Grocery shopping

One of my favorite things to obsess over is food. I have dreams where I am eating, finding or preparing food. Food shows up in my dreams at least once a week, as it has done since I can remember.

According to the dream site I just checked between this paragraph and the last, food dreams symbolize physical or emotional nourishment.
Dreams containing fruit symbolize sensuality, which I find a little disturbing because from ages four to seven I have a recurring dream I had about walking through a citrus grove and a grapefruit falling into my hand off one of the trees. So it would appear I was a little pervert back then wouldn't it?

Before I digress on some kind of weird analysis of my childhood, I have to talk about some exciting ways to get more out of food.

Everybody knows that eating fewer calories means eating more produce. But part of the problem is that we get stuck in ruts with our eating and it is sometimes scary or difficult to try anything new. In short, we eat the same boring food all the time.

Chances are if you are reading this blog, you are trying to improve your fitness. And one of the most obvious effects of being fit is an optimal body composition. Which means you look good in a bathing suit, Sunday suit or birthday suit. What, you thought I meant naked? you're the perv, pervert.

What I am talking about is packing in the most nutrition for the least amount of calories. I am talking about the produce department.
Adam and Eve were nudists and they lived in a produce department. They walked around the garden in the nude until some classical painter guy made them cover it up with a fig leaf.

Since we are usually in the habit of making the same ten or so dishes when we cook, we tend to go to the store, pick out what we need for those dishes and then go home and make them and then watch Dexter while chowing down to the the same boring casserole/beans and rice/meat and potatoes that we always do and basically living the same boring day that we did last week.

What if instead we got some kind of new produce, planned the meal around what is fresh and in season and got the whole family involved in preparing a delicious feast?
Although my wife and I do not have kids, I often include our cat in the preparation of dinner by letting her smell what we are making and then mocking her by making hissing noises, like another, bigger, territiorial cat who knows how to make a london broil.

But in this internet blogorific world where everything I say makes sense and is ridiculously simple yet somehow genious, this is what the family kitchen should look like.

• Head chef - Parent
• Sous chef - Other parent or oldest child/pet
• Line cook - kid or pet
• Prep cook - kid or pet

... and so on.

Everybody cooks, everybody helps. It's what socialism wants to be when it grows up.

Let's get back to the produce. Produce is super tasty and it can be very inexpensive if you know where to find it. Unless you are addicted to heirloom tomatoes (I have not found anywhere that has them for less than what I would expect pay for a wino's liver. That is a few dollars a pound).
Here are the places you need to be buying produce right now:

• Winchester Farmer's Market. Winchester and Kirby in Hickory Hill (across from that crazy church with the statue of liberty holding a cross). It is not a farmer's market, despite the misleading name. It is like America had a baby with all your favorite ethnic foods. The store is in a defunct Schnucks and I literall had to pick by jaw up off the floor in the produce department. Bananas, apples, guava, papaya, chinese and indian eggplant, a thousand different kinds of mushrooms and peppers, purple sweet potatoes, weird squashes and melons with spikes all over them. Some of these vegetables could double as a weapon! BTW cheap awesome prices. We got what seems like a bushel of basil for a dollar!
• Viet Hoa Market. Cleveland and Court in Midtown. Has a ton of exotic produce as well as live eels swimming around in tanks. What's not to love?
• Easy Way. Various locations. Hands down one of the best places to pick up old ladies. All you have to do is talk about this weather we've been having and you are golden. You may have to watch some of the prices, for example pineapple can sometimes be more than $3 (which is a fair price).

That is all I've got for right now. But I want to post theis recipe for slaw. It goes really well in a wrap with some chicken breast or london broil.

you will need:

• 6 or so baby bok choy
• 3 radishes
• chili paste or crushed red pepper
• 1 tbsp. rice vinegar
• 1/2 tsp. low sodiom soy sauce
• 1 tsp. sesame oil
• 1 tsp agave nectar 

Slice bok choy into shreds. Sliver the radishes. Put vegetables into a bowl and add the other ingredients. mix it up.