Seasonal Eating

I'm such a seasonal eater that I think sometimes it's a fault. I get into habits, ruts, patterns, that I find hard to break and sometimes even make me a bit reluctant to travel, visit friends, have a sleepover, end up in a part of the country/world that doesn't have fresh fruit. I'm not a type A personality but I am what Alice Miller wrote a book about called "The Gifted Child": overly sensitive to change. My habits and my routines are my addiction. They fuel my sense of self and ground my place in the world. In other words, eating a piece of canteloup or honeydew first thing in the morning from May through until October is at times the only constant in my life.

I like grapefruit for breakfast in the winter months and I like melons with kiwis or blueberries or strawberries with a bit of fresh lime juice in the warmer months. I'll eat bananas in the afternoon with a handful of almonds in the winter as a snack but now I'm stocked up with mutsu/crispin and spy apples to take to work. I'll only drink coffee before 11:30 a.m. and it needs to have no sugar but enough cream to make it cafe au lait looking and then I'll drink herbal tea (yogi teas, peppermint, echinacea) in the afternoon. I rarely eat anything hot for lunch except in the winter and then it's usually split pea soup. For the rest of the year I eat salads every single day, big salads, monstrous salads, full of crumbled cheeses like blue or Bulgarian feta, olives, capers, tuna, hard boiled egg, white pea beans, curried lentils, roasted pumpkin seas, sunflower seeds, chopped radicchio, sliced romaine, fresh herbs, cubed tofu, cooked corn niblets, anything but carbs. I have a thing about carbs in my salad. Dinner I'm okay with carbs. I know I've got it backwards but this isn't something I just started doing. I've been this terrible food dictator for at least a decade. At dinner I'll eat pretty much anything now that I've gone off my raw food vegan lifestyle from about 5 years ago. I'm into ground beef - tacos, burgers, spagetti sauce. I love rotisserie chicken with paella. I'll eat a multitude of lamb sausages with a swollen side of green beans. And now that I'm at night class I make myself the sickest salami sandwich - Polish floured pada buns, French chaumes cheese, horseradish mustard, homemade mayonnaise, sliced grape tomatoes, hungarian peppercorn salami.

The funny thing is when I was at my most neurotic with food - particular, vegetarian, scared to death of being accidentally poisoned, wine and cigarettes at the first sign of dusk - I lived in places like Moscow and Krakow and rural France and traveled through Spain and Portugal and Mexico and New Brunswick and I never had an issue. I was eating spicy carrots from a communal spoon from the babushkas at the train station.

The point of this post? It's October. In my own mental calendar, it's okay to eat cooked tofu with steamed rice and rapini tossed with lime pickle again. Hallejuia!