Doldrums

I’m stuck in the doldrums. Doldrums – the word itself connotes, suggests, even sounds like a Sargasso Sea of the Soul. Is it the time of year, is it the weather, or is it me?

I arise at 9 AM. Breakfast. Two eggs fried in a puddle of grapeseed oil accompanied by the last two sausage patties in the fridge – pre-cooked courtesy of Jimmy Dean and company. Lately, I sometimes fry food in coconut oil. Coconut oil is 91% saturated fat. It has more saturated fat than beef fat, which is about 50% mono-unsaturated. (Yes, folks, half the fat in your rib-eye steak is the same kind of healthy fat found in olive oil.) Coconut oil is solid at room temperature. It looks like paraffin. It melts at 76° F.

I check my email: nothing much there. I check Skype and see that my amigo CyberDave is online but his status is Invisible, which means he is busy. There is an icon for Busy, but he prefers Invisible. So I don’t hail him.

After a while I lie on the couch. The house is cool, but I leave the heat turned down. Eventually I fall asleep and have a fitful sleep with dreams. Several times I awaken and I think, “I should get up”, but I don’t. I need to wash laundry; that’s my only reason for getting up.

Eventually I get up, but now it’s 1:30 PM. I make a raspberry-banana smoothie, to which I add almond butter and lemon juice. I drink half of it before I remember I didn’t add the ground flaxseed I intended to add. That’s ok, I’ll add the flaxseed to something else. When I want to use flaxseed I grind it in an old coffee mill I found in the garage. I cleaned the mill and it works fine for grinding flaxseed. I could buy ground flaxseed, but ground flaxseed goes rancid quickly, so I prefer to grind it when I need it. It only takes seconds.

Unlike peanut butter, the almond butter in my smoothie is made from a nut – the almond nut. Peanut butter is made from a legume. That’s right; despite cans of nuts on store shelves that proclaim “Mixed Nuts” on their labels and contain peanuts, peanuts are legumes, not nuts. If you eat a lot of corn or peanuts or peanut butter, you may want to read about aflatoxin. Corn and peanuts are particularly susceptible to being contaminated with aflatoxin. It’s a bigger problem in Third World countries, but even in developed countries you will be exposed to it at low levels. Aflatoxin is a potent carcinogen, especially for the liver, and it is so toxic it sometimes kills livestock and, in poor countries, people.

At 5 PM I eat a spinach salad. I put broccoli and cauliflower and sliced beet and black olives and green olives and Bell pepper and chopped scallion and bleu cheese dressing on it. And, it gets a tablespoon of ground flaxseed which is not only healthy but adds a nutty flavor.

I follow up the salad with a rib-eye steak. I bought and cooked two rib-eyes yesterday. Here’s how I cooked them.

First, I left the steaks on the counter for at least half an hour to come to room temperature. I put a cast-iron frying pan on the stove and added oil. As the pan heated, I sprinkled salt and freshly ground pepper onto each side of a steak, patting it firmly into the meat so it won’t fall off in the pan. Using tongs, I placed the steak into the hot pan. It sizzled for a couple minutes, then I turned it over. After two minutes I turned it over again. I poked at the steak with the tongs, judging the amount of doneness by the firmness of the meat. After five or six minutes I removed the steak onto a plate and let it rest for two minutes to finish cooking. Then I repeated the process with the second steak. One steak I ate and one steak went into the fridge. It was perfect – seared on both sides and medium to medium rare inside. I don’t often eat steak because “they say” that too much red meat isn’t good for you. I don’t know the truth of that. It seems, depending on who I listen to, that nothing is good for me. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.

It’s almost time for the nightly news. I’ll tune in to see what manner of mischief the world’s leaders have perpetrated upon the world’s people today.