Cooking Project Update

A brief update on my "eat only what you cook" project:

If you're going to attempt this kind of thing, this is the time of year to do it. It's easy to stop at a farm stand, make a bunch of corn or buy some cucumbers, turn it into a salad and eat it for a few days. Plus, I prefer most vegetables raw, which means there's no work involved preparing part of my meals, so it's just been a matter of, say, grilling some chicken, eating some of it that night, and then using the rest in salads or sandwiches. I've learned there are a few things I won't be able to eat as long as I do this, though.

Pizza, for example. I can make something that resembles a pizza. I can make a flatbread dough, put toppings on it and grill it, and it tastes fine. It's not real pizza, though, not like the pizza from my favorite place. You clearly need a pizza oven to make real pizza, so I'm just going to stop experimenting and put that in the column of things I can only eat if I'm eating out.

I think I'm going to have to say that beverages are not part of this experiment. I love Diet Pepsi too much. I've been making mint tea, but really there's no replacing the chemical fizziness of Diet Pepsi. So I bought some yesterday, and I also bought some pretzels. I was having some friends over for drinks, and pretzels are time-consuming to make, and I didn't want to offer them green beans with their beer (which I also didn't make).

In fact, the healthiest thing about this is going to be the absence of snack food. I didn't think I ate a lot of such food, but I was fooling myself. The hardest thing has been wanting just a few bites of something and finding only fruit and vegetables in my kitchen - no Sun Chips, no wasabi peas, no Twizzlers. And no, I am not going to attempt to make Sun Chips. I'm certain that I lack the requisite chemicals.

In short, it hasn't been a particularly hard week and a half, but it's only been a week and a half. I'll keep going, and update as things progress.