Silly Rabbit

One thing I needed to incorporate back into my life, both diet-wise and health-wise, was salads. Now, I’ve always loved salads. I hate making them, because I want to dump every veggie imaginable on it, and that just takes too damn long to peel and chop and core and wash.

But I love eating them.

Even so, I stopped eating salads last fall, around the time of the ‘poison spinach’ scare. Remember that? Some farm out west had a poo backup that splashed runoff water into their fields and made their spinach leaves nasty and toxic, and everyone had to yank them from the shelves and restaurant menus. I had a bag of spinach greens in my crisper that I treated like radioactive waste.

THEN they came out and said, wait, it’s not JUST spinach…it’s other salad fixins, too.

I couldn’t be bothered to remember which was poison what day, so I just stopped eating the entire genre of leafy greens. (Don't freak...I still ate veggies, lots of 'em...including green broccoli and beans and brussel sprouts and limas. But the thought of salads made me shudder.)

And then it came to me…those times in the last few years when I had stomach flu, the pukking “I-Wanna-Die” belly flu, when no one else in the family got sick, was probably food poisoning from toxic salad greens, as I’m usually the sole consumer of those ubiquitous bagged salad greens in our house.

A. Ha.

Well, in my effort to lose weight the non-pukking way, last week I decided to buy non-bagged lettuce, the ‘real’ stuff, and stumbled across a package of lovely romaine heads in my grocery store.

Stumbled over is right.

Because the bag had 6 heads of romaine. The package was as big as a smallish bed pillow. But it was cheap. And fresh.

My husband laughed at me as I finagled a space for the lettuce in the refrigerator. It took up half the bottom shelf.

“You’ll never eat all that!”, he said.

I hate to be wrong. I became a 4-year old, and stomped my feet, and retorted, “Oh yes I WILL!” (Nah-nah-nah-nah-boo-boo.)

Because I hate to admit a pillow-ish size bag of romaine was a silly purchase, even though cheap and fresh, I’ve been stuffing my maw with a salad every day. And I’m trying to use an entire head each day. For lunch.

LUNCH!

EACH DAY!

I just finished with today’s massive bowl-full, and feel like I just swallowed several acres of underwater grassland.

I feel like Peter Rabbit in Mr. McGregor’s garden, and McGregor is on vacation and all the lettuce is mineMineMINE.

Yes, it’s good for me, and fills me up, and I’m sure my guts are thanking me.

But dammit, next time I’m getting a smaller package.

(Burp)