Feeding the Hungry Ghost (10 page)

Fill the pie pan with the apples and top with the crumble mixture, lightly packing the crumbs on top. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes, or until the crumble is bubbling, golden brown, and fragrant as hell.

GENTLE NUDGE
the
THIRD: DUMPING
the
DUDS

Our relationship with food is a metaphor. It reflects our relationship with everything else. Nasty food habits, toxic life decisions. If you’re treating your body — your fabulous, one-of-a-kind body
— like trash, how are you treating your family? Your friends? Your community? Your planet?

A bad food relationship is just as awful as a bad romantic relationship. You meet someone, it starts out great, violins, fireworks, hot sex. Then comes the letdown. Turns out Mr. Wonderful has an irritating habit of breaking dates, an interfering mother with whom he currently lives, and a somewhat unresolved relationship with his ex.

Maybe you cut him some slack at first, because that’s the kind of person you are. But come on, how many times are you going to be taken in by some fool offering you that grin that’s not as disarming as he’d like to believe, along with the pretty promise that this time things will be different, baby? (Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.) You wouldn’t keep dating a loser, darling. So ditch him.

Alas, taking away someone or something we love — even when we know it’s bad for us — stinks. Of course, we all know this on some level, but our dog taught me the lesson all over again when, in her naughty puppy days, she chewed off the head of her favorite plush toy. As I preferred her not to eat wads of cotton stuffing, I tried to take it away from her. Bad idea. Growling and snapping ensued.

Deprivation may make saints of some, but it makes the rest of us mean, small, creepy, and generally unpleasant. Plus it doesn’t work. Take away our toy, and we will turn to something else. Your shoe, perhaps.

So what does work? Slow, gentle change and a little distraction. The only way I could extract the mauled dog toy without being savaged was to offer her something else. Look! For you! Pretty new toy. Nice doggie.

Can’t live without ice cream? Enjoy it. But try eating just a
spoonful or two less than you did last night. Serve it to yourself in something pretty; you deserve it, babe. Then when you’re out of ice cream, don’t buy more. What the eye can’t see, the heart don’t grieve, as an Aussie sweetie told me once. Breathe. You don’t have to commit to doing this forever; just try it now, just get through now. Distract yourself. Coconut milk ice cream, frozen yogurt, and pure fruit sorbet are luscious and offer less fat and fewer calories than ice cream. Pretty new toys can be good for you, too.

Not only will you have dumped a bad habit — a major coup — you’ll be creating a positive new one. There’s neurological evidence that repetition of new behavior can rewire a scrambled brain. Even yours. Once you pave the way for new neurocircuitry, it seems to green-light other changes that once seemed impossible. Think of it as psychospiritual feng shui.

Getting rid of duds, whether dietary or live-in, takes time, patience, and the absolute and abundant belief that you deserve better. And you do. You deserve to be the healthiest, hottest, most joyful you possible. You may find over time you can ditch your old dud of an ice cream fix and feel terrific about yourself besides. Häagen-Dazs may suffer, but you won’t.

*
Less processed than white sugar, evaporated cane sugar looks similar to light brown sugar. It’s sold in natural food stores and in many supermarkets. It’s the go-to sugar in all
Feeding the Hungry Ghost
recipes.

*
Pomegranate molasses is available at Middle Eastern markets and many gourmet stores.

We think of flowers as pretty.
Nature wants us to, arranging them in pleasing, symmetrical shapes and decorating them in a whole mad paint box of colors, from the gentle lavender pastels of water lilies captured by Monet, to ginger’s red-and-orange in-your-face spikes and spires, which inspired Gauguin. If you’ve never evolved beyond the simple five-petal-flower-drawing stage, you’re still in luck. Loving flowers has nothing to do with artistic talent. It’s how we’re hardwired. Because botanically speaking, they are the sex organs of plants.

Blooming flowers gladden our hearts after a cold, gray winter, but their main agenda is to attract birds and insects, to stimulate pollination and get life’s party going. While the flowers pop their saucy heads out of the cold earth, the sap rises in young trees. And in all species. Spring is libidinous, fecund, fun. In spring,
as Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote
in “Locksley Hall,” “a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove; / In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” This is a decorous,
Victorian way of saying in the spring, we feel the love. We feel the lust. All life forms come out of dormancy, and we’re strutting our stuff.

Maybe not all of us. April is the cruelest month, according to T. S. Eliot (breathe — this is our last poetry reference for a while). What Eliot meant by this is that April can be a con. It’s supposed to be the month in which everything comes into flower. But then it snows. Or you wipe out walking the path that was so firm beneath your feet yesterday but that has, thanks to the spring thaw, morphed into a mud bath from which your dignity and your Jimmy Choos will never recover. It’s supposed to be spring. But you’re still swaddled in sweaters and can’t kick the sinus infection you got back in January. Maybe the weather is delightful. The sun is out, the lilacs are in full, audacious bloom, their fragrance cloying, pervasive, and migraine inducing, and everyone is pairing up and going at it, including your ex. The two of you just broke up, but he hasn’t been pining. In fact, he’s getting married (to someone else), so you’re just a mite hard-pressed to see the glory in everything, all right? So just back the hell off.

Buck up. Spring happens once a year, but even without climate change, the rules are different for humankind. You are not an annual, one that grows, flowers, shoots its seed, so to speak, and dies. No, the really great thing about our species is we can come into flower again and again. It is a coming into self, a blooming, a sense of realizing the extent of our own incredible talents and powers.

Say you’ve been in a holding pattern, a not-good-but-not-bad treading-water phase. Then one morning, you awake and delight to the trill of the sparrow that’s been singing its heart out for weeks, only you’re just now hearing it. You find your footing
in a previously rocky relationship or at last figure out how not to crash the office’s new software system. The scales fall from your eyes; the numbers drop from your bathroom scale; your musk is in the air; your very presence seems to charge the ions around you; the gods beam down and rain prizes and presents upon you. Or at least you think, okay, maybe this has all been to the good, after all. And though it’s nothing you might bring up in your carpool, you feel your soul lift and lighten. You feel joy. Flowering is when life tells you
yes.

For me, sex is the best yes out there, any time of the year. I am a nice, married woman, but even so, desire can surprise and awaken you in odd, unpredictable spurts. I’m not talking about erectile dysfunction drugs; I’m talking about when attraction floods you for no reason, like suddenly getting a crazy-ass crush on the organic farmer at the local farmers’ market or that senator with the weird hair. It gives you a reason to smile through your committee meeting, wear lipstick, or get a haircut. It does not always coincide with the season, and hallelujah for that — I’d hate to think love as we know it has to be stuffed in between April and June, or else we’re out of luck for another year. It can happen in your own spring and well beyond, too, even when you’re older and supposedly wiser. Desire makes happy suckers of us all and makes us blossom into creations both beautiful and vulnerable.

You deserve flowers. They belong in your life. And in your diet. Orange blossom, lavender, jasmine, and rose are a few with terrific culinary applications, adding their haunting fragrance to food and drinks, along with a whisper of other lands and definite healthful properties. If this sounds weird, let’s start with a superbasic herbal concoction, what the French call a tisane, or infusion — a cup of lavender tea.

Lavender Tea

Lavender infusion is pale but has a surprisingly bracing flavor. It’s just a wee bit soapy tasting. That means it’s cleansing. Good. It’ll wash those old negative feelings right out of you. Breathe. Feel the tea work its magic. Let it soothe you; let it heal your heart.

Makes a generous pot, serving 1 to 4

2 teaspoons lavender buds
*

Put on a kettle of water and bring to a boil.

Fill a tea infuser with lavender buds; put the infuser in a teapot.

Pour in the boiling water. Let steep for about 3 minutes.

You may pour it into a mug, but it would be happiest — and so would you — if you served it in your grandmother’s china teacup, the one with all the flowers on it.

You’ve probably eaten other flowers, the flowering parts of plants, without causing a scene, without even realizing it. Chili pepper, without which I would not care to live, qualifies. So do goji berries, the superfruit of the moment, as well as peas, cucumbers, and many of your nightshade vegetables, including peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant. If only David, my late father-in-law, had known eggplant is a sex organ, he might have been more inclined to eat it.

Down and Dirty Rice

What makes traditional New Orleans dirty rice dirty is the addition of
what James Joyce described
in
Ulysses
as “the inner organs of beasts and fowl” — gizzards. Um, no thanks. Chopped eggplant — the flowering, sexual part of the plant — takes the place of organ meat in this supersatisfying veggie version. It’s nice on one of those surprisingly chilly spring nights. The dish is not too spicy but you can make it that way. That’s what Tabasco sauce is for. It’s made from Louisiana’s Tabasco chili, which is also a flowering vegetable.

Serves 6 to 8

5 cups Stone Soup (see
page 84
) or other vegetable broth or water

1½ cups rice (white is traditional, brown is more healthful)

1 bay leaf

1 tablespoon olive oil

6 cloves garlic, chopped

1 large onion, chopped

1 medium eggplant, chopped

2 stalks celery, chopped

1 green bell pepper, chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped, or one 15-ounce can diced tomatoes

2 teaspoons sweet paprika

1 handful fresh thyme leaves or 1 teaspoon dried thyme

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Juice of 1 lemon

1 bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped