Week 6 Questions

Here are the questions of the week with my answers. Add your own answers in the comments section!

1. What is your favorite sweet treat?

I'm not the biggest fan of sweets, but I have recently become obsessed with marscapone cheese. It's just a little bit sweet and goes great on French toast with homemade strawberry jam.

2. How much would you have to get paid to eat something gross like buffalo testicles?

I would pretty much try eating anything, as long as someone else paid for it. I don't want to waste money on something that I might puke up.

3. What would be your last meal before dying?

I don't think I'd care what it was or my idea of the best last supper might change according to my mood. My only wish is that I would be allowed the use of a stocked kitchen in order to make it myself.

And here is the menu for Week 6:

Pumpkin Soup
Broccoli Medley (basically I don't know what to do with it at the moment, I'll come up with something when the time comes)
Sweet Potato Shepherd’s Pie
Flan

Dinner 5

Familiar Flavors
This was probably the first dinner that I wasn't nervous. Maybe it's because I'm getting used to welcoming perfect strangers into my home or maybe it's because this week's dinner guest seemed almost like a long-lost friend. It's like eating a favorite dish after not having it for a long time: familiar and comfortable.
This salad can be made in a pinch. I used cucumbers, mini-heirloom tomatoes, green onions and feta. And I made a simple dressing from three tablespoons olive oil, juice of half a lemon, and salt and pepper to taste. Served on cute dishes my sister gave me from CB2.

My dinner guest and I immediately began swapping our cooking stories and adventures. He's a freelance graphic designer, but work is trickling to a stop, so he has a lot of time on his hands. He spends it cooking and gardening and making yogurt (as well as looking for a new outdoors-y profession: he took fireman classes, got EMT licensing, scuba diving licensing, and stared skiing again). Last year, he grew lots of different vegetables, including tons of lettuce, which he didn't know what to do with, so whenever he visited a friend, he arrived with a dirty head of lettuce. Later, he found out that there is a ton of lead in the soil where he lives in Oakland. This year, he and his roommate built a garden box.
This easy yet tasty Indonesian Ginger Chicken Recipe comes from the Barefoot Contessa. I served it with coconut rice. My dinner guest told me it could use some broccoli. True.

Animal City
He told me weird stories about farming in the city. Several years ago his roommate came home and said he saw a turkey strutting down the street of West Oakland. And a few months later, another roommate who worked at Eccolo in Berkeley (a fancy restaurant that tries to serve food that comes from a 30 mile radius) came home really excited about a woman who had worked out a deal with the restaurant to supply rabbits and half a pig that she had raised in the city. Only years later did my guest figure out that this was all connected. He read the book Farm City by Novella Carpenter, who lived only a few blocks from him at that time. She raised chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits and even two pigs right there in the city. She was the one who exchanged half her pig in order to learn how to make cured meats from the head chef of the restaurant. Small city, big pigs.
My dinner guest brought this homemade yogurt, which he mixed with lemon curd and locally produced honey.

My guest told me about the brilliant strategy of his honey supplier. Not only does the man have numerous hives and a shop where he sells lots of varieties of honey and other things made from it like candles, but he is also the only hive removal service in Northern California. The bee man goes out and collects swarming hives that terrorize homes or neighborhoods, and then he keeps them in order to produce even more honey, which he then sells in his shop.

Manners

Throughout my dinners, I carefully observe the eating habits and movements of my guests in relationship to me and my kitchen. Mostly, they stand about awkwardly and end up not being of much use. Even though this dinner guest was unsure of himself at first, he quickly made himself at home in small ways. He was the only guest so far to take off his shoes, he got more wine out of the fridge without having to ask, he helped himself to seconds before I even offered, and he demanded many spoons while making desert. None of these things are a big deal, but I appreciated them. It made serving a perfect stranger less straining or stressful, and it gave me the chance to relax and just make a friend. And even better yet, he offered to make dinner for me next time. Manners aren't about being proper or polite, but about understanding someone and fitting into the pattern of a friendship.

The Opposite of Stomach-Heart?

I realized that I had to come up with a term to describe the opposite of the stomach-heart. After some minimal discussion with friends, we decided on the obvious: crotch-brain. I then realized that this word is not a combination of the two parts of the body, but that the first replaces the second. I wondered if this is the same as the stomach-heart. Perhaps we're not a combination of stomach and heart, but we have a stomach instead of a heart: we love with our stomachs. Is this a good or a bad thing? And what is to be done about it?

Regardless, you may remember my dinner date for this week, week 5. Remember that bonus story about the goat yogurt, that guy who was the runner-up to the boy-with-a-boyfriend-who-canceled-last-minute, that I guy I should have invited in the first place? Well yes, he is Dinner Guest 5.

And here is the menu:
Green Bean Salad
Ginger Chicken
Coconut Rice
Desert by Dinner Guest 5 (maybe homemade yogurt!)

Dinner 4

Better with Age?
Most foods are perishable. Fruits and vegetables rot after a week and leftovers rapidly become left in the trash as the days go by. Even canned foods implode or grow black fungus after ten years. But then there are cheeses that become riper and tastier as they age. And wine or rum which peak after an extended number of years. Or that Chinese delicacy, that egg that gets buried in the ground for 50 years. Different foods get better over time. We must determine which ones.

This creamy potato leek soup recipe is at Pinch My Salt.

I bring up the aging of food because I wonder if the same rules apply to people. My dinner guest for the evening is old. Not just older, but old. 59 (almost 60) years old to be exact. At first, I was worried about me, my safety: he might be a creep or try to do something to me. He might be rotten produce. But as the evening wore on I realized I should be more worried about his safety rather than mine.

Take Your Time
From the moment he walked in until the moment he left, my dinner guest barely paused as he told me his entire life story. This proved to be a problem because it's difficult to eat while chattering away. My guest ate soooo slowly. And I ate rather quickly. Even while restraining myself, I had already finished my soup by the time he took one bite. But I had already learned so much about him. He is a natural healer. He uses techniques like acupuncture, herbal medicines and twelve others I had never heard of to heal chronic conditions and athletic injuries. His voice was low and raspy and kept fading out as he periodically convulsed into burps and hiccups. He apologized and said that he should take a hydrochloric acid pill. He explained that most people that have stomach pains after eating or heart burn are not actually suffering from an acid surplus but rather an acid deficiency. When even a little bit of acid is introduced from food, it causes pain, but this can be equalized by taking HCL pills. Hmmm...I doubt it would cure the lack of a stomach-heart, though (see Dinner 3).

I baked this talapia with pesto, and added spinach, mushrooms, red pepper, and white onion to the quinoa and topped it with Trader Joe's cilantro dressing.

Go On

Nearly an hour had passed and we hadn't even moved on to the main course. I was starving. Desperate. Finally my guest finished his soup and we started on the salad and fish. It was cold of course. He said he didn't mind cold food. I suppose he better not because with the way he ate, everything would be cold by the time it reached his mouth.

But now we got to his love life. Epic. He eloped when he was in college because his father wouldn't support him if he married. He hid it from his father the rest of his life. My guest's wife died during child birth but his son lived. He decided he couldn't support the child at the time so the boy's god parents adopted him, telling him that his father had died in a car accident. My guest periodically spied on his son: he watched him with binoculars at sports games and sat at the table next to him at restaurants. The boy grew up, got married, had a kid and then sadly, all three died in a car accident.

And on...

But that was only the first love of his life. There were five. I'll skip a few and get to the fifth. He had an affair with this woman for fifteen years, during three of her marriages! During her first marriage, she flirted with him and one night they were making dinner and were going to go out dancing. She cut her finger badly while making chili rellenos and bled everywhere even though she ignored it. My guest finally convinced her to go get stitches and he figure the night was over, but they came home, finished the meal, still went out dancing, and then slept together for the first time. The husband was out of town. All of her other men knew about my guest. Their relationship was accepted, and in some cases even encouraged. It ended when she finally settled down with the former gay lover of a count.

Plantains fried in butter and cinnamon and served with tapioca.

And On

We went into the kitchen to get desert. He seriously almost fell over when he stumbled around and almost bumped into the refrigerator. I was definitely concerned about the old guy. He wasn't drunk though, he has chronic fatigue syndrome and all the sitting had destabilized him.

He got himself together and talked while I fried up our desert and we finally got to his relationship with men. He'd had periodic fuck buddies throughout his life but had never really had a male lover. The closest it came was this much younger man that lived with him for five years. The guy had a personality disorder, couldn't hold down a job, and had been homeless for a long time. My guest took him in and helped to stabilize him. They developed a daddy-boy relationship that was non-sexual but loving.

The minute the last bite of desert disappeared, I immediately started making my good-byes. He was a nice guy, but I could not take anymore listening. As much as I love stories, I had zoned out several times and was yawning inconspicuously every few minutes. Dinner was over and it was time to go (very slowly, of course).Thoughts Over Dirty Dishes

Maybe it's not how old something is, but the combinations. A perfectly aged wine will go great with fresh caught fish, but an old healer did not mix too well with little, stomach-heart me. It's unfortunate that I can't seem to find the right combination: last week's no-show, young sex fiend or this weeks much older, compassionate cuddler (what else could he have done with his non-sexual house boy of five years?). Neither one is even remotely appetizing. Luckily, there are many more recipes I want to try and many more dinners with people to meet.

Week 4 Questions

Here are the questions of the week! And the answers from Week 4's dinner guest:

1. If you could only eat one thing every day the rest of your life, what would it be?
If I were restricted to one thing to eat at every meal for the rest of my life it would be grain: Quinoa, millet, or rice.

2. What is a family dish or speciality that has been passed on to you?
I have several family dishes that have been passed on to me. The one I favor is Ukrainian Mushroom Christmas Borscht (though I must admit eggplant faisinjian or apricot-almond tangine run close seconds).

3. What is the nicest meal you've made for someone else?
Of the many meals I have made for other people, the nicest is probably a simple breakfast: fresh ground and brewed coffee, gruel with date pieces/ dried cranberries/ allspice/ cardamom/ vanilla yogurt/ stevia, and to top it off Brazilian avocado cream with extra lime. A good breakfast can make your day.

And the menu:

Quinoa Salad
Potato Leek Soup
Tuna Steaks
Fried Plantains

Dinner 3

Preparation:

When we cook, we know what we get. If we follow the recipe just right, we end up with delicious food. I spent the afternoon following the delicate instructions to make chocolate mousse. I had to beat and stir each element separately, and make sure the chocolate was just above room temperature before I added the egg yolks, and fold in the egg whites at precise increments. It was a difficult task, but I knew that in several hours the mousse would set and my dinner guest and I would have a delicious desert.

Here is the tricky recipe for this delicious mousse.

People are not as easy or predictable. I'm very precise about my craigslist dinner invitations. I make sure each guest's responses are sincere and thoughtful, and I use polite but direct language when I answer their e-mails. But this week, I had all the ingredients and made half the food when I took a break and checked my e-mail. My dinner guest had e-mailed me and I thought perhaps it was a last minute question. This is what he said:

About tonight, I was talking to my boyfriend (news to me!) about it and he isn't entirely comfortable with the idea. Sex is not as big a deal for him, but this sounds too much like a date. I don't know what exactly was on the menu for tonight, but I feel I need to respect his wishes. Sorry to cancel last minute like this, I honestly thought he would be okay with it or I wouldn't have responded in the first place. It's a cool idea, and I hope someone takes you up on it. Too bad I'm not that guy.

People are unpredictable, they don't rise at certain temperatures and their flavor doesn't come out when simmered over low heat. Despite my preparations, I was left exactly the way I had hoped that this project would not leave me: alone.

Repairs:

But the food had been made and my hands were already stained with beet juice. This dinner would still happen and all the cute boys with boyfriends would not stop me. So, I called in the cavalry: one of my best friends and fellow writers. I tweaked the menu a little because she has a gluten allergy, but we made the most of the dinner. You can make this raw dish by processing a cup of almonds and adding juice from half a lemon and some water until it's creamy. Then mix with cucumber, chopped dill and one garlic clove.

My friend is always there for me and luckily she's funny and cute (way cuter than my craigslist pick), so she was able to get me out of my funk with some jokes and funny stories. She is also an avid cook, but approaches food and cooking differently than I do, so her feedback and suggestions about my food was valuable.I made this simple beet salad by microwaving the beets for just 1 minute. Then I marinated them in two tablespoons of oil, two tablespoons of vinegar, a splash of sherry, a half tablespoon of sugar, a few shakes of rosemary, dashes of salt and pepper, and some green onions.

Of course, I made my friend answer the questions of the week. She said that the most intense vegetable was rhubarb and her guilty pleasure (I had to clarify that I meant food because she raised her eyebrow in a naughty way) was unsweetened carob chips. She could eat a whole bag in one sitting. Because my friend has a gluten allergy, I made a gluten-free version of the alfredo sauce and just dumped it over polenta instead of pasta. Weird, but still good.

My guest had two cooking disasters to share with me:

1. "I woke up early, about 7 in the morning and was really hungry. I went to the kitchen and started to make breakfast. I was going to have an omelet. It wasn't until the egg carton caught on fire and the kitchen was smoking that I realized I was still drunk from the night before."

2. "During the holidays my father likes to make really elaborate dishes and I sometimes help him. When I was a teenager, I was making some kind of cookies or something and I was looking at the recipe and it said 'mix by hand.' I thought it was kind of weird so I asked my dad, "Do I really mix it by hand? Doesn't that seem weird?" Without looking at me he just said yeah. The next time he turns around, he sees that I have my hands actually in the bowl with the egg yolks running all over and I'm caked in dough. He said that was one of my truly blond moments and my family tells that story at every holiday."

The rest of the dinner, we complained about boys and ate really huge wine glasses full of chocolate mousse.

The Stomach-Heart Revolution:

This week's fiasco and bitter disappointment led me to believe that something has to change with the dating and relationship scene. All the cool kids are into open relationships and casual sex and fucking you even though they have a boyfriend, but I can't find ONE decent man to just have dinner with me! I understand the queerness of alternative relationship structures and the argument that monogamous couples come from some sort of heternormative legacy, but I can't physically, mentally, or emotionally be one of those cool kids. Sometimes cool kids take things too far and they don't know what they're doing anymore. Where are their stomachs? Where are their hearts?

So, instead of letting it be cool, we should put our foot down. No more being nice to idiots who are fucking with us. No more being understanding of someone who's not being honest or stringing us along. We have little stomach-hearts and we need to use them. A stomach-heart is that earnest part of us that reacts with feelings, that can't help but fall for people when we are intimate with them, that tries to find the best in people even when there isn't any excuse for them, that is hungry for affection, that loves to love.

Next time we encounter an idiot, there will be no forgiveness. Tell them that casual sex is out, cheating is so not cool. Feelings are in. Cuddling is in. Waking up next to someone the morning after and then eating breakfast with them is hot. Calling people back or texting without evasiveness is cool. Curling up and reading a book out loud to a lover is our idea of perfection. Cooking dinner for a boyfriend and talking for hours while eating is what everyone's doing. Get with it.

Stomach-hearts out there: we are the future.

And a tiny little epilogue:

So, to bring my cooking metaphor full circle: Although lovers and relationships don't work like recipes, friends are like Betty Crocker cake mix. You barely do anything. Just add oil and eggs and throw it in the oven, but it works out every time. Light and fluffy and sweet. Friends are always there for you and it just works without asking questions. I mean, sure you have to bake them a (gluten-free!) cake once in a while, but once friendships are made, once you figure each other out, they are like bottomless pits of stomach-heart. Thank you, friend.

Week 3 Dinner Guest

Here are the answers of this week's dinner guest plus his prologue:

Before we get into your questions, I wanted to call attention to the posting header that precedes yours on craigslist: 'hungry to suck some loads today.' I didn't click on his, but it created a stream of consciousness so when I read your heading I expected something entirely different from your ad: cum guzzling and all that. Anyway, it made me laugh that it's quite the opposite.

1) What is the most intense of vegetables?
I think that depends on your idea of intense. Durian is very intense, it's a fruit, I suppose (not a vegetable), but it's pungent like cheese; something entirely unexpected from a spiky pod. But if you mean the most intensely pleasurable vegetable, which I bet you do, then I'll have to slightly bend the rules again, because bean dishes are always the most intensely tasty for me. I know technically speaking, they're legumes. In the Bay Area there are many great lentil dishes, but the thing I'm craving the most at the moment is Frijoles Charros from Tamarindo, in Oakland. It will change Mexican food for you forever.

2) What is your guilty pleasure when it comes to food?
My guilty pleasure is old school sweet and sour pork. I grew up on the crap. It was always a treat when my parents took us out to dinner at the Chinese (American) restaurant in my tiny home town, so I associate it not only with my first taste of MSG - which by the way is fantastic and should be used more often, not less - but with great memories of my family eating happily together, in a darkened red, sensual room, around a table heaped with a feast of cheap Chinese food. It was heaven, and I make no apologies for my memory. But it is a little tacky, especially with all the authentic and very tasty Chinese food in San Francisco, to order sweet and sour pork. So I rarely do, and NEVER in company.

3) Tell me about a cooking disaster:
I haven't had a lot of disasters in the kitchen, because I tend to follow the recipe fairly closely until I'm comfortable enough to venture on my own. And I learn much more from my mistakes, especially because it's so disappointing. I have this emotional response and sense memory that prevent me from ever doing something so stupid again. Like this one time, I'd spent at least two hours on a yellow Indian curry, and the final step was to add in yogurt to thicken it. There was this terse caveat to not let it curdle, but by that point I was tired and hungry, not really paying attention, and I put the yogurt in when the curry was too hot. Of course it curdled; I was so upset. It still tasted okay, but the texture was all wrong. But like I said, I've never done that again!

And a bonus! Although I didn't pick this guy, he had a great food disaster:

So last year I started making yogurt (clearly I am a foodie too). I usually make thick Greek-style yogurt, so I have a pretty good handle on it. Eventually, I wanted to branch out. I found a craigslist ad for fresh goat's milk. Now, any goat's milk available in stores is ultra pasteurized, negating any possibility of culturing. Through a strange blip in California dairy code, it is illegal to sell unpasteurized goat's milk for human consumption. So, I contacted the goat lady from craigslist and arranged to go to her place in the Oakland hills to procure some black market milk. I am not always a talky one, but the goat lady was happy to do all the talking. She had me meet the goats. She made me go through the extensive milk cooling process (so gamey-tasting bacteria doesn't form in it). She had me taste test the milk from each of the two goats (different breeds & ages). She made me try the six different kinds of cheese she makes from each kind of milk. This goat lady was very, very, very excited about her goats. She mentioned that she had once tried making yogurt, but it didn't work out too well. That didn't worry me, I was a yogurt making pro. After about an hour of standing awkwardly in the goat lady's kitchen and listening to all manner of goat stories, she made me sign a guest book that certified that I was buying the milk for my cat and not myself (purchase for livestock consumption is perfectly legal). I handed over $25 for two gallons of milk. I can't believe I paid $12.50 for each gallon of milk! What was I thinking? I was thinking this was going to be the best damn yogurt ever. I rushed right home and got to work. Since this is a disaster story, you know how it turned out. Twelve hours of careful fermenting later, I had... slightly syrupy sour milk. I didn't have the heart to throw away the most expensive sour milk I'd ever purchased, so I choked some of it down in smoothies and stared at it in the back of the fridge for a month or so. I learned my lesson: do not doubt the goat lady.

Week 3 Questions and Menu

Here are the questions of the week! Feel free to answer them too in the comments sections. My answers follow.

1. What is the most intense of vegetables?

"The beet is the most intense of vegetables." It's the opening line of Tom Robbin's Jitterbug Perfume. It makes perfect sense.

2. What is your guilty pleasure when it comes to food?

I don't really feel guilty about eating anything, but if I had to choose it would be bacon. Even more specifically: bacon grease. My roomate saves it so I started to and I like to fry things in it when there isn't any meat in the dish. Like beans, vegetables, and eggs (the best).

I also love wrapping anything and everything in bacon.

3. Tell me about a cooking disaster that you had.

Both my roomate and I were baking things for a potluck. I was experimenting with a cake recipe and he was making his brother's famous banana bread for the first time. He had been craving it for months. Because of time constraints we baked our stuff at the same time. I got the measurements all wrong and the cake exploded all over the oven and started burning. We had to take everything out and clean it up. Even though we put the banana bread back in, the temperature had fluctuated too much so the outside of the bread was hard as a rock but the inside was uncooked and mushy. It was kind of gross and I felt really bad especially because my cake came out okay. Now, I stay out of the kitchen when he makes banana bread.

And here is the menu:

Almond Yogurt

Beet Salad

Shrimp Alfredo with Fetuccine

Chocolate Mousse

Future menu or recipe ideas are very welcome!

Dinner 2

This dinner almost didn't happen
My top craigslist pick bailed on me. My secondary craigslist pick couldn't make it. The night before the dinner, I still had no one. I even walked down to the bar where my current crush works, ready to put myself on the line and ask him to dinner. He wasn't there.

But sometimes things work out. Last week, out of the blue after six months, a guy I briefly, sort-of dated, g-chatted me. After barely even saying "hi," he asked me to hook up. I was working, sick, and totally thrown off, so was cold to him. Later, since I had no one else for dinner, I thought we could work out an exchange: he would be part of this experiment and I would help him out. He agreed, but before we get to dinner...

The story of how we met:
One night last spring, I was crossing an intersection downtown and a guy on a bike pulled up to the red light. As I crossed, we checked each other out. After I passed him we caught each other doing a triple take. Even though it was dark and he was wearing a helmet, his eyes were a super-intense blue. I kept thinking about the encounter, so I decided to miss-connections him on craigslist. After a couple days he e-mailed me (I didn't think that ever happened on missed connections) and we started to hang out. Things were fine for a bit until (at least in my mind this seemed to be the turning point, I'm sure there were other factors) one night, we were making out and we bumped mouths together, and I chipped his tooth with mine (so embarrassing)! Things fizzled out after that and he only talked to me if he wanted to hook up. Then we stopped talking altogether.

The Dinner:
He showed up with desert and his hair looked better than I remembered it. We started with French onion soup that took me four hours to make. He loved it and told me that he'd discovered that the longer you cook onions, the better they taste. He'd been cooking goulash, in which there's a similar process of cooking the onions for many hours. Even though I like raw onions too, I guess it's true. The soup was the best dish of the night, with a well-rounded, rich flavor.

You can find the very-involved recipe here.

We obviously had a lot of catching up to do.

The short version of his life during the past six months:
He had been working as an engineer, but he hated his job. The company had just laid off a bunch of people and he was pissed that he wasn't one of them. He quit anyway without the severance package. He still wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life, but he had a few ideas: go back to school for film, start his own business, or get another boring job. He said that he's a lazy and indecisive person so he did some other things instead. He joined a gay basketball team and played in a tournament in Boston. They didn't do very well, but he's helping to organize another tournament in San Francisco in the next few weeks.

While he was on the East coast (he'd never been before), he decided to visit New York City. He went alone and explored the city by walking as far as he could until he was exhausted and then took the subway somewhere else. He tried to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge twice, but the first time, by the time he walked there, there was a downpour; the second time he walked there from his hotel, but was so tired he just sat on a bench. He wants to live there at some point and his ideal situation is if someone would give him a job and an apartment in SF and NYC. Good luck with that one.

The Questions
We got to the entree and I discovered that the pork had dried up when I left it in the oven to stay warm. Yuck. We had to force it down and my guest did so very politely (but slowly). I decided to ask him the questions that I asked on my CL post. When he was a kid he hated tomatoes and only sort of likes them now. The texture reminds him of a baby fetus or cold intestines. On the other hand, he loves carrots and went on a tangent about the fact that there are purple carrots (but he was surprised by my purple potatoes).

Well, Ta-dah, it's true!

Then I asked him, if he were a fruit, what would he be? He said a pomegranate, not only because he likes them, but because he too, compartmentalized his life. He kept his gay friends separate from his straight friends and those separate from his work friends, and that separate from his family life. It's partly because he hasn't always been that comfortable with his sexuality and also that he is an anal-retentive, awkward person. And part of it is that he is a recovering alcoholic (he was wasted from the time he 17 until he was 23) and it stunted his maturity and ability to put his life together. Only now has he started to catch up to being an adult and being more relaxed with who he is.

As far as favorite restaurants in San Francisco, we both agreed: El Farolito.

By the time, I asked him if he wanted seconds, I had definitely decided that he had changed in a really good way. It's hard to know your flaws and try to deal with them. I know that I don't. He turned down seconds, but not just because of the pork.

Why he turned down seconds:

He said he couldn't eat a whole lot anymore. When I asked why, he said that he had done a nine day Master Cleanse. This involved only drinking water and a concoction of lemon, maple syrup and cayenne. Oh, and a salt water flush: he chugged a liter of salt water everyday, all at once, which totally flushed him out. He wanted to do it to get rid of all the lingering toxins from his pothead, drinking days. For the first three days he felt terrible, but afterwards it started to feel normal and (euphoric? I asked jokingly) yes, euphoric. He even tried playing basketball once and almost passed out, but it made him feel euphoric, too. The worst part was that he was cold all the time (totally freezing) and had to sleep with socks and shoes, flannel, top layers and his hoodie up. That sounded so sad, but anyway, he liked it and now he never felt like overeating or eating junk food.

"Desert"

So then there was "desert." It was nice to make out (it had been a while for me) and even though he's really hot, afterwards I felt myself getting cold towards him. I just realized that I don't want physical stuff if it doesn't come with any sort of security. And he definitely has nothing to offer in terms of that: he's totally unreliable and has made it clear, he's not interested in anything else. He's great in a lot of ways and has grown since I last saw him, but he still treats the physical as something he can take and then just leave. I realize a lot of people can separate sex and their feelings, but I can't.

On Fire

After the break, we had the real desert. He had brought a cranberry pear tart from Bi-Rite. He almost started a fire when he put it in the toaster-oven to heat up because he left it on the cardboard. It was good, though and we topped it with homemade whipped cream.

We started to make our awkward goodbyes, and he was really sincere and sweet. He was glad to have caught up. But I had a hard time returning the sentiment. That coldness was still there, and I couldn't quite see the point of the whole thing. I grumbled some poker-faced responses and showed him the door. At the last minute, I awkwardly kissed him. Maybe just in case I don't see him for another six months.