On Tuesday, the day after I got here, I offered to make dinner for my host mom and her daughter. I bought four chicken breasts, figuring I’d have one for the next day. I used cream of mushroom soup as a sauce and served them over rice with some grated carrots on the side.
It is now Friday night, after dinner. I still have leftovers.
Wednesday at noon, I wasn’t feeling that great, so I just had some rice with a little bit of mushroom soup on top. That left me still with soup, rice, chicken and carrots. Wednesday evening I was invited to my host teacher’s house for dinner and Thursday I had the world’s best sandwich ever*.
Thursday evening, however, I chopped up the chicken, mixed it with the rest of the rice and carrots, threw in some soy sauce, ginger and shallots, then sautéed it to make something that I’m not really sure qualifies as stir-fry. Maybe it was fried rice? I have no idea. Leftovers à la fake-chinese, as it were—which I then couldn’t finish.
Friday, I returned to the leftovers à la fake-chinese and consumed all of it! I thought I had at last vanquished the perpetual leftovers. I was even still hungry and returned to the refrigerator to discover…there was still mushroom soup. Cue dramatic music here.
More seriously, either there’s appetite suppressants in the water (which would explain how the French eat patisserie and drink red wine and still stay skinny) or I eat much less than I thought I do. The latter may be a product of me eating alone. Though I still keep more or less standard meal times rather than just grazing throughout the day, and still prepare meals that actually resemble real-person food, with no conversation to distract me, I notice that I’m full a lot sooner. It could also be that I have a tendency to get up and do the dishes once I’ve finished my plate of food, rather than going immediately to the fridge to get a yogurt or an apple.
For whatever reason, two chicken breasts, a decent quantity of rice and about 200 grams of grated carrots had made up four meals for me. I guess this bodes well both for my health (considering that sort of diet combined with walking around two miles every day to get to where I need to be will definitely result in me losing some weight) and for my budget. Which means I can buy more wine!
*The best sandwich ever is thick-cut French ham, Gouda cheese, mayonnaise and some lettuce on whole-wheat bread. And when I say mayonnaise, I mean real mayonnaise that you can still taste that it’s made from egg and is flavored with a little bit of Dijon mustard. Mmm.
Eating alone can have a huge affect. With people, you're generally talking and paying attention to things other than the food, and you're eating slower which means you have more time for things to move through, meaning it will take longer to get the full feeling. (I've recently gained a few pounds, so such things are on my mind. I think I need to start eating alone in a dark, quiet room.)
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