Eat to Love and Love What You Eat

Right now I am in Maryland visiting relatives. For dinner, we are having mashed potatoes, stuffing, creamed spinach and mushrooms - the mushrooms are divine! - and a roast. Everything is already made by my Uncle Kirk, who loves to cook and is great at it. I am making the roast.

New Things I Ate This Morning: a bagel with cream cheese and lox, capers, and onions. It was fabulous! I mean, I felt like I had died and gone to heaven! Kirk told me that the secret was to sprinkle lemon juice on top of the salmon, so that it did not taste too fishy.

New Things I Ate Last Night: slices of an apple that was dipped in caramel, nuts, and chocolate. Yum! Homemade Clam Chowder!!! I had never had it homemade before. I mean, I had had it restaurant-made, but never homemade, especially for me. (My uncle had made it for us, so that if we wanted something after being in the car twelve hours, we could.) Creamy, vegetabley, clammy, bacony goodness! Yum!

It's funny, but on Shapely Prose, a reader joked about the phrase, "Eat to live, not live to eat." I do not just live to eat, but I don't simply "eat to live" either. Some days, like today, I do nearly live to eat. I am eating with friends and family and it is food filled with both the energy I need and with enough love for my life to thrive. We need more than healthy high-fiber bread and skim milk in this world, although there is nothing wrong with those things. We need calories and fat grams of love to bring us together.

Merry Christmas Everybody!