be able to rely on the fish's nature qualities to carry over her meal.

Nor could it carry over her excitement about the date to anticipation on the guy. Her fish would cook. Her kitchen would change that night. The boy would be himself and she would be Apoka. Someway, the night would proceed.

Apoka

In the mist of baking, Apoka felt a twinge of regret. Chocolate cupcakes, while popular, were a completely safe option to take.

"Why am I baking so safe?" entered her mind and rattled around her brain as she put down the cup of coco powder.

Apoka stood in her apartment kitchen with an efficient layout and bland colors. All the accent colors where items were given in a haphazard way. Family, friends, and college roommates had all bequeathed the items they most wanted to replace. She had accepted out of poverty, practicality, politeness, and a lack of thought as to her kitchen. Before committing to a kitchen style, she had received excess items from others and had no need to ponder her own style as the essential basics of a kitchen freely came. Yellow cups, plates with country edges, modern red mixing bowls...all nice items, all necessary items for a kitchen, but none managed to match or were what she would have picked out.

With the basics of her kitchen covered and barely in her first "real" job, Apoka tried not to let the decor bother her. She never thought about them bothering her enough to toss perfectly good items in favor of matching and pleasing items purchased cheaply from a large box store. Her needs were filled and she repressed the self-expression desires as being frivolous.

But it did bother her, enough to annoy subconsciously but not to consciously dispose of usable items to replace at a higher expense just to have them please her for their newness and matching style.

So while not able to consciously recognize that the used measuring cups given to her by an aunt, who happily replaced them, was the source of her irritation, she put away the coco.

In the fridge, she took out the lemon juice and went off recipe, beating with old wooden spoons left by a roommate.

Fudge

Fudge is made with ingredients.

Fudge is tasty.

Fudge also mean to lie a little.

People lie a little to themselves. Its a lie believed to be true, but alas is not. The lie comes and is easier to live with than whatever ugliness is the truth.

"No, I was right."
"You need these pants."
"She will understand."
"They should have know"
"I am the one who really needs it"
"It's my turn."
"This is mine."
"I'm sharing"
"We're a team."
"There is no reason for them to think that"

All of these statement can be said in truth, all could also be lies. Fudging life comes from only looking at it from one perspective. From a first person perspective, all of the statement could be true. Which recipe to follow? The one that requires more knowledge and thought or the one that is fudged.

Fudge requires ingredients, the truth requires information and thought. If the recipe calls for milk, wine will not do.

Oscillate

Going round and round never seems like a good idea unless egg whites are involved. The turning of clear, gluey liquid into white peaks which then get sugar and applied to lemon pies requires magic. The magic being an electric beater.

Making meringue by hand could become the new exercise fad called "Lose Weight by Cooking Great".

Oscillating on a problems lacks meringue magic. It wears down the senses and perspectives. As the beating repeats, nothing changes, no whiteness appears, bubbles fail to turn into foam, nor do any peaks become stiff. Instead, the problem grows and solutions wither with the spirit as the energy is used.

At a point, just like getting a bit of yolk in the whites, any and all solutions seem infeasible unless it's the "perfect and optimal" one. The obstacles grow and so does the negative energy.

So why beat a bowl of egg whites with a drop of yolk in it? Admit that the cracking and separating of the eggs was not perfect and redo it. See the problem as being beyond a perfect fix and work on doing what is possible.

Egg whites can become an omelet. The person who separates the egg is not always the one who beats. The oscillator does not always have the power to fix the problem but can end the waste in energy and heat up the pan.

Seven Hundred and Fifty Grams

A danger in grocery shopping as the only shopping done is the possibilities that come to mind. One example:

See a coconut
"I could crack open the coconut, dig out the meat, shred it, and toast in the oven as a snack" comes to mind.
Buy coconut
Never even crack coconut open
Coconut goes bad
Wonder why ants are in the kitchen.


Kitchens can become full of items with an intended use. Intentions that never come through. Fun intentions which occupied the mind while wandering the isles looking for cheese. Purchased intentions wasting money and space but filling up daydreams. The dream can still happen, over and over again, if the temptation to act remains repressed.

Making lemon cupcakes
Frying homemade potato chips
Icing cakes without using a can
Whip cream with a whisk
Hard-boiled eggs cut thin in the egg slicer on fresh french toast
Crepes hot of the maker
Hot chocolate without tearing a packet open
Blending homemade peanut butter

Putting aside the dreams, the reality still sit on the counter in the form of 750 grams of Godiva chocolate fresh from a friends hands.

Then the list is put aside for questions.

750 grams of chocolate - Does that equal 750 more grams to the weight scale? Does it count if eaten in grams but weighed in pounds?

It is all but a daydream unless eaten.