I eliminated beef from my diet about two years ago, as an easy diet modification to eliminate a possible contributor to my cholesterol levels and weight gain. I switched to turkey or sausage for these kinds of recipes which normally rely on beef. In the past two years, I also began to increase my fish consumption, which I’d never eaten in college or Flagstaff (where there just wasn’t any fish around except for at Red Lobster).

A couple weeks ago, I made some chicken fingers just because we happened to have some in the freezer. It’s an old favorite recipe for the “Ultimate Chicken Fingers”, which uses a batter of Bisquik and Parmasan to add flavor to the chicken. This used to be a staple in our cooking. But once the chicken fingers made their way onto my plate, I just couldn’t stomach it, and I realized that I don’t even like chicken anymore. Chicken has gradually made its way out of my diet over the last few years, and I hadn’t even noticed.

So I got to thinking, what meat am I really eating? I don’t eat beef. I don’t eat chicken. We’ve only bought ground turkey once in the past month for a spaghetti meat sauce, but I ate many of my spaghetti bowls without the meat sauce, simply with butter and parmesan. I enjoy pork, bratwursts and ribs, but I haven’t opted for these meals as regularly now as I used to either. My taste buds and stomach have changed. What does this leave me with? Fish and veggies.

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Token

by Barbara Anderson

My mother keeps an artificial wallet
in her pocketbook to fool the hoodlums of the city.
Thick with newspaper torn into money,
it is the wallet not chained
to the inner security zipper.
FUCK YOU it says on the transparent plastic folder
for credit cards and photos of loved ones.
FUCK YOU on the window for identification.
In case of emergency, she carries it everywhere
invisibly as the belief in god
or knowledge of karate. Any god can tell you this,
she knows, that everything she’s ever saved
is just so much dinero in the sky,
small change to the sun.
But to ride the subways in the heavy metallic hour
before the rush, as the train burrows
from one man-made darkness into another,
between fluorescent stations
yellowed to the color of the moon—
everyone needs something besides
themselves to conceal for ransom.

I wanted to have an epic meal for my last night of summer. We normally buy ground turkey for our “staple meals,” and I wanted to grab a pound so that way Derrick can cook sloppy joes tomorrow night when I’m in class. I noticed that they also sell turkey legs for something like $1.98 per pound, and we bought a package three turkey legs for $3.13.

We really winged the meal for the most part (no turkey puns intended!), rubbing salt, pepper, garlic salt, paprika and vegetable oil on the legs, then cooking it at 400 for an hour and a half. It turned out delicious, though I think Derrick thought the skin was a little spicy. Side dishes included saffron rice and country style baked beans. DELICIOUS!

This meal for the two of us cost about 8 bucks, and we have leftovers to “recycle” as sides for our next few meals. My point is simple, as I was saying in my last entry, that I am increasingly amazed by how easy it is to cook cheaply at home. Derrick and I like to eat out, so it’s worth the extra looking around and experimenting to figure out some fun meals for home. This one will definitely be one we cook again.

Oh, and don’t worry, I’ll get out of this writing about food rut soon enough. School starts tomorrow, & you’ll be able to look forward to monster student stories. I’ll be teaching two sections of Eng. 1101 and taking my first MFA poetry workshop tomorrow evening.