The Quality of this Post May Disprove its Content

There's a blogging advice book on the market (yes, that day has come) called, No One Cares What You Had for Lunch which is devoted to the topic of how bloggers too often write about boring crap. I haven't read the book since I prefer to draw uninformed conclusions but the author claims to offer interesting writing topics to snaz up your boring old blog. I'm all but positive that she forgot to advocate for public nudity or embarking on a series of awful relationships and thank god -- I need to retain my niche. Anyway, I suspect the book is mostly correct -- there are a lot of boring blogs out there -- however I also suspect that the problem is not a lack of interesting topics, it's the bad writing. Lisa and I were chatting on Friday and hypothesized that certainly lunch could make for an interesting post since really good writing is rarely based on having a good topic (though a good topic probably makes good writing easier to come by) so why not write about your lunch? Because we are huge rebels (who also love to eat stuff, especially at the noon hour!) we agreed to both write posts about lunch and since Lisa is a bit of an over achiever she decided to write FIVE posts about lunch. And since Lisa is also an evil bitch who wants me to lose all of my readers she decided I was also writing five posts about lunch. We'll see.

Today's lunch is leftover cassoulet from last weeks inaugural meeting of the Wine Club spin off "Eating Fancy Food and Gossiping About Celebrities Club" which was held at the restaurant AOC. How bourgeois do I sound with my frenchie lunch? I also just finished the Julia Child autobiography, My Life in France so I'm pretty much an expert on all edible French things. For those nonexperts reading this post cassoulet is a French tomato based casserole with white beans, duck confit and sausage and pork fat (read: ambrosia of the gods). My leftover portion of France's version of Hamburger Helper (queue all of France hating me, but those Pierres need to cut me a break -- cassoulet comes in canned form! You don't even add your own freshly ground ecoli infested chuck!) is smaller than I would like (since I would *like* to eat a bucketful) but I'm fairly certain that the calorie content is more than sufficient to constitute a full lunch. That said I foresee myself breaking into my stash of granola bars or possible sneaking downstairs for a PB&J come 3:00pm (so much for maintaining that fancy food allure). The best part of the cassoulet was the sausage which I ate every morsel of in the restaurant last week so today I am left with a piece of pork fat and a few bits of duck meat and a lot of white beans. Luckily the sauce makes the beans pretty yummy and also has the wonderful side effect of fooling my coworkers into believing that I am eating a very healthy lunch despite the fact that everything in my Tupperware is coated in a loving blanket of fat.

I am normally pretty disciplined about making some sort of healthy food on the weekend and eating it all week for lunch, this, along with my "oatmeal or cold cereal with 6+ grams of dietary fiber for breakfast" rule is my weight maintenance plan and generally offsets the evenings full of Indian take out and cornmeal pancakes made with 3/4 stick of butter (and consumed watching skinny chicks on Top Model). But the last 2 weekends have been busy (Especially this past Saturday when I had to not only lounge around in bed until 1pm but also needed to watch The Real Dirt on Farmer John and the Jamaica episode of No Reservations -- I really over booked myself) and I fear that the lack of healthy lunch combined with the fact that my new freezer totally keeps ice cream frozen (a feature not offered by the old model so obviously I had to buy a tub of Neopolitan Dynamite and eat it everyday) will result in me gaining about 50lbs. I may have to counter with a couple of liquid dinners or by farming myself out as a wet nurse.

I still contend that an interesting "what I had for lunch" post is perfectly possible... even if this is not that post.