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October 7, 2005

Wasabi Potato Cakes

There have been three or four times in my life when I've lost a significant amount of weight (fifteen pounds or so) without dieting. Instead, something awful has happened--a serious illness, clinical depression, a devastating breakup, or some combination thereof--that has made it hard to choke down food, and made the food hard to digest once it was down.

Recently I lost over ten pounds without trying. I wasn't depressed or ill, but I was extremely anxious. It had to do, first of all, with the standard post-traumatic Sunstone syndrome I go through every year. But what I didn't want to admit to many people (though I did tell Tom and his wife about it) was that what troubled me most was this visceral certainty that I lacked a fundamental piece of bad information about the romance I'd begun at Sunstone.

Every morning for a month I'd wake nauseated and grossed out. I'd raise a carton of orange juice to my mouth (I live alone, so I feel entitled to drink straight from the carton) and my throat would contract after a swallow or two. Along about noon, I'd find myself ravenous and toss a salad, but I could never finish it. At dinner I'd grill a cheese sandwich and end up throwing the last few bites away. As for dessert, I couldn't even go there! The way I felt reminded me of how my sisters described morning sickness, except that instead of random smells making me want to puke, it was random thoughts: I'd think suddenly of this guy I was utterly enamored of, and I'd feel dread, foreboding and a trace of sheer physical revulsion, which, to state the obvious, is not a good sign.

Eventually I discovered what it was I hadn't known. Soon thereafter, the relationship went away, and with it, much of my anxiety. But my appetite didn't return immediately, which was OK with me. I'm generally quite healthy, with an appetite to match; I'm a decent cook, and I enjoy food. But I discovered that fitting into clothes I haven't been able to wear for four years offers certain enjoyments too. Having begun losing weight, I rather wanted to continue.

And I managed to be good enough most of the time, losing a few ounces every couple of days. But I had to work at it, had to tell myself to order a small mocha, no whipped cream. Had to say to myself, "No, Holly, you DON'T need to make cookies." Had to make myself cover my plate and say, "I'm done here" before I finished all my french fries.

But this morning I awoke again with that violent internal retching that prevents me from even thinking about solid food. It's not anxiety today--well, maybe a little, because I do feel harried and harassed by the many, many things I have to do, like shower, get dressed and go to a 4 p.m. meeting on campus. But mostly, it's wasabi potato cakes.

One of the nicest duties of my job is meeting the visiting writers we bring to campus, attending their readings, then going out to dinner with them. It's always a fun evening: food, drink and conversations with some cool writer, six or seven members of the English and creative writing faculty, occasionally a partner or two. We have a standard reservation at one of the nicer restaurants in town, and the service is almost always provided by a genial, efficient waitress who knows us and our preferences quite well. When she's taking drink orders, before I even have to ask, she tells me what the martini special is. If it sounds good, I'll try it; if not, I go with a cosmo.

The flip side of going to a restaurant so often that the waitress knows what you'll ask before you ask it, is that you know what will be on the menu before you open it. I have a favorite standard item I can always fall back on: a nice steak covered in a delightful piquant pepper sauce. And sometimes they have cool and interesting specials. But sometimes they don't.

Earlier in the day, I'd taught a Stuart Dybek essay about a bunch of sixth-graders going on a field trip to a slaughter house, and the descriptions of cows being clubbed to death, of an assembly line of swine hanging by their hind feet to facilitate the slitting of their throats, after which they are allowed to watch each other bleed to death as they squeal in terror and pain.... well, discussing that with a group of undergrads left me with the sense that I didn't want to eat red meat again any time soon.

But this restaurant isn't known for its vegetarian items. Fish, I thought, I'll order fish. I almost went with the tuna.... but it was on the cheap menu and didn't come with any side dishes. One of the specials was crispy-skinned salmon, accompanied by a few spears of grilled asparagus--AND wasabi potato cakes.

I couldn't help it: I was skeptical. It was farmed salmon, for one thing, which just doesn't taste as good as wild salmon, and isn't as healthy, either. And then there were those wasabi potato cakes.... I hated to be accused of culinary cowardice: after all, this wasn't any random pairing of a strangely colored condiment with a familiar white starchy food, like ketchup-covered banana chunks; no, it was nouvelle cuisine, the blending of east and west! My colleagues on either side of me announced their intention to go with the salmon. I figured I might as well ask this trusted waitress for her honest advice.

"Oh, I serve so many of those wasabi potato cakes! We can barely keep ‘em in the kitchen!" she assured me. And I placed the fateful order.

As you should surmise from my subtle foreshadowing, the entire meal SUCKED--well, I guess the asparagus was OK. When our plates arrived, a colleague who had wisely ordered something else commented, "Oh look, it's the dish with hair," because each item in the meal was stacked on top of each other, the entire structure covered with finely shredded, deep-fried potatoes, mounded high on top and trailing down the sides in curls, so that the whole thing looked like a fuzzy brown muppet. The salmon was not only bland, but covered by an especially greasy tartar sauce I had to scrape off. There were a couple of breaded, deep-fried tomato slices buried in there (had that element been mentioned in the menu, I would never have ordered the dish, because I don't like tomatoes), and as for the wasabi potato cakes, they were just spicy patties of hashed browns, undercooked on the inside and burnt on the outside.

The meal was so bad, it even put me off dessert. I ordered a black forest trifle, but didn't have the appetite to finish it. I wasn't even as buzzed as I wanted to be because we have a two-drink limit, but I guess there's something to be said for being sober enough to drive home at the end of a two-and-a-half-hour long dinner, whether the food is good or bad.

I got home, got ready for bed, couldn't sleep, took a sleeping pill. I did manage to fall asleep soon thereafter and stay asleep for a long time, but I woke up feeling just like you'd expect. I've been up for seven hours and have yet to put anything of substance into my stomach. I think it might be seven hours more before I do. The only consolation for feeling so queasy is that the evening of excess won't show up on the scale or on my hips.

Posted by Holly at October 7, 2005 3:27 PM