daddy's little fatty.

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Roly Poly
Eatin' corn 'n' taters
Hungry every minute of the day

Roly Poly
Gnawin' on a biscuit
As long as he can chew it, it's OK

He can eat an apple pie
Never even bat an eye
He likes anything from soup to hay

Roly Poly
Daddy's little fatty
bet he's gonna be a man someday

Roly Poly
Scrambled eggs for breakfast
Bread and jelly twenty times a day...

--"Roly Poly", Merle Haggard.

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It's that time again, where we tighten our belts and bid a temporary adieu to reckless grubbin'. I say "we" here, but it's just me, isn't it. This roly poly's been plumpin' up for a few months now, so it's time to once again tighten the thumbscrews of healthy eating onto my unstoppably choppin' opposables.

Come to think of it, this "we" character didn't even do such a great job with the last "return to healthy eating" spell back in May 2007, did "we"? In our defense, other shit was going on. How fortunate that our current refocusing is occurring concurrently with a new year and a new birthday, two psychological albatrosses (whatever) that usually carry at least some motivational weight.

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Diets suck because of their restrictiveness. And their cheeselessness. And their manilnesslessness. Because it makes you sound like a teenage girl, "I'm on a diet." I will attempt to foil this bit of buggery by pretending that I am going to research Chinese cookery over the next month or so. Chinese cooking is an area in which my knowledge is limited to the very superficial, but I do know that there is not a whole lot of cheese involved.

I can cook the basics. Tonight we had chicken and mushrooms in black bean sauce:

















and it was totally good, though in this photo it closely resembles alien innards or Human Ear Salad. But chicken's easy. And not really something that I eat a lot of. And a black bean sauce isn't rocket science either: fermented black beans, garlic, ginger, shao xing wine, chicken broth, soy sauce. So I'll be trying to get beyond the 3 Chinese things I can already cook and concentrate on fun new ways to cook fish, tofu, seitan, and all manner of other weirder shit.

I bought my first-ever Chinese cookbook today, Yan-Kit So's Classic Food of China. Still looking for my first proefkonijnen (literally "test rabbits")....

...but in any case I should probably start toasting my Sichuan peppercorns...

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