Painfully Enamored With Food: Oh man. Frozen creamed spinach has a strong smell.

I'm weaning myself off of an all-starch-and-sweets academic crunch diet, and forcing my body to remember that produce exists in more than just "topping" formats.

So, I've decided to eat this for breakfast, right now:

This is a photo of the bag that I took with my phone. Let's pretend that the glare and illegibility was intentional.

So, I microwave the bag, vents-up like the instructions said, while making my husband's breakfast. We have an egalitarian chore balance, and my husband is typically the main household cook. (Imagine that! I mean, you've read this blog. I don't see why anybody would prefer their own cooking to mine. Really!) However, because I'm a grad student and he's an associate producer for a game company, working on a project that is HUGELY TIME CONSUMING AND DOESN'T LEAVE HIM WITH AS MUCH TIME OUTSIDE OF WORK AS I HAVE OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL, I wake up with him and pack him both his breakfast and his lunch, while he groggily showers and lurches to the car. I've also been making our dinners lately, despite both of us knowing better, because he's often working 13-hour days, or longer. (Curse you, games industry!)

I have, like, sleep superpowers. As adventurers should. I fall asleep quickly, and wake up from even wholly, dangerous inadequate sleep pretty easily. So I make a pretty good ally in the morning, just like I'm a good ally on red eye flights, and during up-all-night medical emergencies. Besides, on weekdays, I have the opportunity to go back to sleep if I need to, so waking up a few hours after we went to bed doesn't impact me as heartily as it impacts my perma-tired husband. Giving him that boost in the morning, to help him head into his marathon-paced working environment, suits us well.

So!

This morning, I peeled him an orange, made him a little snack pack of frozen blueberries, filled the travel mug with fresh, sweetened and lightened coffee (French press, what?!?), and buttered two slices of blueberry bread. As we do.

With my partner's breakfast accomplished, I sat down on the couch to play video games and wait for my experimental spinach to cook. It was at this point that the cats snuck into the kitchen.

(When stalking our food, Leonard will walk slowly. If he catches us watching him, he'll pause to sniff the cookbooks and floor, and maybe curl up and shut his eyes, to make it look like he's just standing around aimlessly. It's really cute! Hard to stay mad at someone so keen to demonstrate that some nonhuman animals use hunting strategies that appear to utilize metacognition. It's like, he knows. He knows what's up.)

Once the cats had snuck into the kitchen, I heard a rustling sound, stood up, and shouted "Caaaaaaaats!!!" like I was shouting "Flintstoooone!!!" from, like, the old cartoons. Leonard and Greg (cats) ran out of the kitchen, through the living room, down the hall, and into the bedroom as fast as healthy cats can go. Which is pretty fucking fast.

I scramble after them at a sprint, shouting and flailing, because we live in a house, and shouting at 6am is a luxury that comes free with rent. The cats bolt back out of the bedroom, past my feet, almost tripping me. Neither had the blueberry bread with them. Instead, I found it on the bedroom floor, still protected in its lunchbox packaging, unharmed but in need of new packaging.

...Unfortunately, being raided by small, fast animals who love a good chase was not the WORST thing that happened to breakfast this morning. The worst part was the goddamned garlicky smell coming out of the microwave as my corporate spinach cooked.

I'm eating it right now, and it actually tastes pretty good. Smells bad. Smells so bad. I don't know that a culinary purist could get it down without growling, because it's prepackaged artificial whathaveyou. But it's a decent way to start easing myself back into vegetable use, if I don't want to mess up the kitchen by making a homemade white sauce. I CAN cook, I have the skills and the education, but I am not good at dishwashing. So...y'know...I'll eat whatever makes the smallest mess.

Oh man, the smell, though. The smell! The smell is not the sort of thing to smell when trying to appreciate blueberries, early in the morning. My husband was so grossed out that the smell (it saturated the whole house) almost put him off of breakfast. "Luckily," he'll eat breakfast in the office, because I don't think that he could have done it at home.

I'd say that I learned my lesson this morning, but I really haven't. Like, at ALL.

Update: I've finished the spinach and I'm still hungry, so I'm probably going to have some cereal. Leonard is stalking the bowl that the spinach was in, because he likes cream sauces. I'm like, YEAH I SEE YOU, "falling asleep" a few feet closer to the spinach bowl whenever I look away for a second. Fuzzy little bastard.