Monday, March 31, 2008

Sunday, Swilly Sunday

Spurred on by the Rutt's Hut experience I worked hard at home to create some more food experiences where the comfort caused by eating was near-opiatic (I think he means "similar to opiates," Ed.) and inversely proportional to their nutritional value. This glorious blend of masochism and satiation is what you will repeatedly hear (via the voice in your head) me call "swill."

The first thing I ate was actually the most healthy thing I ate all day and it contained an egg, so I might lose my American Heart Association funding after today. I cannot, however allow that to stifle my journalistic integrity or, by association, my meandering palate. If I ever own a diner, this will be on the menu as a "dippy egg." That's what my grandmother called them when we were growing up and it has just stuck as a family word.

In a bowl mix a 1:1 ratio of slices of buttered toast cut into squares and poached eggs. The ratio is of course slices:eggs but I know how the MIT kids get on the comments section so I thought I should nip this one in the bud before I spark another spamoff. More important to the recipe than the ratio of egg to toast is the ratio of salt to egg. Ideally, you introduce about a quarter teaspoon of salt directly to the egg yolk before stirring the egg and toast together and putting a dash of pepper over the whole mess.

A nice touch is also to use all of the wispy trailing egg whites from the poaching water and not just the main glob that holds around the yolk. This adds to the "sopping wet, soaked in butter and golden boon of the chicken gods" effect that master chefs refer to when teaching "dippy eggs" at the Sorbonne. There is, however, a longstanding feud over whether any of the toast at all should retain it's crunch, or whether the entire dish should succumb to permeation by the eggy virtues.

We only had one egg left, though, and while one egg to one piece of toast is a great addition to some hash browns and bacon, it is not enough breakfast for me. I cut up some of my giant Sarris' peanut butter meltaway Easter egg and nibbled from that as my roommate and I listened to some Joe Frank radio shows.

Just the chocolate was making me kind of sick, though, and I thought maybe eating some real food would keep you from telling on me to my mother, so I made some rice and reheated a bag of CoCo Ichi's 角煮カレー, a soupy Japanese curry which counts as swill because I reheated it out of a sealed pouch. If it is food you can mail, then it counts as swill.

If you have never had Japanese Curry, go to Japan and walk up to any of the presumably Japanese people you might see upon exiting the travel vessel of your choice and say to them "anata no opai o mitte kudasai." This will scare most people off, but if you find someone who laughs, you should then say to them "Can you please tell me where the nearest Coco Ichi's Curry House is?" They will probably drive you there themselves, and it will probably be next to a FamilyMart.

It is however important to pronounce the word "curry" as "kah-ray." Some other words you might think you know how to pronounce but are wrong about are "Su-tah-bah-ku-su" which is where you get your yuppyjuice and "Mah-ku-do-nah-ru-do-su" or "Ma-ku-do" for short or "Maku-maku-iiiiiiiiii-makumakuchan" if you are a teenaged girl, all of which refer to that ubiquitous American hamburger chain that is actually worth going to in Japan.
It's not just the shrimp patty "ebibaga" sandwich or the reasonable portion sizes, but the fact that the employees seem to take their job seriously and, at least outwardly, don't despise you for coming to their store. After your curry and rice (kahray raisu), cross the street to the FamilyMart and get a bottle of Dakara, a tall can of Lemon Chu-Hi (hi like "HI!!! NICE TO MEET YOU! AMERICAN!?!"), then walk around the neighborhood enjoying your traditional Japanese beverages, then duck into the golden arches for the "ebibaga seto" or maybe just the "bigu maku seto" for the less adventurous. That's a great formula for a tour of Japan that you can do almost anywhere in the country. You will probably see a lot of English instructors doing the same thing.

Also in my Japan-related diet today, but not really so swilly, was a tall glass of iced "houjicha" which is a very deeply roasted green tea. It’s more mellow than the green tea most Americans are familiar with, and I find the smoky character of the deep roast very refreshing when the tea is chilled.

Later, my other roommate came back from actually leaving the apartment on a Sunday, wacko, having brought back lots of gifts for the apartment that he found in the $1 aisle of the local supermarket. I'll skip all the useless crap I couldn't eat, but of particular note was a box of Lego brand fruit snacks and a box of Christmas cookies.
The cookies were still good, or, well, as good as I imagine they ever were, seeing as how they are all 50% sawdust and 50% red clay. Even if you didn't know they were 4 months old and came from the dollar aisle, there's something about the art on the tin that is even tackier than usual for holiday butter cookies that let you know not to expect too much from the contents.
The Lego snacks, however, were truly disappointing. If Lego were willing to risk all the choking lawsuits by putting their name on a product that you are actually supposed to put in your mouth, they could have at least made them actually function kind of like their actual products, maybe. All of the "blocks" are only the 2x2's, which isn't very dynamic, and although they have the little Lego nubs on top, they had no holes on the bottom into which the little nubs of another block might fit. Though they actually tasted like quality fruit snacks-- I mean at least as good as Shark Bites or the like-- you would think that with the actual Lego logo on the box and each individual wrapped packet they might actually function. This is probably why they were in the $1 aisle. How about all you MITCMURPI guys start harassing Lego instead of worrying about my ratios? FACTISTS! ... i mean FASCISTS!

And then, much later, I got a terrible flash of swillspiration, "swillsagna," which in it's high concept form is just layers of swill that are saucy enough with other swill that might give some vague division of the general swill into "layers" and then heated in an oven.

I took about 4 white flour tortillas and cut them to fit a 8" round cake pan by placing the cake pan on top of them and then cutting off everything that stuck out from the edges. Then I put a little olive oil in the pan and layered a tortilla in the bottom. I proceeded to layer Tostitos nacho cheese dip and a mixture of canned black beans and diced onions, green peppers, jalapenos, tomatoes and frozen french fries between successive sheets of tortilla or the tortilla scraps, toping it off with one tortilla covered in olive oil. I let the whole mess bake at 350F for about 15-20 minutes.

Somewhere in there, I also ate 2 potato chips and a bowl of rice with a healthy dusting of Adobo seasoning. When my Southwest Swillsagna came out of the oven it was already after 10PM, but it is never too late for swill. I ate about 20% of it, which is easy to estimate because it was shaped like a math problem. My roommate had a similar portion and the rest is waiting eagerly for it's big field trip to Lunchtime Lefover Land.

And just because I don't want you factists decrying me at the next den meeting, I said "about 4 tortillas" even though tortillas appear to be rather discrete units because I ate quite a bit of the scraps from the trimming process as I was cooking. I'm a nibbler. I've come to terms with that and I think you should get over it.

Special Bonus Feature: the first person to comment on this posting by correctly giving the number of words in any language that uses the roman alphabet as the language existed prior to 1937 can be formed by exactly using all the letters in MITCMURPIRITUMASSSORBONNEFASCISTPENELOPE will be immediately gifted with a secret knowledge.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

cookies is not biscuits is not not delicious

I woke up early and headed down to Kearny, NJ to have breakfastlunch with my girlfriend and our friends who were visiting from England. We used to live in the same building in Japan and they had gotten used to our hearty American brekkies when we would invite them over for breakfastdinners. Though I really do have a very diverse command of many different breakfast dishes, I am always commanded by visiting friends to make biscuits and gravy.

I am amazed that more people don't know about this amazing food as it is absolutely one of my most favorite foods ever and a very common breakfast at my family's big collective breakfasts on Sunday mornings. If you have no idea what I'm talking about either, I guess some brief explanations are in order.

Biscuits are a flaky, crumbly bread item more or less created by mixing flour and baking powder with something wet like water or buttermilk, then baking it in globs about the size of a flattened golf ball. Recipes will differ, but what they are not is cookies. I repeat in plain English for any Brits, Ozzers or Kiwis in the house, biscuits is not cookies. If you're still having trouble, think scone, then turn up the moist and crumbly dial.

Gravy means many things to many people, but in this case I mean a creamy meat sauce made from cooking sausage, making a rue from the rendered fat, adding milk and reducing till thick, then re-introducing the meat to the pan.

It took me a while to get down to Jersey and I am definitely a breakfast person, as you, my dedicated reader, must have intuited by now. Riding a New York City subway and reading The Burn Journal by Brent Runyon were not enough to keep away the morning pangs, so I snuck a Sarris' milk chocolate egg. Please, don't tell my mother.

Then, before actually making breakfast, I had a cup of Tazo "Awake" tea and half of a buttered pedingyashj(sp.?), which is a Portuguese roll that is possibly one of the greatest baked goods on Earth. Also quite obviously, that is not how you spell it, but I have no idea how you do spell it, so I will leave it for my Portuguese fans to ridicule me for later.
(Note: actually spelled "padinha", Ed.)

The girlfriend and I whipped up enough biscuits and gravy for 6 and two of her Jersey friends came over as well. They also had never had biscuits and gravy, which is a damn shame. I am saddened by the billions of people on this planet who have not had biscuits and gravy, especially those that have not had my grandmother's biscuits and gravy. Although more often than not she opts for the pre-made biscuits in the pop-open tube because she routinely serves breakfast to over a dozen people every Sunday, her gravy is the most amazing food you put on top of other food in the Entire World. I am still a mere gravy paduan, but I do have a small cult following, consisting mainly of my friends who have not been fortunate to eat at Grammy's on a Sunday morning.
Anyway, billions of people only living half their lives, very sad.

It's always nice to have desert after breakfast. There were plenty of biscuits so I ate a biscuit half with strawberry jelly, and a half with peach preserves, and a half with a Portuguese tomato marmalade and a half smeared with the insides of a Cadbury cream egg, imported from Cadbury, even. If you've never had tomato marmalade before, it's a trip. It's sweet, like jelly, and it tastes like tomatoes. I'm not the biggest tomato fan, and when I do eat them it's usually in the presence of bacon, lettuce, white American cheese, mayo and rye toast. This was a new tomato experience for me and one I imagine tomato lovers would really enjoy.

It's always nice to have desert after you have desert after breakfast. After the biscuits I had half a Mars egg, imported from Mars (Ireland, not Pennsylvania or the planet) and a cupcake. This was from the same batch of cupcakes as the smooshed half-cupcake you may remember from my first post. I had mistakenly reported that they were from somewhere in Manhattan. They were not. My girlfriend made them herself. I still don't know what the deal is with funfetti. It's a bit of a pink elephant.

So then there was Rutt's Hut. After a failed attempt at spending the afternoon looking at cherry blossoms somewheres in Jersey, Dora and her two Jersey friends and I -- the Brits having shipped off that afternoon; I hope they don't get their diner leftovers confiscated-- we decided that deep fried hotdogs and hamburgers would make for a nice afternoon. Indeed they did. If you've never heard of it, it's an amazing roadside treat for those of you who love true American swill.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=8859485

I had one of the hotdogs you can plainly see in their Myspace profile, there. They were fantastic; crispy on the outside, still juicy inside. The homemade relish was quite good, and together with a little spicy brown mustard, made for a very gratifying classic hot dog experience.
I also had a pork sandwich, sliced roast pork on your standard issue hamburger bun with brown gravy that somehow managed to drip both up and down the sides of the sandwich prior to it being served. This was also delicious. Both items cost less than two dollars, but the sandwich seemed the better value if only for the size. The seasoning on the roast and the gravy painted a picture of hard work and just rewards upon my palate.
I also had a bite of my girlfriend's deep-fried cheeseburger. I don't know if it was just the deep-frying or the quality of the meat, but the flavor of the beef really came out. It makes a McDonald’s cheeseburger seem like a gallon of kool-aid made with a half cup of sugar.
Top the whole swill experience off with some cheese fries and a pitcher of Pepsi for the table, and we had ourselves a very pleasant afternoon huddled amongst the whiskey bottles and wood paneling.

Later that night at home I dug into the bean pasta leftovers. It was still quite good, although the fennel was starting to fade. I had two breadknots on the side that came with a pizza my roommates had ordered earlier in the afternoon, a bottle of the Focus-A VitaminWater and I don't know what it is, but I am really enjoying cold, flat ginger ale, even after all signs of the stomach virus have passed.

My apologies for not actually posting this till Monday. I'm sure many of you wasted your entire Sunday updating this blog waiting to know what I ate on Saturday. Your devotion is felt and appreciated.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

i would write a haiku about spring but then again...

I started out on the simple recovery program this morning, or yesterday morning, or whatever. Two pieces of toast and I made a double dose of the farina, added some cinnamon, didn't put enough salt in it, but most of it ended up spilling all over the inside of my bag anyway. Farina is hard to clean up. Make sure the seal is secure. Seriously, more infectious than glitter and an actual semen stain might look less like a semen stain than dried farina.
I was all set to eat spaghetti drizzled in olive oil with a little Adobo and basil, but I got blustered into a free lunch and since I was actually invited to sit at a table with other people in my department I thought it would be rude to refuse. I passed on the tomato/basil/moz starter. Even though I know that moz sandwich probably wasn't what shut down my bowels, the thought of that creamy sponge of milk proteins turned my stomach a bit. I thought I'd try a little of the white wine, but that was also a mistake. The entrée was rotini with a tomato sauce and some olives and artichoke thrown in for kicks. I was afraid this would not go well, but my stomach seemed to hold the pasta and sauce pretty well. I could handle the olives too but the artichokes were tough and bitter. Why do people even eat those things. I've enjoyed them a few times in my life, but in general, people just should not go there, especially when serving more than a dozen people at a time. Half a breadstick sopped up the last of the juices and I was feeling good enough about my gut that I had a canoli and two mini-eclairs for dessert. The canoli was kind of cheap, though, and while the shell and cream were both good, there was only a squirt of cream in each end, not a thorough filling of cream, big disappointment.
Got home for dinner and I went at it in the kitchen. The ability to eat real food really kickstarted my palate and I wanted real food. Five cloves of garlic, sliced at about 1/8th an inch, olive oil, low heat till it started to get translucent
, a can of white beans, pinto beans and black beans, a carrot, celery from deep on the inside of the bunch, basil, oregano, dill, thyme and fennel seeds ground in a stone mortar with a wooden pestle. A few cups of water and I threw the lid on it and let it go for a while. Tossed in some spirally pasta after a while and when that cooked in, i added some shredded baby spinach, sprinkled some parmesan and breadcrumbs on top and let it brown a bit. Delightful with a little wonderbread/adobo garlic bread. Would have been nice to finish it with a little white wine, but there was none to be had. Settled for a few glasses of ginger ale that I let go flat for about an hour before drinking. All in all, it's good to be cooking again.

Friday, March 28, 2008

fade to bland

I didn't want to start eating too much too soon, but my stomach felt pretty good. I hadn't kept down more than a tablespoon of rice yesterday and my palate was clamouring for stimulation. Thankfully, when you haven't eaten for a day, toast with a little bit of butter is the most amazing thing in the world. I managed to keep two slices down, and I didn't notice any cold sweats or gastric spasms so I figured it was safe to go to work.

At work I had some farina made with water, not milk, some brown sugar and a little salt. I put twice as much water in as I should have for one serving, so it took forever to cook down. This was an accident, but I think it might have helped break the food down a little more for my weakened gullet.

For lunch I had rice from the night before that I'd boiled again with too much water to make a kind of porridge that I snuck a dash of Adobo con pimento into as it was cooking and a tortilla that I'd browned in a skillet without butter. It was very simple but it did the trick.

It was a bit tortuous to eat so simply, though, because there was again a wealth of free food in the building. I had turned down free bagels and muffins in the morning and free leftovers from some symposium luncheon in the afternoon only to be confronted with free pizza in the cafeteria, the open box wafting gutwrenching temptation towards me as I slurped my rice porridge.

For dinner I had a master plan of taking the crappy white bread I only eat when I have a stomach flu and cutting it into little squares and drizzling them with some of my homemade chicken stock and then broiling it so it got nice and toasty where not laden with wholesome healing juices. I stacked four slices on top of each other, and as I cut them, they compressed into unappetizing little flakes except where the crust managed to hold them up enough that at least you could separate one slice's crust from another. Undaunted I forged on, drizzling the chicken stock as planned, but since I only had a little left and it was on the fattier side, I used some of my vegetarian stock in the bottom of one of my small nabe (japanese crock pot) where the chicken broth-laden bread flakes were heaped. Since the pot was too deep to broil very effectively, and because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to check the oven very regularly, I decided to just bake it on a low heat that would provide for some toasting while allowing the bottom to also heat thoroughly (aka 350F). By the time I finally pulled it out of the oven it was nice and toasty on top, but the bottom had turned into this very unappealing white paste. I tried stirring the whole mess together to get some sort of stuffing and gravy kind of mix going on, but there was nothing to do but shovel it in. That together with a bowl of applesauce was my dinner, and the rest of the night I felt let down by my culinary muse and overful of stomach acid.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Double Shot Kickoff Spectacular

I've been meaning to start this blog for a while now, but since I have an inordinate amount of time to do things on the interwebs, and because I feel that to wait a few days and not include these particular entries would be a disservice to my future loyal readers, today is the day.

This posting is a bit of a whodunnit. You see, I spent much of yesterday asleep, but not in the good, "Saturday afternoon, lying in the sun, dreaming I'm a cat" way. No, more in the "I have thrown up everything I've tried to eat all day and barely have the strength to close my eyes" kind of way. As we go through my list of things I ate, see if you can guess what actually caused my gastric distress.

Day 1
To start, for breakfast I toasted two Trader Joe's blueberry waffles, then "buttered" them fairly liberally with Country Crock churn style margarine while still hot, and then, once the butter had melted, I drizzled on some Log Cabin syrup, just so much that it would soak in with the butter and not drip (very much) when eaten as a sandwich, which is how I ate them with a succulently thick slice of Easter ham in the middle that I had just pan-fried without oil in my glorious 8" nonstick pan to which nothing really ever does stick except magnets.

As I was preparing all of this, I was practicing composing unwieldily run-on sentences in my head to narrate the actions of my life as well as eating the last of a big tub of Stonyfield Farms cream-on-top whole milk yogurt that I’d used a week and a half ago to make a vanilla-sage sauce to top a goat cheese spread. There was only about a third of the tub left and I was about to dive right in with a spoon, figuring whatever I didn't eat should probably get thrown away, when I thought "Why not just chug it straight from the container and not dirty the spoon?" I'm very green at heart.

So chug away I did, and two or three gulps down I noticed a fizzy tartness that wasn't there before, reminiscent of champagne. I decided it was probably best to throw the rest away, and by that time my sandwich was ready and I was out the door to work.

It was my first day at this assignment, and I was glad to have been placed right next to the microfridge full of water bottles. I had three throughout the day. I really should drink more water, but I'm going to start refilling the same bottle at the water fountain. I'm so green (imagine the national average shade of back yards in late October).

I wasn't feeling very hungry so I volunteered for the late lunch shift at 2PM. By about 12:30 I was starting to regret that decision, though, so that afternoon I ate two Sarris's chocolate eggs, half a cupcake my girlfriend got me from some specialty place in the lower west side, and a s'mores flavored granola bar.

My girlfriend had said that it was a cherry cupcake and that it had skittles on top of the icing. The skittles part was certainly true, though they'd started to melt into the icing and became more like skittles sauce than the hard-coated fruitrocks I used to pit against each other in shell-to-shell combat during lunch breaks of yore.
The cupcake had become quite messy from having bounced around by bag since about 9PM the night before, and I couldn't use my usual method of squeezing all the gooey stuff from inside the bag into my mouth like a tube of toothpaste because the cupcake wrapper prevented even squeezing and seemed determined to come out before any delicious cupcakeicingskittlessauceooze.

I ate about half of the cupcake by trying to peel the plastic bag open enough to not get icing on my rather large nose while still eating. Then I noticed it was not a cherry cupcake at all, but a funfetti cupcake. I was a little disturbed that my girlfriend would buy me a funfetti cupcake, although the skittles topping choice (yellow, orange and green, not red) did make a lot more sense. I decided to bring up the funfetti question with my sigoth later and set the cupcake aside until I could get a spoon from the cafeteria.

But at 2PM I received one of those special calls that sets some temping assignments above the rest, the announcement of free food. After the weekly faculty luncheon, the rest of the staff are invited up to eat what is left over. This is a better spread than it may seem, as they order from Whole Foods and always get way more than the professors can eat, obviously planning to feed the rest of the faculty as well.

I went up to the conference room on the 3rd floor and dug in to a roast beef sandwich on panini to which i added a roasted red pepper and some swiss cheese from the tappenade assortment. I also had some pita chips with the olive spread, humus and baba ganoush. The baba ganoush was not so good.

Then I ate a piece of fresh mozzarella because who can resist fresh mozzarella? (Not me.) I had a small, chocolate covered biscotti and then a strawberry for desert.

Then I went to the other end of the table and had some garlic sprouts, some cheese ravioli in olive oil with diced peppers and a waldorf salad-esque mixture of chicken, walnuts, red grapes, celery and red onions in this cream sauce. They appear to be in the yogurt camp and not the mayonnaise camp of waldorf dressiers. That waldorfy stuff was so good I had two rather large portions.

Then, because they were going to get thrown away anyhoo, I took a turkey and brie sandwich and a fresh mozzarella, basil and tomato sandwich for dinner later. I also threw a few cookies in my bag and took a glass of coke down to my desk to help me buzz through the rest of the afternoon. I ended up eating the mozwich during breaks at UCB's Harold Night and tossed the brieturkwich in the fridge when I got home.

End Day 1
WARNING: Day 2 has more description of food coming out than going in, so you may want to skip the next 5 paragraphs if you want to spare yourself the details.

That brings us to yesterday. I started off not feeling so hot, kind of hungover. When I sat down for my morning movements I broke out in a sweat which is my body's usual signal that I'm dumping poisons and I might want to consider a pre-emptive regurgitation. I managed to get through a shower and felt well enough to get dressed and head back to work though I wasn't hungry at all.

At work I thought I should maybe try to eat something, so I bought a banana and a croissant. Opening the bag for the croissant I was assaulted by the smell of it and couldn't bring myself to eat. Despite waves of nausea and pain and several trips to the bathroom for very small amounts of diarrhea, I managed to get through more work than they'd given me all day Tuesday. I tried to focus on work and let my GI problems work themselves south.

Things just weren't coming to pass, as it were, and by 10:30AM I was spurred to run to the bathroom again and induce myself to vomit in the thankfully empty public toilets across the hall from my office. Someone did come in towards the end, though, and my apprehensions about puking at work stifled the last throes before I could fully discharge all of the offensive contents of my innards.

For those of you keeping a score card, the culprit seemed to be the free food from the luncheon, as the most identifiable elements in the bowl seemed to be pieces of garlic sprout and red pepper.

I managed to shake it off, rinse my mouth, and a few breath mints later I was back to proofreading a paper on financial regulation agencies. I tried to settle my newly swept stomach with the banana and croissant. The croissant went down very well, but the banana didn't feel so good. Sadly, sometime around 1:30PM I had a repeat upheaval and decided that I should go home early if possible.

Thankfully my supervisor is a kind and benevolent man and he let me go without the slightest hint of disappointment. I spent most of the afternoon sleeping and wallowing in nausea so I didn't eat much of anything, though I did drink a little gatorade. Later that evening I managed to get down some more of the banana and some gatorade, but by 7:30PM, I'd thrown that up too.

If you are ever likely to throw up, I recommend banana and lemon-lime gatorade. Maybe because it was the third time I'd thrown up that day and I was running out of bile, or maybe it was because I was in the middle of brushing my teeth when I accidentally gagged myself and couldn't settle the rumblings, but I think that was the most pleasant tasting vomit I have ever discharged. There was none of the usual nasty after-vomit tooth-fuzz, which is funny because I usually get a similar kind of fuzz from bananas. You know what I mean?

Anyway, I did manage to eat about a tablespoon of the rice that my lovely girlfriend came and made for me before passing out when she left around 8PM.

OK, GROSS STUFF OVER

So up until the point where I passed out here, I was pretty sure that the waldorfy chicken salad had done me in, although the mozwich that had sat in my bag for at least 5 hours and who-knows-how-long before I lifted it from the faculty's refuse was a prime contender as it was the last thing I actually ate before symptoms set in. The sparkling yogurt didn't really come to mind until later, when I really started to catalogue what I'd eaten that day.

It turns out, though, that it was none of these, nor the ham that had been unrefrigerated on my return train ride across Pennsylvania or the funfetti or even the skittlessauce.

My mother called me to check in on me around 9PM. I'd earlier told her my symptoms because she is a nurse and so hopefully she can tell me when I'm about to die of meningitis so that I have enough time to write my tragic last-minute opus, if not seek out medical attention. She said that my father had the exact same symptoms and that it was likely a stomach virus that we had contracted over the weekend. This is strange since the last time I talked to my father was Sunday night before I went to bed, and the symptoms didn't start until Wednesday morning.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that even if you have contracted a stomach virus, you may not know about it for a few days, but eating sparkling yogurt or tepid waldorfy food items is probably not in your best interest anyway.

Come back tomorrow to find out what I ate today.