“Growing up, my mom made dinner every night. Usually this would be a large salad with kale, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, all organic of course, and sometimes she’d sprinkle nuts on top for texture. Kale has a metallic taste, like chewing on the hood of a Mercedes. No, something safer, like a Volvo.”
  - Jarod Gintz

I’m lucky my family still live with me, you know. Or that I raised my children to adulthood without them fleeing to another, better family. I am a good but lazy cook. Once cooking is something you have to do, it loses its sparkle, and it’s something I’ve had to do for 37 years. So cooking has less sparkle that last season’s Toddlers and Tiaras. 

The reason I’ve been thinking about food is the particular nature of my nausea. Things I could previously eat I can’t now. Chiefly tomatoes. Now I don’t know much about the secret life of food, but I know that tomatoes are acidic. So I wondered if that was part of the reason for why I don’t enjoy some things anymore. I was discussing this with a friend and he said ribavirin had a similar effect on him.

My youngest daughter who works in hospitality gave me a long list of things I could try that were low acid.

High on the list were kale and quinoa.

Oh god. I was going to have to turn into one of those people. Kale people. Quinoa people. I may as well just grow a beard, get a fixie and move to Portland. But regardless of my sweeping character generalisations, I thought I’d give it a whirl last night.

So I made kale and quinoa patties (totally healthy!) and a wonderful cucumber and avocado salad I’d seen on Smitten Kitchen that morning. An incredibly delicious and low acid treat. Now granted, I sullied my copybook a little with the salad and added lime juice and sriracha sauce to the aioli dressing (it needed it, what could I say?) but apart from that, it ticked all the boxes.

It felt good to cook something from scratch. It felt good to sit at the dinner table feeling human. It even felt good to clean up afterwards. And I had enough avocado left over to have toast with avocado and promite and the teeniest squeeze of lemon juice for breakfast. You Americans who have not tasted the glory that is avocado and promite on toast - you know not what you are missing. Don’t give me your weak little avocado smashes. This is the Real Thing. All the wins!

I have some kale left so it will be twice baked potatoes with kale for dinner tonight. And something else yet to be decided.

Anyway, behold the glory of my dinner:

dinner.jpg