More Munchies

       Two-Dollar Chicken McCheese

After doing without the dubious wares

peddled by that exploited hamburger clown

for an extended length of time,

I thought, “What the fuck,” one midday

whilst walking by the Five Crossroads McDonalds

and had a loose-change special

two-dollar Chicken McCheese.

I spent the next four hours or so

unpleasantly dehydrated,

drinking a couple of litres of water and juice,

and fighting back nausea

two or three times an hour.

I hate to think what it would’ve been like

if I’d consumed fries and a sugary fizzy drink as well.

           Fleeting Pleasure

The thing about eating good food

is that, yeah,

it’s good,

but then it’s over.

The taste may remain for a bit,

but the textures are gone forever,

except, of course, in memory,

and by now

I have all too many of those.

                             Nourishment

I was slicing thin strips of beef

– what the supermarket packagers call ‘beef stir-fry’ –

into small pieces

as part of the process

of making a pasta sauce,

and it struck me that,

after butchering,

my own muscles

would look generally the same

and have a similar texture.

This comforted me

and provided me with spiritual nourishment.

I felt as one with the 300 kay-gee beast

from whom my 148 grams of beef had come.

I didn’t feel bad

because the bull or steer or heifer was dead,

because as 65 recedes into my distant past

and I read of friends my age dying,

I realise with increasing clarity

that I could die myself at any time,

so death in general fails to arouse automatic horror in me,

nor does the idea of my own body,

which I can feel deteriorating anyway,

becoming dead meat.

It’s also comforting to know

that New Zealand beef cattle

spend their lives in pastures,

and live without the cruelty of feedlots.

               Chicken Broth Recipe

I’d discovered some time in my late fifties

that my metabolism was slowing down

and that as I continued to eat

as I had before

I became continually larger.

Some time after

I’d slid into my sixties,

when I was going through a particularly

self-destructive period,

I put myself on a liquid diet

of coffee, juice, herbal infusions, wine, whisky,

and for sufficient nourishment to enable me to work

a hot drink I concocted by dissolving

powdered chicken stock, powdered mustard, and garlic powder

in boiling water

and then adding hot chili pepper sauce and dark soy sauce.

I varied the amounts of the ingredients to avoid monotony.

Even though I allowed myself one solid meal a day

after I finished work, after a while,

it remained my daytime sustenance

until then.

It’s cheap and provides intense pleasure

to my tastebuds and the rest of the inside of my mouth,

but plays merry hell with my old-man’s body’s

dodgy thermal regulation,

sometimes raising my temperature

until I’m sweating

and stripping off layers.

                         Winterfood

Spring took its time getting going this year,

but when it did I still had plenty of dry pulses and grains –

split peas, pearl barley,

red and brown lentils, brown and white rice,

and garbanzos –

in their sealed canisters

to make several four-day monster soups

if I’m still alive when the cold weather returns.

              Peanut Butter

When I was a kid

and from time to time thereafter,

when peanut butter was in the house

my favourite style had been chunky,

for the texture it provided

after the butter part of it

melted into hot toast.

When I returned to it in my sixties

I went for extra chunky,

as that seemed to me to be

a way to provide myself

with some sensory oomph.

After a few jars of this

I noticed that the chunks

kept getting stuck between my teeth,

requiring more time and effort on oral hygiene

than I prefer to expend,

so I switched to smooth,

having developed some canniness in my old age.

I rarely eat toast anymore, anyway.

        Culinary and Social Skills

I improvised a wonderful curry

with broccoli and fish and mussels

and brown rice and chillies and garlic

and spring onions and peas and seasonings

and a whole heap of spices.

It involved about seven or eight steps,

maybe more,

depending on what constitutes a step –

a complex operation, indeed,

but the result justified that.

When I ate it

its flavours and textures

provided intense pleasure inside my mouth,

but inside my soul was sadness

that remains there as I key this onto the screen

because I could share it

with no one.

                       None, Anyway

I was craving cheese –

hard, powerful cheese

that’d leave a burning sensation on my upper palate

and stick, only partly melted, between my molars –

not that creamy, soft, mild

brie-or-camembert la-di-da.

After all, there’s no point in wasting

a hopelessly not-to-be-fulfilled craving

on something they give away free

by the shovelful at art openings and such

– maybe it wasn’t

completely

hopeless, though …

                     The End of the Season

As I prefer fresh local produce, it’s always sad

when the season for something I’ve been stuck into

ends.

That’s why I allowed myself a touch of resigned sorrow

when I noticed that the bin at the Vege King

from which I’d been extracting Brussels sprouts for months

contained nought but portobello mushrooms –

flavourful, but neither green nor inexpensive.

As I stood in line at the checkout I mentioned

to the woman behind me in the queue

how sad the end of Brussels sprouts season is.

She held up a bag of them and told me that

they had two-dollar bags in a bin on the footpath.

I went out and nabbed one,

returning the telegraph cucumber that I’d selected to replace them.

They were little, which I like,

but the bag held many more than I could eat at one sitting.

I steamed ’em all and put ’em in the fridge.

They made excellent salad veggies for days.

It’d been a false alarm.

When I returned to the Vege King about four days later,

there, to my delight, were the Brussels sprouts in their usual place.

As I key this onto the screen a week or so later

they are indeed gone for the season,

but the first-of-season asparagus is on sale.

                  Jazz Cookery

She put out a call on facebook

for a recipe for I-can’t-remember-what.

I suggested that she google the dish.

She replied that she didn’t like internet recipes.

They never worked out.

Their proportions always seemed out of balance,

or their ingredients were hard to obtain,

or they used American measurements,

and they all disagreed with each other.

None of this bothers me.

I don’t follow recipes.

I can’t follow recipes.

With the internet, though,

I can read three or four different ones

to get an idea of what a dish is about,

and then improvise off this general theme.

Make a dish the exact same way twice?

Pah!

                     Thanks, Prey

I made myself a sandwich

from a frozen crumbed hoki fillet

that I’d dry-cooked with a tiny bit of olive oil

on a hot no-stick skillet

and slapped between slices of multi-grain toast

with melted marge and half of a sliced tomato.

I would’ve used mayo,

but it’d gone bad in the fridge.

It was pleasing to my mouth and belly, nonetheless.

As I was munching my sandwich

I considered the hoki

upon which I had based it,

swimming around in the ocean,

enjoying being alive to the extent it could,

completely unaware of its niche in the ecosystem

as both predator and prey,

and I felt sincere gratitude toward it

for sacrificing its life for my enjoyment

and sustenance,

all the while thoroughly aware

of the meaninglessness of that gratitude.