Talk Me Down From the Ledge

So back to the food issue.  Last night I'm putting away dishes and I'm having this internal conversation with myself.  I do this pretty often, gotten kinda used to it, and it's something I'm sure everybody does.  But I also have this person inside me whom I tend to think of as the Voice of the Insufferable Optimist.  The IO is the girl who whispers, "Sure, sign up for that half-marathon.  It'll be fun to run 13 miles in 30-degree weather."  You probably have one too.  Your own internal cheerleader, pom poms waving, who insists that YES! You can do that!  It's crazy and makes no sense to the rest of creation, but this is the way to go!  She's annoying, and it's because she's usually right.  I hate her.  My conversation goes something like this, as I'm putting tupperware away:

Dana:  Are we really going to do this?  Eat food that doesn't come in a package?
Insufferable Optimist: Yes, we are.
D:  But Dallas said don't go crazy, and this sounds really crazy to me.
IO:  You can do it!  (Pom poms waving wildly.)
D:  But this is weird food.  Things people in this house probably have never seen, much less are interested in eating.
IO:  Do you want to feed them chemicals?  Oreos are not food.
D:  Mmmm... Oreos.....
IO:  Yes, you are really going to do this.  The government is a big fat liar.  Chickens are people too.
D:  It's going to be really hard.  It's going to mean I have to COOK.
IO:  Wuss.

This is the conversation.  But I finish what I'm doing and I think, "It will all make more sense in the morning."

Except this morning I was still out there on the ledge and it only got worse.  Breakfast is not hard in this house, we usually eat cereal or toast or fruit or yogurt and I had all that in decent quantities.  But about 10am I started to get a little scared because oh my word these children are going to want lunch soon and I have no idea what to feed them.  I got my Food Bible out (the Mark Bittman book) and started flipping through recipes in the "lunch" area.  Chopped Cabbage Salad.  Salade Nicoise with Mustard Vinaigrette.  Thai Beef Salad.  Spinach and Sweet Potato Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing.   Now all those sound just fine to me but are they exactly the ones I want to test out on my four-year-old, who would much prefer a sandwich?  No.  We're having peanut butter sandwiches.

But then I start thinking and the IO is nowhere to be found, probably off thinking up new ways to get me to run a marathon or something.  And I am freaking the heck out.  How am I going to do this?  This is all so new!  Are they really going to eat this?  I don't have any ideas!  What if I spend three hours on something and they all hate it?

So I called my cousin Heather, and she talked me down from the ledge.  She and my friend Kristen are the people I emailed first when we decided we were going the slow food route, because they're smarter than me and they figured out this stuff WAY before I did, and she'd already sent me a couple good recipes, one for granola bars, which I'd made this morning and they were already in the fridge.

Dana:  Heather, I need help.
Heather:  What?
D:  I'm freaking out.  I need to feed these children lunch and I don't know what to do.  They're not going to eat anything in this book.  They're not going to eat quinoa with cilantro.
H:  What do you normally feed them for lunch?
D:  Peanut butter sandwiches, and we're having that, but what am I going to do tomorrow?  They're going to want to eat lunch AGAIN!
H:  You eat all the normal things you usually eat, you just get ones that are organic and not full of pesticides and preservatives.
D:  But I've bought MILLET!  I've bought millet and I don't even know what millet IS!
H:  You use the millet in the granola bars to make them less hard.  And in cereals and stuff.
D:  Crap.  I didn't put millet in the granola bars.  I'm a failure already.  I need some real-life recipes.  Can you send me some real food that these children will eat?

And so she has.  She has talked me down from the ledge of thinking that my children are going to have to subsist on barley and oats, by telling me all kinds of things that I didn't know that were out there.  So I'm going on a shopping trip, and I'm going to go find all these wonderful things that she says exist.  And we talked about growing a garden (which I started this afternoon, by the way, more on that later), and how to slowly incorporate these changes into the regular lives of these miniature house-dwellers so that they are none the wiser.  There is hope.  There is hope that we can learn how to eat the way we probably always should have been eating but I just didn't know any better.

Darn you government.  You suck.

My granola bars are AWESOME, by the way.

Thanks, Heather.