Day 12: On the Subject of Temperature

Well today was exciting if your idea of excitement is other people’s kitchen stories and meetings with financial planners.

I was keen to try out my new crock pot so I picked up some vegetables and spices. I figured instead of getting a whole chicken, as suggested, I’d get a pack of chicken breasts. That way it would be both healthier and easier, as they’re all pre-cut and whatnot; I don’t have to pick anything off of bones, skin the thing, or otherwise “process” the meat. I got free range chicken from the butcher on Granville & 11th. I put it on a bed of tiny potatoes, onions, garlic, lemon, carrots, mushrooms and cranberries, and put some typical spices on top like rosemary and oregano, plus a couple of different mustards. As I type this it’s been in there cooking for over 6 hours so before I go to bed (my bedtime is somewhere between 1am and 3am) I’m gonna see how it all turns out. All I know is that right now it smells great!

As you may guess, I’m not used to cooking things. I am a lazy, lazy man and perhaps just as significantly, my palate is so easy to please that I’m perfectly happy eating my presliced turkey cold, right out of the bag, and I do the same with corn, green beans and other canned vegetables, chili, et al. Normally heating food up is, to me, a superfluous step that doesn’t notably improve the eating experience, and it just takes valuable time standing in front of a stove or microwave when I could be shoving something in my mouth during that time. Obviously there are exceptions. I don’t like cold refried beans, for example. And conversely there are some things that I prefer cold over reheating, like pizza or most takeout, especially Chinese food. Reheated potatoes are practically inedible.

UPDATE: Stuffed! Well my first crock attempt went over pretty well. The carrots & potatotes weren’t as soft or moist as I thought they would be. The cranberries and lemon and mustard were tops, however. I put in a whole bulb of garlic and I think next time I’ll use two. Really I could eat a meal of just roasted or stewed garlic. Well maybe not, but I like to have a clove with each bite of whateverelse. The meal as a whole was not as good as say buying a roasted chicken from Max’s, but it was only my first attempt. The biggest downfall is that unlike everything else I’ve been eating, I know exactly how many calories I’m taking in, because for the most part it’s prepackaged, except the fruits & vegetables. Figuring out how much to eat to fit within my current regime is really just guesstimation, to use the parlance of our times. This may be the first day I’ve cheated on my diet, and if so it’s out of ignorance.

In financial news I invested in mutual funds today. I was just going to take the two old, lame investments I had and fold them into my checking account but the financial planner was such a cool guy that he convinced me to…do what I just said I did above. I explained to him that I don’t care for money, I don’t like thinking about or dealing with money, that more or less I didn’t want to be there and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have to decide what to do with my maturing GIC, and most importantly I don’t understand 99.99999% of what goes on in a bank. So he talked slow and used small words with lots of diagrams in crayon and to sum up: maybe in five years I’ll have more money than what I invested. And if not, boo schmoo hoo. He did make a point of making part of my investment part of the “Global Sustainability Fund” so with luck my investments aren’t going into Zyklon B factories and suchlike. It made me think that probably the most useful Slackademics class for me would be money management/investments.

Day 12: Leftover slackademics apple cranberry pie 220 (all carbs) smallest banana I could get with cocoa & Splenda + Thinsations 300 grilled turkey avec mustard 180 crock pot experiment ???probably 300-500 calories??? = 1000-1200 calories???