the oy of cooking.

Items made in Fort Phil Collins kitchen today:

1) Blueberry muffins. I have never made blueberry muffins before. I just don't love them very much. David, one of my brothers, has had this lifelong relationship with muffins, sort of a Tristan and Isolde thing that has frightened people in the past. Blueberry, his best loved. There was a Passover some years ago when David and I had some pet goldfish that lived in the kitchen near the stove, and one morning when I came down to eat one of the gross (sorry, Mom, but it's true) matzo-meal muffins she'd made with the tiny blueberries baked inside them, I saw the fish dead, floating on their sides in the water. Their eyes were wide open, of course, but starting to grow opaque and dark like the mini blueberries. Since then I've never wanted another blueberry muffin again, until today.

I'd recently received a request for blueberry muffins and decided to fill the order. I ate one when it came out of the oven and it was actually pretty fucking good. I tried not to think of the fish. I can't remember their names. Goldie, no doubt, or something similarly unimaginative.

2) Chicken cabbage salad. I know I shouldn't be eating cabbage, but the guilt. The Jewish guilt. These muffins and whatnot are making me feel really nervous, like at any moment I'm going to turn around and discover myself incapable of standing, suddenly transmogrified into a loaf of something highly yeasty. My friends eat carrot sticks, run miles and miles along beaches. My friends lift huge canoes over their heads and hurl them into abandoned movie theaters eighty feet away. They subsist on boiled tofu and do things like pilates, yoga, calisthenics. They are ready for battle. I am getting worried. I bought some cabbage.

I'm supposed to be "walking around" for 40 minutes to an hour each day. I don't think this means power-walking with my butt out like Rose from The Golden Girls, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean walking from my oven to my computer back and forth either. So every day I've been taking long walks to do errands. On the errand walk today (Important Wares Acquired: Ziploc bags and a head of cabbage) I decided I'd try to make myself eat some cabbage tonight and see what went down. Since I can't feel the ulcers I guess I might as well try to make myself fight-ready, though I don't know when the fight will be. I mixed up about a third of the cabbage head with half a grilled chicken breast and some mustard and avocado. It made a lot of cabbage. I took a picture of it and sent it to Fellow Crohn R. (not to be confused with The Other Crohn, who must continue to be stuck under some car somewhere, eternally changing a tire that says I'M EXTREMELY RUDE on it).
OK to eat? I asked R.
"No," said R., which was all I needed to hear, and I ate it.