More On Food

This goes a bit with my previous post, but I thought I’d keep it separate anyhow.

On our last grocery trip, I made a bit of an effort to pop some organic items into our cart. I know, these organic items are probably from a large organic company not totally working in an ecological way, but I figure its one step closer—and that’s the process I’m going for.

One of the things I bought was tomato sauce for this recipe we, in my family, call goulash (I don’t think it’s anything like real goulash—it’s just macaroni noodles, hamburger, and tomato sauce—so it’s really more like a spin on spaghetti).

I made the goulash with the tomato sauce. I actually didn’t like this organic tomato sauce as well… because it was too sweet—in other words, it tasted more like a tomato probably should taste and I’m not a big tomato fan. I’ve grown up with such tasteless, manufactured food that I actually don’t like the fresh as much. (This happened to me as well when I bought fresh green beans and didn’t like them at all, when I can eat whole cans of green beans by themselves. I didn’t like the real flavor; I liked the fake one). Still, I think that I will begin to accustom myself to fresh food or organic food and begin to like it more, it will just be a process on weaning myself off the salt, bland and preservative.

I must preface this next part with the fact that R. and me are not the cleanest people on the Earth and have the terrible habit of not doing dishes right away. Usually, this isn’t much of a problem.

This time, it was. We didn’t wash out our goulash bowls or the pan it was made in. And the next morning there was this smell. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. We hadn’t made anything that I thought would smell after only a night. At first I thought it was the dishtowel, then I thought the garbage disposal. I tried numerous things and still the smell persisted.

And then, that night, it clicked—it was the tomato sauce. Without the preservatives in the tomato sauce I usually bought, it had decomposed and gone to smelling overnight. Convenient? Not so much, but it made me feel a lot better about eating something that seemed real. Tomato sauce that never smells… there’s something wrong with that. Why would I want to put that in my body?

In other news, we’re supposed to get a lovely warm spell this week. I can’t wait! Also, you should check out this post http://simplereduce.blogspot.com/2007/02/sense-of-entitlement.html over at Simple Living. I couldn’t agree more.