Strangely obsessed

What does a man think about after spending a summer being disappointed by the experience of eating?  I'll give you hint: it's a four-letter word that starts with "F".

 For the last few weeks I have found myself being food-obsessed.  When people look at my far-away expression and ask me what I am thinking about, it usually has something to do with what I am cooking for dinner.  You can ask anyone in my immediate surroundings who has spent some time with me recently and they will confirm that I am kind of crazy in this department right now.  I was caught the other day sniffing day-old caramelized onion residue from the edge of my cast iron pan and I was really enjoying the experience.

To be clear, I am not eating much of this food.  I am researching it, shopping for it, and cooking it for my family.  The sight, smell and consumption by others has been a surprising pleasure for me.  I've got my handful of go-to foods that I eat that aren't too disappointing and swallow easily.  I anticipate that this list will grow as I distance myself from chemo and thrush.  And I try everything, looking for that next taste or texture that will feel good in my mouth and move easily down my throat.  I just discovered that a shredded cabbage salad worked great having given up on greens and other vegetables.  Bread in any form, including pasta, is still in the "disappointment" category as are sweet things.  I can manage mildly sweet things like a flavored yogurt, but ice cream, chocolate, jams and candies are completely lost on me.  Peanut butter is my biggest loss.  I always considered it a staple and one of my favorite flavors.  I have to preserve that one in my memory and olfactory because in my mouth it just makes me sad.

Speaking of peanut butter, I just learned why Costco no longer carries the Kirkland natural peanut butter.  We've been missing it for a while.  (Marlee has never really had the regular non-oily kind and turns up her nose at Skippy and Jif).  As it turns out it has to do with stupid people.  Evidently, customers would buy it, open it, see the oil at the top and think it was spoiled so they return it.  Costco was throwing away tons of perfectly good, returned peanut butter every month (this notion kills me!) and finally decided it was not worth it.   The guy at the checkout says there is a new, 3rd party natural brand but it is now kept in the refrigerated section.

But I digress.  Do a few food anecdotes really betray an obsession?  The digression really is one of the symptoms.  I have all kinds of food anecdotes and all the time!  I'm following food blogs, watching food channels, being sidelined by Facebook photo postings of friends' dinner plates, taking gratuitous trips to the grocery store, reading cookbooks, asking people to describe what they had for lunch, and imagining how good a Reuben sandwich would taste.  Sometimes an odd ingredient or spice will pop into my head and I'll start Googling recipes to see what could be created with it.  Send me to the grocery store with a list and I'll come back with twice as much.  I bought pink Himalayan salt the other day.  It's pink and it tastes exactly like salt.  Supposedly it is mined in the Himalayas and has trace mineral elements that make it special.  I'm sure.

Later today, the food mill comes out and I'll be making homemade peanut butter and fresh squeezed cider from Honeycrisp seconds that are selling at Kingma's for a dollar a pound.

Obsession is not a good thing.  At dinnertime, when Mary comes home from work looking to unwind, she finds a crazy man in her kitchen.  I'm hoping this phase will soon pass.  As I can begin to eat more foods I'll begin to be satisfied in more ways than just visual and smell.  For now, the ritual of hooking up the food pump with 4 cans of Pivot 1.5 each evening is the anti-climax of each day.  And each morning starts with a serving of Greek-style yogurt.  I am perfecting my rice pudding recipe which will be an after-breakfast treat. Cardamon was a nice touch.

Thursday I'll have my CT scan results, which I predict will be stellar.  Next week is another Endoscopy dilation to stretch out my throat and make swallowing easier.  Clear sailing after that.