Just How Much Do You Like Pizza?
I was thinking about this the other day. Or sometimes I get into a little rut with my meals, and it pops into my head. I’ll realize that I had chicken for lunch and dinner, or maybe three nights in a row, and I wonder what my threshold is for eating the same food over and over again. You hear people say if they could only eat one thing for the rest of their life, it would be….and then they say something like their grandmother’s fried chicken, or the salad bar at Ruby Tuesday, whatever catches their fancy. I suppose it would be possible to eat the same thing for the rest of your life, but no one really wants to do that. If you were in a contest, though, I wonder what you’d pick and how long you’d last?
I’ve never come remotely close to trying this, and I hope I never do, but like I said, I’ve thought about it. I spent a summer in Michigan once, and the golf course hours I was working left me eating a lot of late dinners. Since I wasn’t exactly located in a metropolis, and Michigan can’t touch Pennsylvania for convenient store convenience, there wasn’t many options for me to grab a quick dinner. This left me fending for myself most nights, and when it’s 10 pm, you just want to be done with making something. There’s not a lot of time for flair, so I was eating an inordinate amount of pasta. About as creative as I got was to mix up the sauces, but still I was packing it away like an animal. I don’t remember ever getting the point where I was dreading popping another rotini into my mouth, but I was probably in the neighborhood.
In fact, I think I might have maxed out my pasta intake that summer, because there are times now when I am just definitely not in the mood for it. No, if you’re going to eat something all the time it better be more interesting than pasta. And, when you are thinking about this, don’t worry about the nutritional values or anything, or we’ll allow you to take vitamin supplements if you must. In my mind, there are a couple approaches to answering the question, what would you eat if you could only eat one thing the rest of your life?
The first approach is just gut instinct, you throw something out there, and it’s from the heart. Chocolate cake! Great call. Something that falls into this category for me is pancakes. Love ‘em. You can eat them any time of day and feel like a King. Bonus. They’re relatively easy to make….looks like we’ve got a winner. The problem is, pancakes are kind of special. I don’t even know if I’ve ever had them two mornings in a row. Perhaps if every day of your life was Christmas, then pancakes would be the play, but I think they would pretty quickly grind you to a halt. I don’t know if I could last much longer than a week or so on the hot cakes.
Second approach is what I call the clean slate approach. You pick something that you can eat several different ways. For me, this would definitely be chicken. Oh, the versatility of chicken. We get into technicalities here, because I’m not sure if I would allow you to mix up side dishes, or even have side dishes. I’ve thought about this, but there are a lot of gray areas. I would say you can eat anything as long as chicken, or whatever you choose is the main ingredient. Like, I’d allow a chicken pot pie, but a chicken breast with a salad and a potato or something…not allowed. I’m not sure what my record is for eating chicken day after day, but it’s certainly more than a couple of days. If we’re talking chicken, I think I can last a while. A long while.
The third and final approach is the gun to your head approach. If the first method is decadent, the second one practical, this is just the most realistic. Bottom line, what are you taking. The other name for this approach would be, “The Pizza Approach,” because I think most people are picking the pie. Pizza is something I can almost convince myself I would never get sick of. There are different varieties, different styles of crust, you can mix it up a little bit. I’m just thinking about my life, and trying to recall a moment where someone suggested pizza and I showed any hesitation at all. I can’t think of anything. It’s a guaranteed yes. Pizza? Yes. I don’t know how many days in a row I could eat it, and I’m not going to try to put a streak together, but in some ways it sounds like a delicious experiment.
