Chicken Fat

I think I could be a vegetarian. Today I spent my afternoon ripping yet another chicken limb from limb to make yet another pot of homemade chicken soup for yet another sick kid.

I'm totally not kidding.

Declan came home from school yesterday with a set of massively swollen glands in his neck/throat. Nifty. Which means I am one of those parents who sends her kid to school sick. Dang it. I hate it when I have feet of clay.

Frankly, I'm starting to wonder if he's just progressing through new sets of symptoms and he's been sick with the same thing for weeks now, like Finn was. Tomorrow we have parent/teacher conferences. I fully expect to hear that they'll each have to go all the way back to preschool and start over again because of all the school they've missed this year.

But back to my vegetarianism. Or not, actually, but I'm darn sick and tired of handling raw chickens. It's just really starting to gross me out. I enjoy a good steak, but the handling of raw meat is becoming more and more repulsive as time goes by.

I go through phases like this--sort of like seasons to the year. In the winter, I can't get enough of that heavy comfort food. Yep, bring on the chicken and noodles, meat cooked to death in a crockpot all day, and bread, bread, bread until my daddy takes my T-bird away. I love it.

But now spring is coming, and along with it, bathing suit paranoia. Let's just say that bread, noodles and mashed potatoes aren't exactly bathing suit-friendly fare. It makes me sad, but it does make sense.

I'm not quite in panic mode yet, that will happen in late April or early May, but I'm leaning towards lighter choices like fruit smoothies, salads, and still the occasional bowl of chili or lentil soup (I'm the only one who eats it here) on those snowy spring days. I'm feeling the urge to eat more raw foods again. But that requires some effort to dehydrate all that stuff and again, I'm not panicking. Yet. I fully expect to have the dehydrator running 24/7 in six weeks time and Eamonn will accuse me of running up the electric bill as a result.

By the time summer rolls around, I'm pretty much just eating grilled eggplant all the time. That's because I make a giant bowl of grilled vegetables and nobody likes the eggplant. So they pick out all the other stuff and leave me with a plate of eggplant all to myself. I'm OK with it. By September, I'm ready for a little variety though.

And then it's starting to get cold again and it's not long before I'm rooting around in the cupboard for my trusty crockpot.

My eating has come full circle.