soup, salad

It was 11:00 at night, one hour before midnight, and the gnawing inside that started signaled I had not eaten a proper meal all day. It occurred to me in that moment of gnawing, because I'm quick like that at reaching conclusions, that snacking on a single kiwi fruit and snagging a bowl of strawberries on the fly wasn't going to cut it, even though they were pretty big strawberries as far as strawberries go, red ones too, real red, red and juicy. I virtually inhaled that bowl of strawberries like a giant mechanical vacuum strawberry inhaler, juicy and red strawberries brazenly wearing their seeds on the outside and with tops as green as the day is long so that within a minute there was nothing left but a bowl of green strawberry tops piled up like little dead green soldiers. Still that wouldn't be enough. It would take more than that. Much more. For tomorrow would be a big day, and I would have to be prepared. Yes, all this occurred to me in a flash triggered by a pang of gnawing hunger.

It quickly developed into the type of hunger that went all the way down to my stomach and stayed there tightening. Tightening like a rope that keeps twisting and tightening until it tightens and twists itself and suddenly doubles, and the double tightening keeps right on tightening until even that doubles on itself so that eventually the rope not only becomes much thicker by this tightening, it also becomes shorter. The gnawing turned into a growl -- a growling right there inside my stomach, turning and churning and growling and tightening. It growled like the snarling growls of two dogs caught in a dog fight with no exit, and not just any two common scraggly street dogs either, where there's a few threatening growls and nips then fight is over as soon as it starts, no, it was like those dogs that are made for fighting, the kind of dogs that bite off each others' ears and clamp down with their jaws and never let up. Even if one of the dogs submits and wants to stop fighting the tougher dog keeps right on attacking, because they're obsessed and they're trapped there in the dog fighting ring and there's no getting out, until the weaker one dies, and even then the dog that prevailed doesn't let up, it has to be pulled off the dog it killed and dragged away by its owner, who's the only one that can come close to the k-9 tornado without getting torn up themself, because by then the dog is completely overtaken with passion for fighting and clamping and killing that it blocks out everything else and cannot even hear its master's commands. Those kind of dogs. Mean dogs. That kind of growling. That kind of hunger.

It was the kind of hunger that only one thing could resolve, only one thing in the world. And that one thing is -- eating something.

Wut? Wut? … Damn you, Dashiell, I'm trying to say something over here.

It's true. It's late and I'm hungry. This bowl of soup can never be duplicated. It consists of three, possibly four, leftover preparations I found in the refrigerator by scrounging for things I want to clear out. When you're this starved everything looks great. Each container looked good on it's own but combining them was questionable. There was something with beans and something else I couldn't make out or remember, another container that looked like stew with canned tomatoes, mushrooms, and chicken in a thick mixture that was dark, another mixture with butternut squash and apparently chicken, possibly a previous chicken pie filling. I added a scoop of leftover risotto, that was the best thing, and frankly, the whole pile looked like a mess in the bowl. Peas dotted the pile. It wasn't soup. I added my own chicken broth and heated it. Zap. It was delicious.

* Some kind of fancy purple escarole that comes in a variety package of lettuces.
* heirloom tomato
* fancy pants olive oil
* extra super duper extreme balsamic vinegar completely unsuitable for salads
* sea salt / cracked pepper.

* Oh. And bread of course. Wonderfully odd 50% home-milled whole wheat with its incredible depth and strange roundness of flavor, its thick and somewhat difficult crust and its crumb denser than regular artisan bread. I could live on bread like this, and become fat as a cow.