Sunny Side Up

Do I even own a saucepan?

This is what I wondered Monday morning, barely 12 hours after an international flight and about 8 since the end of a binge.

Mail and water bottles littered the top of my stove, and I tried to remember if I’d ever actually used it. (In my other New York apartment — the one downstairs — I think I might have once made oatmeal on the stove top before I got a microwave, but not in this one.) I opened the kitchen cabinets and didn’t see anything but a tea kettle. I could soft-boil eggs in a tea kettle if necessary, right? I cringed a little. It was funny, but not really.

Luckily I found one (and who knew I even own a lid)? I hauled myself (it can only be described as “haul” post-binge) to the Gourmet Garage for eggs, having only narrowly won the internal battle as to whether to just start tomorrow. The one thing about going back to paleo is that you know (or at least, I know) that the first two weeks are absolutely brutal, so the idea of delaying is very tempting. (What did I used to eat for paleo breakfast? I ordered these almond-flour pancakes, which were totally delicious and I loved them, but I’m thinking they ought to be a once-a-week treat, and not an every day one.)

The egg-making itself really wasn’t terribly difficult or time-consuming – really not much longer than it would take me to microwave something prepared. And it was satisfying to make something instead of giving in to laziness. If I had, say, eaten cereal, I’d likely have eaten too much, and all day I’d be fighting the urge to binge (it’s always tempting to just keep on going when I’ve binged the day before, and the 72 hours after a binge I’m probably the most vulnerable to relapsing.)

I think I’m going to need to start slowly acquiring necessary pieces of kitchen kit and pantry staples, because this business of constantly ordering food (even if it’s paleo food) is ridiculous. I could just about manage the eggs, but I’m going to abandon the cooking thing pretty quickly, I’d guess, if every single time I want to make something I have to go out and get everything. I’m also going to need to do some kitchen clearing. I have a toaster on the counter I never use and that space should probably be allocated for chopping… Anyway, after I make breakfast all this week (= boil eggs), my plan is to make dinner once next week.

Meanwhile, I have so many half-started (in my head) posts from London last week, but I don’t think they’re going to happen. The highlights: I did binge, first on Monday night (after a hugely boozy not-quite-dinner, so not entirely unexpected) and then again on Saturday, when it was 3 pm before Friend Bearing Chocolate mentioned lunch (and I sat around for 2 hours trying to figure out how to bring it up). It wasn’t even that I was so hungry by the time I went to the Sainsburys for provisions (yes, I volunteered, of course), it’s that I wanted a hedge against this happening to me again. I wanted to be full. I didn’t love the sound of the lunch we were going to eat (and I didn’t think the portion would be enough), and I was just tired of being hungry and feeling watched. And so I bought a box of raspberry jam doughnuts and ate all five of them (1,000 calories – not actually horrendiferous in the binge scheme, actually). And then I ended up if not bingeing then definitely overeating on the flight home, and then a bit of last-chance eating/bingeing (damn you, Magnolia, for being out of icebox pie) before getting on the straight and narrow Monday. Ask me again in a couple of days, but I’m pretty happy to be on the straight and narrow. I’m tired of feeling blah, and running into the Fig in London (remember him?) and seeing BN2’s best friend (though thankfully not BN2 himself) while feeling far from my best just really sucked, for lack of a better word. Onward and, well, downward (at least as far as the scale’s concerned).