You need to keep this on the down low. There’re a few little quirks I want to share with you, the subject of said quirks may not be happy having them hung out for the world to see. Let’s start with food rules. I don’t mean food RULES! I mean rules about food. Don’t get me wrong, in my little world food DOES rule! I like food, food is good and tasty and we need food to live. However other than my self-imposed dietary restraints (I’m too vain to be a fatty in my declining years) I don’t have a lot of food rules.
I like omelets for dinner sometimes. Who hasn’t happily indulged in cold pizza or pasta for breakfast? I can go through phases where I want to have French toast every single day until I’m tired of it. I’m not here to talk about MY food rules; I don’t have many of them. I’m here to talk about someone else’s food rules and if he reads this he’ll know who he is (and then get very angry at me).
Did you know that you can’t store a leftover roaster chicken vertically? That’s a food rule in my house. It’s true. I made a roast chicken a year or so ago. We didn’t eat nearly as much as I thought and I was too lazy to pick the meat off the bones so I took the whole thing and put it into a tall round container. Wow, looky that, it fit perfectly and it even took up less room in the fridge to store it vertically than if I had laid it out horizontally. Well awesome me.
Yeah, until my darling hubby came across the VERTICAL CHICKEN! I heard a groan from the kitchen. I went to check that hubby hadn’t succumbed to some horrible kitchen ailment, no gremlins in the blender or anything along those lines and found him staring at the remains of the roast chicken resting comfortably in their vertical container. He shook the container and its contents at me and asked what it was. I explained that it was leftover roast chicken to which he sighed, shook his head and looked at me pitiably. Clearly he had to explain to me that roast chicken is stored HORIZONTALLY, not VERTICALLY. There is no such thing as vertical chicken.
Breakfast foods cannot be for dinner; or even for lunch. If you’ve made it to 11AM without having your bacon and eggs then it’s time to move on and have that ham and cheese sandwich. Lunch comes with two side dishes. I don’t mean at the diner…I mean EVERYWHERE. You can have a sandwich and soup and chips or you can have a sandwich with soup and salad or a pickle and cole slaw but lunch comes with two sides. Go figger. I thought lunch was whatever you could grab and eat to stop being hungry until dinner.
Dinner comes with many rules. My house could be the textbook model for a 1962 home economics class. For all you young ‘uns out there home ec was this cute little course of study that taught girls how to be great wives, and I don’t mean by earning equal or more than their husbands but by getting stains out of white dress shirts and making sure dinner was on the table every night.
Dinner is a meat, a starch and a veggie…and LOT’S OF IT. I’ve tried to argue against the starch at every meal but it falls on deaf ears. I’ve tried to convince him that corn is a starch but that falls flat as well. The interesting part of the argument is the part where he says, “but this is how we grew up, it MUST BE RIGHT” and I respond “but we’ve learned more about food and nutrition since we were little kids, shouldn’t we go with more current knowledge?” Sounds so reasonable, right? Nope. The world came to a screeching halt sometime around 1966 and that’s where our food habits will remain.
To recap; breakfast is served until 11AM and consists strictly of breakfast foods; eggs, bacon, hash browns, French toast, or cereal. Lunch can start at 11AM and go until around 3ish. Lunch consists of a sandwich and two side dishes such as soup and chips or cole slaw and a pickle. Dinner is sometime after 5PM and has meat/fish/chicken, a starch and a veggie. Meats can’t repeat two nights in a row which means if there’s beef on Monday there can’t be beef on Tuesday; if there’s chicken on Tuesday then maybe there’ll be pork on Wednesday, ya gotta rotate this stuff out.
I can’t stress how crazy this is. I always thought the whole idea of growing up was that I could do crazy stuff like eating French toast for dinner eight nights in a row if that’s what I wanted to do. I wanna know who the food police are that are gonna pound down our door and make sure we’re not having French toast for dinner and what the penalty will be. That’s my big question, what is the penalty for eating French toast for dinner or having beef two nights in a row?
Why can’t the rules change?
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