The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 23

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.

I am so tiiiired of this diet. Tired of not being allowed to eat anything except certain very specific things. But I did it to myself, right? No one is making me do it. Only a couple people know I am even on it. My immediate family, my mom and dad, E and L, and a few friends who I happened to mention it to (before I was on it, so I doubt they remember). I haven’t posted about it on social media. All the writing I’ve done about it has been here.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to quit. How lame would that be, to quit now, with 8 days left? I can do it for another 8 days. It’ll be rewarding just to have the knowledge that I did it. I’m just saying. I’m just complaining, letting off steam.

It will, however, be nice to be done with it. I do plan to actively pursue ways to incorporate what I’ve learned from it into my life going forward, but at least I can eat peanut butter and yogurt again. I’m again in the position where I don’t have any breakfast immediately available, and it’s about 8 am as I write this and would really like to just eat something, for chrissakes, with my black coffee.

I had a banana and homemade hashbrowns. The hashbrowns actually do have the consistency of something chewy, like bread, and the only ingredients I’m using are a potato, olive oil, salt and pepper. I’m not trying to pass it off as anything other than potato. So it counts.

I have to do some serious cooking for lunch. Last night I took some beef out of the freezer and don’t know if it’s the beef for the Indian Beef or the beef for the Steak with Spiralized Potatoes, so provided I can figure that out, I’ll make whichever one it is.

It was YET ANOTHER snow day for the kids, and as often happens it turned into a laaaazy day. We didn’t have lunch until late, and because I had neglected to remove the beef from the fridge to defrost completely, I couldn’t make the beef until dinner. It was the Indian beef, which I was glad of, because the other thing was potato-y and I had already had potatoes today.

So for lunch I had a bacon omelet. And the kids had mac and cheese, although Little Kid didn’t eat much of his.

And then in the afternoon the kids and I took a loooong nap on the couch. I guess I must have been tired, since it was after 7 when I woke up and realized I had to make the Indian beef. I felt guilty about letting it get so late and tried to tell myself it was ok because we had had a late lunch.

Over the weekend we changed the clocks for daylight savings and I must say it’s affecting me more than it ever has in the past, in the sense of very viscerally “feeling like” it’s still an hour earlier than it is. In the past I always rejoiced in this day, because it meant it would stay light out longer, and that’s nice but these days I just feel like time is constantly slipping away from me.

The beef recipe involved mixing garam masala and garlic salt with water in a bowl and then setting it aside. When I read the recipe carefully, then read it again, it became clear that this mixture was never mentioned again after you set the small bowl aside. Obviously you were supposed to add it to the skillet at some point, but when?

When I used to work as a copy editor, I worked at a couple of different food magazines, and found that recipes were among the most difficult pieces of writing to copyedit. This was exactly the kind of mistake I always had an eye out for, hidden in plain sight among all the other stuff we had to keep track of at the same time. Were all the ingredients listed at the beginning, and did all of them appear in the text of the instructions? Were they in the same order in both places? Did the instructions make sense, that is, if a person performed all the steps exactly as written, would they logically follow one another? Was the stated amount of time realistic?

All these questions and more were on the table alongside the usual things one needed to look out for when copyediting: Was all the text styled according to the rules in our style guide — for example, did it say “teaspoon” or “tsp” where it was supposed to? Where did we use numerals and where did we spell numbers out? Was all the indenting consistent? What exactly was the difference between saying “onion, diced” and “diced onion”?

(I recall that the difference was, if you were stating the amount of onion needed in terms of number of onions, as in “1 small onion,” you would add “diced” after the comma, and if it were a measured amount, such as “1/2 cup diced onion,” then the “diced” would precede the “onion” as shown. It made a lot of sense, and my understanding of why it made sense was the type of thing that made me a good copy editor.)

So this kind of mistake was easy to make when copyediting recipes — but it also would make us wince if the issue came out without anyone having caught it. I wondered who the copy editor was on this cookbook and if I would have caught the error before it went to press. I added the garam masala mixture to the skillet at the same time as I added the beef and ginger, and it seemed to work.

It was after 8 when the beef was ready, but fortunately, it was quite yummy and the kids even thought so. At first Little Kid wouldn’t try it, but I got him to try one piece of the beef and he really liked it, so then he sat and happily ate more. He also enjoyed the red and yellow peppers. Big Kid wasn’t as big a fan of the peppers but he liked the beef. In the future if I make this dish, though, I’ll serve it with some basmati rice. We love garam masala in this household.

This diet really has been like Raw Meat Boot Camp for me, which is good. I’ve had to cook with raw meat so much, I’ve developed tactics for doing it that make it less of an odious task (but still kind of odious). First, I make sure that every last other thing is ready for cooking before I even take out the meat, so I’m not involved in handling a lot of other stuff while there’s still raw meat sitting there. Then, I try to make the journey from taking the meat out to cooking it as short as possible, and make sure the meat stays in as concentrated a physical space as possible (say, on a single cutting board). As soon as the meat goes into the skillet or oven, I wash my hands, making sure to use my forearm to touch the faucet, soap dispenser, etc. When all food is gone from the area of the kitchen where the raw meat was, I spray that area with Lysol spray and wipe it down with a paper towel, then wait a little while and wipe it down again with a wet paper towel.

So I have a nice portion of that waiting for me for tomorrow’s lunch, and meanwhile I should put something else in the fridge (from the freezer) to defrost for tomorrow.

One week to go! I can do it!

Tomorrow: Housecleaning and audiobooks are a winning combination.