Kitchen Victory

Guess what I just did?

I made peanut sauce! And it was good!

I decided to try something new with my... leftovers. I put it on some pork tenderloin that was in the fridge. It wasn't the most sophisticated meal but that's not the point. I mixed:

1 glob of chunky peanut butter (2 tablespoons?)
1 tablespoon of Dale's Sauce (essentially soy sauce with some spices thrown in)
1 tablespoon brown sugar
a bunch of garlic
1/4 cup of water

Put everything together in a sauce pan and let it cook until the peanut butter melts completely and the sauce smooths out.

I couldn't believe it was actually good. The last time I attempted something blindly like that was when I tried to make enchilada sauce. It was a complete disaster. I want to make the peanut sauce again and put it on a noodle and cabbage bowl, sort of like pseudo Vietnamese food. Mmmm. Chicken and rice too.

I've sort of picked up this habit lately of only eating meat once a day, if that. Today I had a bean taco bowl for lunch so I was excused to eat pork tenderloin for dinner. I don't plan on becoming a vegetarian, or telling people I'm a vegetarian, because I don't have the discipline to take it that far. Unless there's a type of vegetarian that eats chicken fingers and bacon. I've just really started to think about the food I put in my body (mainly meat) and where it came from and what it went through to get to my plate and I'm not really comfortable with it.

I've thought about it too much lately. I've read too much about meat processing. I've listened to too many new-agey people talk about how bad meat is for your bodily energy. Frankly, meat sort of grosses me out now. I'm mostly talking about beef, pork, miscellaneous land mammal. (Bacon is of course excluded. Sometimes it's better not to think, just chew.) Chicken I'm still okay with for some reason. They're devilish little birds and they deserve to be eaten. Fish and seafood I'm still cool with too. I've caught and gutted fish before (I was five. Thanks, Gramps.) so I can without a doubt say that it does not bother me to kill and eat a fish. But cows? Pigs? I don't know. It just seems different. It's just gross.

I still eat meat when presented to me and I still buy leather products, so it's not like I have some moral or ethical reason not to eat meat anymore. And like I said, I do still love chicken and seafood. But I haven't eaten a cheeseburger in a couple of weeks and the last one I ate gave me some mental indigestion. Will I eat a burger again in the future? Probably. Okay, yes. It's not like I'm going to turn down a burger if I'm over at Jen's and she offers me what I'm told is the best burger ever. But I don't think beef is going to be a staple in my diet anymore.

Or maybe I'm wrong. It's probably just some weird phase and I'll grow out of it.

I'm still torn on sausage though. I really like sausage. And of course the bacon. Maybe I just have a problem eating meat that is still identifiable as an animal's body part. Chicken fingers don't look like meat. Sausage doesn't look like meat.

Who knows.