The morning started poorly. While lying in bed, just as the alarm was to go off, I was wide awake, thinking “I’m really hungry and tired.” That’s when the guilt set in. Millions, if not a billion people on this earth survive day in and day out on less than 700 calories a day. I go for one day (along with the day-long mental torture of knowing that I won’t be really adding to that caloric intake) and I’m complaining.
But I got up and had two scram led eggs and half a cucumber for breakfast. Also, while searching around the cupboard of canned sauce, I found one remaining jar of salsa from last fall made entirely out of garden produce. Score. A little of that on the eggs and, again, not a bad breakfast. I felt okay after that, took a shower and went to work.
That’s where the trouble started. I was in at my desk at seven a.m. as usual and realized that I had meetings from 8:30 straight through to 1:00. “Ok”, I thought, “a lunch meeting.” Throughout the morning I was hardening myself against the idea of sandwiches and brownies. But it didn’t matter anyway as the food never arrived at noon. Everyone was hungry and that was fine.
The next challenge was at two o’clock. I had just finished my lunch of a hard-boiled egg, cucumber and zucchini, when I went to the work baby shower of a dear friend of mine. There was cake and Cherry Coke.
Around this time I was starting to get a little worried. Tomorrow is the make-up date for our last softball game getting rained out. I had been feeling a little drained all day and was thinking a lot about bed. Very unlike this upbeat Suburban Farmer. I thought that, besides the little pasta and bread, I might need to add another small supplement to push me up to at least 1200 calories a day. The cake, I thought, would be a good start.
But no, I would have to stick to the rules. The rules, as they were, were under assault. The next hour contained a meeting with another small celebration, which included ice cream.
I don’t work in Candyland. It was just a really good day.
With the help of some friends, I quickly located the most proximal purveyor of Daisy Flour, which is milled very close to here of local grain. There is also a local dairy here (part of a conglomerate) that isn’t local, but has local cow milk (at least when I worked there they did). I combined one cup each of those two ingredients with one of my eggs and made a batch of crepes, or as my Granma called them, “thin pancakes.” Adding this to my day, which was almost exactly like the previous day, will get me up to around 1000 calories.
It was kinda neat how the idea for crepes popped into my head. My Granma was an old farm girl from Michigan and raised three kids on the farm. She never had much money, but she worked like hell and did alright. She’s the one that I think of when I’m canning. Today, as I was thinking of what would be the minimum to add to my diet to get to a survival level, I thought of the easy recipe that she taught me years ago for thin pancakes.
So the experiment continues. A quick recalculation from the pilot day of the “clinical trial” and I’m back on track. Now, if I go out and get a bunch of fruit from the local farmer’s market, maybe I can make a fruit topping for the crepes…
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