Sheer bliss. There’s great news in the food department today!
I did chores and vacuumed the whole house today, and then I went over to Kimball’s Fruit Farm to pick the two huge bags of apples that I usually put by for the winter every year. Last week, I went and picked just a few, for immediate eating, and I tried the variety called Northern Spy, which I hadn’t tried before. Kimball’s only has a few trees of them in a little stand, and in past years I’ve gone too late to get them. Well…I loved them. To Die For. So I went back today to get lots more–47 pounds more. Then I got about four pounds of a little heirloom Roma-type tomato to make into sauce and put in the freezer (Kimball’s is famous for their heirloom tomato varieties and yes, I save the seeds), and sugar pumpkins to cook and put up in the freezer (I’ve never used canned pumpkin in my life, and neither did my mom), and veggies to eat right now.
Then, I went to Donelan’s, the local grocery, because I’ll need to make more fruit/oatmeal cookies soon (next batch will be with the pear sauce I made from the pears my friend gave me) and I need eggs for those.
They had bluefish.
Bluefish is my absolute favorite kind of fish. I love it, and it’s hard to get. Most of the time, even specialty fish markets don’t have it. Some people worry about it having mercury because it’s a fish that’s high on the food chain, but I eat it so rarely, I’m not concerned about that. In July, a Boston Globe article listed bluefish as one of the most environmentally responsible types of fish you can eat in terms of how its harvested.
It wasn’t cheap, but I didn’t care! I bought almost a whole pound. I just had a piece for my supper. As far as I’m concerned, it needs nothing. I take the fish, just as Nature made it, put it in my counter-top broiler-oven, broil it until it’s cooked through and just getting a little brown crust on top, and eat it as is. Mother of all the gods…what a treat. And I have three more servings to look forward to!
I’ve got tomato sauce reducing on the stove (won’t let that go too much, though), and I cooked some strawberries into puree for cookies, so my house is just redolent. I need to cook the pumpkin, too. Supper was a fresh apple and a piece of broiled fish, and I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.
A lot of people think it would be boring to eat a diet as simple as mine now is. But my palate is now so pure, the things I eat all taste just unbelievably good. I’ve never enjoyed food so much! Of course, a severely restricted calorie diet does tend to add a special poignancy to every mouthful. *wry smile* But I honestly can’t remember now why I ever thought that plain, natural foods needed to be gussied up with condiments and sauces and sweeteners and all sorts of things that just add hundreds of calories and no nutritional value. Even my guilty pleasure, peanut butter, is the “natural” kind–nothing in it but peanuts, not even salt. Commercial peanut butter doesn’t taste right to me anymore. I do use a lot of herbs and spices, but that’s when I cook. A lot of the food I eat now isn’t cooked at all. And the irony is, I love to cook!
I have to weigh and measure and calculate the calories in everything I prepare now, like the tomato sauce, but that’s not really a big deal. I gave the cats the foil that I broiled the bluefish on. Wow. That’s one clean piece of foil. No waste in this house! 🙂
