Salad Days

Point 1: My name is Tony, and I really don't know who I am any more.

Point 2: This is probably a good thing.

It's a Friday, so there's not much that can be wrong with the day. Had blood sugar of 6.2 this morning, which was irritating. The day went on in a similar vein, tiny little gritty things that stuck in my craw or got under my skin, so it was a great thing to be able to call d and arrange to meet for a weekend-starting dinner at one of our regular Italian haunts in the city.

From the minute I walked in, it was the weekend. This is what my girl, and Friday night, and Italian food can do for me. Thankfully, far as I may have come from who I used to be, that's still the case, and will always be.

Now, you have to watch this carefully, it's kind of like a game of Watch The Lady.
And yes, before you ask, The Lady would be me.

If you've been keeping up, you'll know that I'm not a fan of fresh, raw green things. Normally when we go to this particular restaurant, we start with a melted ball of mozarella in a tomato sauce, and move on to something pasta-based.

I don't know who it was that looked down the menu tonight, but it wasn't the man who started this adventure. Because the words that came out of my mouth were:
"I'll have the Italian salad."

Yeah. Quite. I don't know, alright?
The thing is, the Italian salad was described as mozarella, prosciutto, bread, and vine tomatoes. Technically, not a thing on there I don't like. And no green. It was only after I'd ordered it, and d was goggling at me that I explained this. There was no green in this salad.

"Errr...no dear, it doesn't work like that. All those things will be..." she shrugged "in the salad. But it's still a salad..."
"Seriously?"
"Yes dear. That you don't know this is pretty scary."
"Hey," I said, "so shoot me - I see a list of ingredients, I think that's what's in a dish, and that's all that's in the dish."
She blinked, shook her head slowly.
"No dear."
Still, since it was the first salad I'd ever ordered in 39 years of being alive, she felt it was worth encouraging.
"Look, if it's a disaster, you can swap with me. And what you do is pick through all the green to find all the stuff you like."
Something about the way she said that was like coming to the edge of a big dark swimming pool. Queasy and scary and odd. But I kinda like queasy and scary and odd from time to time. I shrugged.
"Nah, I'm gonna eat it," I said.
d did a second double-take.
"Who are you and what have you done with my husband?" she asked.
"I have absolutely no idea," I told her honestly.

When it turned up, there was less green than she'd expected, but still, it was an integral part of the dish, and I ate it all. Apparently, there was spinach and rocket, and something else that was whitish and unidentifiable. This, I have to admit, is one of the great things about going to dinner with a foodie - I wouldn't know spinach from a sunflower, frankly, but now I know what they look like, and taste like, and want to go on to conquer other things - maybe something big and cold and bright and green and limp and utterly British - Y'know...lettuce and so on...

So this is me, the Disappearing Man - I no longer drink fizzy drinks, I don't eat desserts, I don't eat fried potatoes, I now drink de-caff at the drop of a hat, and now...I eat salads.

Yeah, so sue me, I have no culinary principles left in the world. Of course, it's not lost on me that I've come to salads at precisely the moment when salads are pretty much Suspect 1 in Europe's next big food scare - I watched the news earlier and a scientist mentioned that salads had been 'implicated' in our spanking new E-Coli scare. So maybe I can still own testicles if I treat this as an extreme culinary sport - see, that's how hard I am, I've never eaten salads in my life, but now every mouthful of rocket is like playing Russian Roulette with rampant food death, yeeeeahhhh! Bring it on, beeeatch!!

Ahem...Yeah...right...I'll be over here in the pink Bo Peep outfit if anyone wants me...