Last night at dinner, I had one of those sabotage PETA moments, where they kidnap you and throw you in the back of the van and force you to watch how food is made. Except, you know, the whole experience came via a box of fishsticks.
I get sick of making homemade food three times a day, seven days a week is why. Soooo boring. I mean, fun if you have a spanky new apron and you feel all cookish. But boring as hell when it is like the 250th consecutive meal and you’re tired and man, why is it not OK for our whole family to pretend like we are a bunch of bachelors, and we can bond by eating tuna out of a can over the sink?
Plus, sometimes, when I’m wheeling around the grocery store and the kids are three hanging monkeylike creatures, howling and threatening to tip the cart with their swinging body weight, asking for cookies, the smallest one rips off her diaper and waves it in the air like a big white SURRENDER flag? Except, clearly, I am the one who is supposed to do the surrendering.
Well, I must admit that on occasion, I just throw shit in the grocery cart and call it a day. Later, we eat whatever I got. But not over the sink! Just to show you that I haven’t totally thrown in the towel.
I know a lot of you meticulously plan out the whole week and then shop for every little thing with your print outs with neat little boxes to the left and ordered by location. Check! Check! Check! So satisfying, I assume. But chaos groceries is how we roll in this household.
Anyway, I do kind of half heartedly try and buy the processed food that is least processed looking. I now realize this is a big mistake. If going for processed food, you should go for the most processed. Like on a one to ten scale where tomatoes hanging off the vine are at one end and hotdogs are at the other, if you are going for processed, you should go 11. That’s my thinking this morning anyway. Because otherwise, you are halfway through your fishstick (that you are enjoying! Because all you had to do was pop it in the oven and make a side salad, instead of season some stuff and simmer it and think about it and make sure you had all the ingredients and stuff. Hallelujah! Oven ready! Processed! Fishsticks!).
Yeah, I should just cut right to what was waiting for me inside the fishstick, right.
My half eaten fishtick! With homemade tartar sauce!
And Right Here! Under this Cut! The WormoftheOcean that I wrapped around my fork, thinking, Hmm, that is unusual color and texture for a hunk of fish, and then pulled slowly out of the rest of the fishstick, until it freed itself with the tiniest plop! sound.
So as I’m sitting at the table, mostly thinking Ctrl-Alt-Delete over and over like some kind of purification ritual, some small part of my brain is thinking I need to go vegan. Because this stuff always happens to me. I am always finding the chicken embryo swimming around in my scrambled eggs or that one big vein that’s always hanging out in a leg of chicken like rubber tubing. It’s not that I care about the animals so much as my squick factor is taking over. Maybe after a month of no animal product, I’d lose my skittishness. Maybe I’d miss it so bad I’d eat the ass out of a horse or something. But I don’t think I’ll ever eat the ass out of a fishstick. At least not again.
