So it's the day after Mother's Day and I, of course, am consumed by guilt for many reasons, some of them being having an actual basis in reality, but none of them having to do with the fact that I ate bacon this weekend because I didn't but maybe I should have.
Have you seen this website?
Wow. Really, who wouldn't love a salad served in a bowl made of bacon? Why didn't I think of that? is what I say.
I did eat some pork though. Actually, come to think of it, I believe I may have eaten pork three times this weekend, which is an awful lot for someone who claims to eat mostly plants. It was a pork-filled weekend, as so many of them here in the Deep South are. Friday night I helped out at the Monticello Opera House, taking tickets for a dinner theater and they generously served me a meal and it had pork in it. Indeed it did. I think it was in the form of a paella, although it just seemed like yellow rice with various meat products on it to me. It was delicious, though. And then on Saturday night, we went to Roland's welcome home party and there was every sort of grilled pork imaginable. I only ate a small piece that someone gave me off his very own fingers but it was mighty good.
The party was good too, although overwhelming for me, the country-mouse-who-never-sticks-her-twitchy-little-nose-out-of-the-doorway. Roland looked and seemed terrific and I was glad to have gone just to see what a real Marine looks like. Hot, I think is the word I am searching for here and if that's inappropriate, so be it. He gave a little speech to the many, many people who were there, thanking them for our gatherings and the sending of good energy his way while he was in Iraq. He claims that it must have worked because every one in his company came home whole and uninjured. I don't know if I believe that's the reason, but I'm grateful they all did.
So back to the pork.
On Sunday I cooked waffles and venison sausage for me and the man but that venison sausage is made of both venison and pork and I know it. I ate it anyway and it was damn good.
The Mother's Day feast of sushi and strawberry shortcake had no pork in it but it was great anyway. I suggested we make bacon and tomato sushi but I pretended I was kidding after I said it.
It was more than lovely to have the kids here on a Sunday afternoon, hanging out and cooking rice and rollin' our own sushi. We did the garden tour and then we went over and checked out the goats and chickens next door. The kids were suitably impressed by the garden and who doesn't love a baby goat when it's all curled up in a food bowl? So that was fun. They also admired the hole we've dug in the backyard where we're putting the pond. The man worked hard all weekend on that project and I can't imagine how nice it's going to be when it's done with the sound of water trickling through the bamboo spouts he's making. From our own bamboo, of course. And it will give me the excuse to plant more ferns which always makes me happy.
The kids gave me some great gifts for Mother's Day, although I wish they hadn't. Receiving gifts always makes me feel...undeserving? Something weird. But I'll put that salad spinner (which I actually asked for) to good use with garden greens and I'll eat the chocolate and I love the flowers and the cards and what they wrote in them made me cry. They gave me money to get a massage and a gift certificate to get my hair cut and I'll certainly put those to good use too.
So it was a lovely Mother's Day and couldn't have been more perfect if we'd had bacon-wrapped ham instead of sushi and OH! I almost forgot my favorite present:
THE MONKEY PEELER!
My kids know me so well.
