Nutritionally (un)Sound

I was raised in a very meat-and-potatoes kind of family, with emphasis on the meat. Seriously, I’ve written about this before, but my mom in particular is a hard-core carnivore. My mom could eat red meat for every meal, every day, and be totally and completely fine with it.

Since I moved out, I’ve kind of been on what I like to call the Whatever Diet. Other people often think of it as the Single Woman Living Alone With Cats Diet, but Whatever Diet works better for me. The Whatever Diet relies heavily on the following staples:

  • chicken
  • noodles or rice or rice noodles
  • Diet Coke
  • whatever else happens to catch my attention at the grocery store.

So I was eating Kettle Corn a lot for a while, because it seemed like a good idea. This one time I made chicken adobo like three times in the same week because that seemed like a good idea. The other night I had Cabot Extra-Sharp Cheddar Cheese and Club crackers for dinner. Sometimes I have Spaghettios. Sometimes I have raisin bran. Sometimes I have a can of mandarin oranges. On Saturday when my power was out for five hours I had two Little Debbie gingerbread men and a Black Cherry Fresca for lunch.

I’m terrible at making useful grocery lists. I’m equally terrible at using up fresh produce before it goes bad, so I don’t buy it nearly as often as I should. I’m famous for buying something random at the grocery store and then deciding I don’t want it and forgetting about it until it goes bad (recent case in point: feta-stuffed calamata olives).

One thing I almost never eat since I moved away from Family Headquarters is red meat. I just don’t want it, usually. I almost never want ground beef – the mere thought sometimes makes me gag – but every once in a while I’ll feel like a little steak or something, although I usually don’t follow through.

But on Sunday when I was at the grocery store I saw one of those Old El Paso Gordita kit thingies and it seemed like an awesome idea, so I got one. I could have gotten chicken to go in it, but I didn’t feel like it. I could have gotten ground turkey, but it was like $5.99 a pound or something equally insane. So I got a grody little tube of ground beef.

Fun fact about red meat: if you have gotten out of the habit of eating red meat and then all of a sudden you have some, your stomach gets PISSED OFF. This is true for my own body, and I have anecdotal evidence that this happens to other people too. I guess that ought to tell us that there’s something in red meat that we probably shouldn’t be eating.

So the experience of cooking the yucky ground beef was unpleasant at best, and then the stupid gordita didn’t even taste very good, and now I have a red meat hangover.

And to the person reading this who was on the phone with me last night while I was cooking: no, it’s not the sour cream. I chickened out on the sour cream and threw it away.

To the rest of you: Let’s suppose, hypothetically, that you find an 8 ounce container of sour cream in the back of your fridge, and when you get it out you discover that it has an expiration date of October 26th, 2005, but it’s still sealed and has never been opened. Let’s say you open it up and sniff it and look at it and it looks and smells just fine. Is it okay to eat?

18 Replies to “Nutritionally (un)Sound”

  1. I had to ween myself back on meat of any kind after being a vegetarian for four years, but I still don’t eat much of it. There are tons of other ways to get protein and iron.

    Also, I wouldn’t eat the sour cream, but I’m a stickler for the expiration dates.

  2. oh, and I would have opened and smelled the SC and, sans worrisome funk, I’d have devoured it.

    …still stuck on “gotten” though. ugh.

  3. wtf is wrong with “gotten?” it is a word, according to my dictionary!

  4. “I could have gotten chicken to go in it, but I didn’t feel like it.”

    There’s nothing grammatically incorrect about this sentence.

    Using “bought” or “picked up” in place of “gotten” would probably have been more precise, but that’s just playing Diction Cop.

    (I would not have eaten the sour cream.)

  5. Agh! You’re the one that got me turned onto Spaghettios ages ago and now I want them again. :)

    I definitely wouldn’t have eaten the sour cream.

  6. P.S. My “Single Woman Living Alone With a Cat Diet” often consisted of eating a can of green beans for dinner.

  7. An HR Consultant behind me, who recently visited Bolivia on vacation, said the following: “We stayed in a 5-star hotel and you couldn’t even tell where you were; we could’ve been in Hawaii, anywhere – it was beautiful!” So, tell me, what’s the point of travel? We have 5-star hotels 15 minutes from here. Who are these people?!

    “Gotten” is passive. “Got” is best used when you don’t want to attribute any responsibility or ownership to the voice or subject. An example of an active verb would be “purchase”. It’s just a thing I have. You use is three times in the same paragraph and it got under my skin. (See, “it got” – I didn’t do it, it happend.) Sorry about that.
    …I’m going to go and find some old sour cream now.

  8. 1. I used “got” twice and “gotten” twice. I could have gotten x, but I got y instead. “Could have” was important to the sentence – here’s what was possible – but I didn’t like “could have bought” and I wouldn’t use it.

    2. To say “I could have purchased x” would have been weird and stilted, as it’s not how I speak and certainly not how I normally write. “I could have placed a package of poultry into my shopping cart” seems inefficient.

    I can rarely tell you what grammar rule applies to whatever words I’ve chosen, and MS Word is constantly accusing me of using the passive voice and chucking green squiggly lines under everything. And I start sentences with “and” or “but” all the freakin’ time and I’m queen of run-on sentences and sometimes, like now for example, I do it on purpose.

    That said, I think I generally have a pretty good ear for flow. Or whatever. And if I were telling you about the chicken I’d have said “gotten.”

  9. OK, why has no one commented on the “tube of ground beef?” Tube? Of ground beef?

    I won’t eat ground beef from a tube, but I would eat expired sour cream, so what does that say about me?

  10. Sealed food sans mold… good to go…

    Tubed beef… slightly odd but it works for sausage and no one freaks…

    Gotten… screw them… at least you didn’t say “done got”

  11. Ground beef is scary in general – maybe a steak wouldn’t have sent you off the G.I. ledge.

    SC? mmm…Oct. a little old for me. But as my husband pointed out, it’s already “bad” – it’s SOUR CREAM. So we’ve pushed the envelope before, but only within a couple of weeks.

    Blogs are kindof “grammar-free” zones, aren’t they?? They always seem to be in a person’s Voice and not a term paper. I didn’t think “gotten” was so horrible. It was like being told a story instead getting a status report.

  12. Oh my gosh – comments, too, are simply a persons personal observation/opinion. I don’t like “gotten” the way it was used here; much in the same way the way my father adds an extra “ed” whenever he reads a word that ends in “ed” (“jumped” sounds like, “jump-ted”).
    I said, It’s just a thing I have – it’s not a professional criticism.

    “??”
    heh.

  13. oh I hear ya. my “thing” is irregardless. no hacking on ya intended – just following the discussion. :)

  14. ooh yeah, irregardless. Another of mine is “anyways” (vs. anyway). Anyways? How many ways then?

  15. gotten is fine!

    even finer: the fact that you had typos when correcting her! woo!

    the law of internet justice: when you pick on specifics, misspelling abounds!

  16. There are errors in every comment I post. “Gotten” isn’t an error, it’s just annoying; I wasn’t correcting her.

    abounds!

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