experimenting with color design in lunch

Decided to try a little something different today. Instead of a range of color, I thought it might be kind of cool to pick a design palette. Because a meal is just like decorating a room.

It was kind of cool to do, and pretty in a way, but as I look at it to eat I just keep thinking, "Needs green."

lunch, deli club:

• 2 (badly) molded eggs (with a small container of sea salt on the side)
• carrot chunks
• red d'anjou pear
• satsuma
• cashews

I didn't have a bento yesterday. But! Thanks to Guy, I did not go without a delicious, homemade lunch! Grabbed one of my pasties from the freezer and a gravy packet on my way out the door in the morning, enjoyed a delicious -- and wow, very filling! -- lunch in the afternoon. And it was quite the talk of the lunchroom. There may have been drooling.

Comments

[Anne Hawley]

Those little hand-pies and gravy are a terrific idea! Must try something similar. Is the gravy packet fairly, um, how shall I put this?, MSG-free? I'm really interested!

Also, I love your color-coordinated lunch, but when all's said and done, I think I agree that meal design should pretty much always include green.

[Bitty]

No MSG. The packets are a brand called "Better Than Gravy" and it's their organic beef gravy mix. The ingredients list: wheat flour, cornstarch, whey (milk), salt, autolyzed yeast extract, cane sugar, natural flavors, beef stock, beef fat, tomato powder, silicon dioxide, dried onion, natural butter flavor, (milk), spices including turmeric, spice extractives.

It says on the package that all the ingredients except the silicon dioxide is organic. Sal thinks it's a preservative. Whatever it is, it seems to be relatively un-evil, since I usually get some kind of indigestion after eating processed food these days and this didn't give me any issues. And the gravy itself was tasty.

[Anne Hawley]

"Autolyzed yeast extract" and "natural flavors," I have learned, are permitted variants of Monosodium Glutamate.

It's a tricky area, one that I've had to do a lot of research on, and still wound up confused. I can eat naturally fermented products where the glutamic acid arises as part of the fermentation process--tamari and Marmite (which I think is also "autolyzed yeast extract) are a couple of examples--but I've had some difficulty with glutamic acid when it's an additive in those MSG-not-called-MSG forms.

Since the "difficulty" came in the form of weird seizures, I wasn't long in concluding that I probably shouldn't take any chances. It's been well over two years, however, since I had any "difficulty" of that kind.

All of that long-windedness to say that at this point in my Path of Purification, I could probably take a chance on a gravy packet. Because it sounds really good!