Thursday, April 10, 2014

What a cheesy life!

It is about time I came out of the closet.  And openly admitted to who I really am.

So, here it is.

Out and aloud and proudly in the open.

I am becoming a health nut. A health foodie.

There, I said it!

Even normally, when home, I try to start the day with at least a little bit of protein.  On the road, and when I have to sit in a room and listen to presentations, I knew I had to have more than mere carbs and fat.  Which meant that I needed eggs to start a working day.

But then I am picky about how to eat eggs.  There is no way that I can force myself to eat those scrambled eggs at buffet that they leave sitting there for hours.  Well, unless I have no choice whatsoever.  And this time I had a choice--I just had to locate it!

I did find a place, eventually. I decided to go for an omelette.  

"What do you want in the omelette?" asked the fair-skinned waitress who seemed at least five, if not ten, years older than me.

"Vegetables and cheese.  What options am I looking at?"

"Spinach, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, peppers."

"Everything except mushrooms" I told her.  Perhaps it is all in my imagination, but sometimes those mushrooms seem to trigger strange dreams.

"How about the cheese?"

"What do you have?"

"Cheddar or Swiss?"

I could not decide.  I am so much used to feta and gruyère in my egg preparations at home that all of a sudden I was stumped that the options were so pedestrian.  Maybe I chose the wrong place to have breakfast after all; what kind of a place has only cheddar and Swiss as options!

But, apparently she interpreted my hesitation differently. Very, very differently.  

"The yellow cheese or the white cheese?" she asked me in a much slower delivery.  

Could it be that a dark-skinned Indian guy came across as one who did not know the difference between cheddar and Swiss?  Could it be that the fair-skinned waitress assumed that people like me are ignorant about cheese?  Should I be snarky and tell her something like, "I hoped you would have feta?"

"Swiss please.  And not a lot--I don't want it all gooey and cheesy."  Yep, that is all I said.  There are very few moments in life when a retort is ever worth the time.  This one was not one of those moments.  

As I kept sipping the dark elixir of life, a kitchen-staff brought out the omelette.  The yellow omelette was colorful, with the spinach green, the tomato red, the onion purple, the peppers green and red and greenish-yellow.  I took a small piece.  It tasted great, exactly like what I was looking for.

I was set for the day. A long day of work and fun lay ahead for this health-nut.

Fame is a Fickle Food
By Emily Dickinson

Fame is a fickle food 
Upon a shifting plate 
Whose table once a 
Guest but not 
The second time is set.

Whose crumbs the crows inspect 
And with ironic caw 
Flap past it to the Farmer's Corn – 
Men eat of it and die.

2 comments:

Ramesh said...

First of all, you don't have to come out of the closet to pronounce this. You have been a health nut for some 30 years.

BUT

If you have another omelet like that, you will be permanently disqualified from the health nut fraternity.

By the way, what is this new fad of posting three posts at a time. I suspect your scheduling of posts isn't working - Blogger sucks.

Have a ball in sunny Florida. Soak up enough Vitamin D to see you through all the dark days in Oregon that you have to endure until you visit India next !! :)

Sriram Khé said...

I didn't schedule the posts--real time posting. Which means that perhaps the problem is with the RSS feed?

Yes, it is so sunny and warm that I, ahem, actually sweated.
It is so bright that my eyes hurt.

The thought of 95 degree heat with 80 percent humidity in Chennai makes me shudder :(