January 2, 2010
Saturday
List your guilty pleasures.
— Lisa Nola, b. 1970s, American listmaker
1. Dates stuffed with cream cheese
2. Keebler club crackers spread with cream cheese and a maraschino cherry on top
3. Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate spread with cream cheese
4. Cake with cream cheese icing (may skip the cake part)
5. Cream cheese fudge
Are you seeing the pattern here?
We’re coming to the end of the season of eating excess, or at least the season where you can almost sort of justify the preparation and consumption of uncontrolled quantities of food. And we’re not talking just food which provides the nutritional components you need to stay active and healthy. We’re talking food that indulges, or amuses, or takes you back to your mother’s kitchen where you fought with your sister about whose turn it was to lick the beaters.
I didn’t have my party this year, so there were no ham balls nor spinach lasagna, no cheese pinecone (a mixture of cream cheese and shredded cheddar covered with almonds), no sand tarts, no cherry dot cookies rolled in Kellog’s corn flakes. I did make two batches of the lussekatter (cardamom-laced bread for St. Lucia Day), and Ron made two batches of his sfratti. All of it was consumed by us, with only a little help from Lynn.
As reported elsewhere, Ron and I went out for a sumptuous dinner on Thursday night and came home to have cannoli while we watched The Godfather. The direction to “Leave the gun, take the cannoli” occurs somewhere in the second hour, and it takes about as long to eat a cannolo as it takes Richard Castellano to deliver the line. I bought four. Ron ate half of one. There were none left by the time Richard Castellano was showing Michael how to prepare pasta and sauce for twenty-five men who’ve gone to the mattresses.
Yesterday we went to my church for the second annual Pork & Sauerkraut dinner held to raise money for our Guatemala mission trips. In Pennsylvania German tradition you have to eat pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day to ensure good luck for the coming year. The elders are silent on which of the offerings on the crowded dessert table are suitable for ensuring good luck, so to be safe, you sample them all.
I went to Weight Watchers this morning — yeah, I’ve done it again, and I could give you links to all my “Oops, I Did It Again” posts, but if you’re clever, you’ll be able to find them, including last January’s, which I could repost verbatim today, since it still represents my attitude toward weight loss and my struggles with it. I’d have to change the number I report there, upward just a little. I made progress in a lot of areas of my life in 2009, but in some ways I stood absolutely still.
The Listography page I opened to this morning for writing practice illustrated “guilty pleasures” with a drawing of a hot fudge sundae. I picked up my pen, thought for a moment, and filled in the first five lines with food items, forgetting that it is my policy not to use the words sin, addict, battle, combat, reject, or forbid in my writing about my relationship with food, and the only “guilt” I need to feel is that I am so affluent that I have never experienced “food insecurity,” probably never will, and can even afford to join a club that encourages me to develop strategies for eating less.
Of the five cream-cheese concoctions listed, I am drawn to write about #2. I was introduced to it on New Year’s Eve in 1972, when I was at the beginning of the long siege of clinical depression that would stretch out over the next two and a half years. I’d been dumped by a long-term boyfriend in August, a rebound relationship had ended badly, and I was spending the December school vacation days sleeping about eighteen hours out of every twenty-four.
I’d become friendly with the young married couple who moved in across the hall about the same time I did the summer before. More precisely, I had become friendly with the husband. The wife worked in a lab while he went to school full time, finishing up college after a hitch in the army. We sometimes arrived home at the same time in the afternoon. He often left his door open. Once he remarked on how hungry he got smelling my dinner cooking. I ate before 5:00 to make a 6:00 graduate school class. His wife didn’t come home until 6:30, he said, so it was sometimes 7:30 before she got something on the table. (Yes, I did wonder why he couldn’t manage at least a pot of pasta and bottled sauce in the three hours he spent home alone. Maybe he was studying.)
When he learned I had no plans for New Year’s Eve, he invited me to join the gathering of friends they were having. I was, of course, the only one there without a partner. There were three or four other couples. One of the women was a nurse who had come directly from work. She put down the plate of food she’d brought and then disappeared into the bathroom. She emerged in a slinky black dress with sequins. Her hair, which had been pulled back in a bun, now flowed loose around her shoulders and was dusted with glitter. Beside her I felt hopelessly schlubby, and all I wanted to do was go back over to my own apartment and crawl into bed to sleep away the next two days. Instead, I ate from the tray she brought. Her husband had actually prepared it, she said, plain Keebler Club crackers spread with cream cheese, and a maraschino cherry on top.
At ball drop time all the couples kissed each other. Then all the friends hugged each other. Two of the men, whom I had just met, of course, gave me kind of a hug, but the host husband gave me a sloppy, wet kiss that landed on my ear (because I turned my head to avoid it) and sounded like a dentist’s suction tube.
My neighbors bought a house a few months later. I helped them move. He came by a few times in the months that followed, to make sure I was all right, he said. Once I heard him call my name from the balcony at a shopping center. I’d already seen him, pretended I hadn’t heard him, and moved quickly through Wanamaker’s and out their side door. I think he got the message.
Usually the foods we crave are ones that take us back to a pleasant time in our life. I seldom buy corn flakes, or dates, or maraschino cherries either, except at Christmas, because those three things go into my mother’s cherry-dot cookies and I want to taste those days again. There is nothing, really, that I want to re-experience from the bleak and lonely early 1970s. But for some reason, every New Year’s Eve, I want that Keebler Club cracker thing.
On Thursday night we watched Michael Corleone take care of all the family business, put him on pause to see the ball drop, and then joined with him again as his late father’s loyal caporegimes kissed his hand and called him Godfather. Ron went to bed. The church next door was having way too loud a “service” to usher in the new year, and I was restless anyway.
I got out the Keebler Club crackers I’d bought along with the cannoli and the spring mix salad for tomorrow (because Sunday is always my Weight Watchers Week Day 1), a brick of cream cheese that didn’t get made into a pear tart for my party, and a jar of maraschino cherries. I popped Forgetting Sarah Marshall into the new Blu-Ray disc player and watched the second half (I saw the first half a few days ago but hadn’t had a chance to get back to it), in which Jason Segel’s sweet and funny and vulnerable character comes to terms with his breakup while consuming his favorite comfort food, Lucky Charms. (And yeah, I watched the beginning again, three times, I think, in all its superhigh definition gloriosity. I did not, however, download it to my own personal handheld device, mostly because I don’t know how.)
I sent 2009 out with a cherry on top. Back to roasted root vegetables and the algebra of the Weight Watchers point system tomorrow.
From the Archives
January, 2005 — Slow Down!: And it seems worth mentioning here that this is a very quiet neighborhood, and that there seems no way to describe this noise from a band of teenagers that does not make me sound like a crotchety old lady who can’t accommodate youthful energy. There was such a woman who lived in the city neighborhood I grew up in, and she was the bane of the summer existence of the twenty-odd youngsters who occupied the two double houses on either side of hers.
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January 2, 2010
Saturday