The Girl Who Ate Everything

It's only day three of "resisting all wheaty products", or about 72 hours, or about 4,320 minutes, or about 259,200 seconds.

...that number translates into a lot of wheat eating opportunities. Of course, if I thought eating wheat (or not just wheat but the things made of wheat, like bread, cake, cookies, and so on) were fine and dandy, I wouldn't be trying to give it up. However, my asthma has gotten not so good (as in, waking up to hacking up mucus like cat with a furball problem is not very becoming), so I'm getting desperate.

Yes, I'd rather give up wheat products than take medication or go to a doctor and, I dunno, demand tests and junk. I can't say I'm really eating less, rather, every fooding possibility becomes a temptation. "Ooo, cookies! Ooo, sammich! Oo, cake! Oo...more cake." To curb temptation, I do things like consume a 9 ounce container of raw cashews in two days (although that obviously didn't curb the temptation or else I wouldn't have been running on 4.5 ounces of cashews a day, which by the way is a lot more nuts than most people would ever need in one day). Thankfully, even though nuts are a common food allergen or source of food intolerance, I'm 1000% sure they don't cause me any problems since I subsisted on them for a long time without any lung related problems.

*hack cough hack*...*wheeze*...dammit, there I go again. I wish I could turn my lungs inside-out and scrape off all the mucus. Damn, how gross would that be? (Besides "I'm gonna go puke for a while now" gross?)

I don't remember my asthma being this bad a year ago, but my body is now a year more junked up on NYC food. Delicious NYC food. Delicious carb laden NYC food. I can't just cut out wheat though; I should also cut out added sugars. Yesterday I ate a 100 gram peanut butter milk chocolate bar from Jacques Torres, but I obviously can't do that every day. (I mean, technically speaking, I could, and would love to, but my organs probably wouldn't like it, except for my taste buds and my brain's pleasure center.) Today while walking home through after eating dinner with a friend, I had a hankering for a rice ball from Fay Da Bakery. I passed two of them and went inside one of them...but I plodged on. For dessert, I ended up eating an apple and about 3 ounces of cashews. Yeah. Not the most delicious thing in the world (quite calorie-dense though), but I could do worse.

Yes, I ate dinner out today! With a human! What a novel idea. My high school friend, Christina, goes to NYU also but ironically lives at the absolute opposite edge of NYU housing from me (I live in the southern-most area at Fulton Street and she lives at the northern-most area at 26th Street). We haven't seen each other in ages so she hopped a cab to meet me in Soho. Although I initially had no idea where to go, I remembered wanting to try Thai Angel on Grand Street. Christina said she had never tried Thai food, giving us all the more reason to try something new. It was empty when we went in around 5:30 PM but became full by the time we left around 7 PM.

meat and rice and stuff

Christina ordered pad thai and I got some kind of spicy meat and vegetable thing (seriously, after looking at the menu for a while it seemed like a lot of things were the same...but now) involving chili paste, julienned red peppers, chopped green beans, bay leaves, and lots of beef. I wasn't expecting all the beef.

"Dude, I think I just ate a cow. A very thiny sliced cow."

While I would've prefered that the beef be more tender, I still enjoyed it; just enough spicey-ness that I didn't have to glug down water, flavored with a hint of bay leaves, and the green beans were perfectly crisp. There was just SO MUCH MEAT. Like. Man. It's a good value (with tip, around $10); I enjoyed my dish but couldn't finish it. God knows I tried, as Christina looked at me in horror (which is how people usually look at me while I eat). Besides having my stomach almost explode from my meal, I sampled Christina's pad thai--TWICE. I didn't think she was taking it home, causing me to ask for another bite after she said she was done, but...er, she did get it packed up. Oops. Note to anyone who might eat with me in the future: if you want to take your food home, don't let me eat it! I'll just eat stuff if it's destined for the trash.

Before meeting up with Chrstina, I had spent about 5 hours in Corinne's apartment to see her photoshoot for an upcoming issue of Budget Living about throwing a Chinese New Year party (cos you know, EVERYONE'S DOING IT...hell, my family hasn't celebrated it in at least seven years). It was cool, food stuffs including chicken satay, Vietnamese summer rolls, potstickers, triangular fried spring rolls, those Japanese buckwheat noodles whose real name I can't remember right now, and probably other stuff. It just took...a long time. Yeah.

stuff for making summer rolls

I was there because I wanted to observe but also because I could be used as a prop! A living one. At most, I think I'd be in two photos, one of a group of us around the table in the photo making summer rolls and looking like we're having THE BEST TIME EVAH, and another standing next to a woman holding a cake with another person on her other side looking at the cake and all of us looking at the cake like we're having THE BEST TIME EVAH. Like yeah.

Taking photos of one food platter (or anything) takines 1000000 shots. They come out really nice though, if you have a really nice camera, good film, a huge-ass lighting thinger, and people who know what they're doing. YUP! Figuring out what plate works best with what other serving dish takes some planning too, not something I've had the need to think about since I have ...um, a plate? A bowl? "A" as in the singular. Not much choice there, folks.

Although we couldn't eat most of the food since it had to be photographed (I left before they finished the final "let's put all the food on the table and make it look all bounteous and delicious" photo), I could've sampled some of Corinne's dumplings or spring rolls. Except. WHEAT! NO WHEAT! Why does my asthma come at the most inopportune times? (not that there's a good time, but I was eating wheat last week.) I figured I had to start somewhere, so I refused all the wheaty products, including the free sandwiches and cookies we had at lunch. My lunch consisted of potato chips, corn chips, and strawberries. Well. It could've been worse.

NO WHEEEAAT!!!