Vegetarian Wannabe

Because I'm a lonely and pathetic acoholic widow, I spend Saturday night entertaining myself with a bottle of bubbly and Iron Chef. A Japanese cooking show with crapply dubbed American accents and the wierdest of ingredients but tonight? Eeeeuuuuw factor kicked in. Large Octopus, live, slaughtered before us and crayfish boiled to the point where their limbs were twitching as the water's heat was elevated. Am I wrong in thinking that apart from the Vietnamese and Cambodian taste for puppies (so much more emotive than 'dogs') is usurped only by the Japanese appetite for the strange . . . now this is where the dichotomy (word of the week) kicks in. I love a a rare Black Angus steak, I'm a devotee of seafood but to watch it brutalised on a Japanese cooking show certainly brings me to the brink of vegitarianism until I think about the fabulous flavour of mung beans and lentils, the superlative taste of bhuga wheat and the fantastic texture of tofu . . . I so wannabe a vegetarian . . .every fibre tells me it's the right thing to do but . . . .the aroma of a BBQ, seafood risotto (which I had for dinner tonight) and the pervasive waft of a Sunday roast forbid it, I'm not even going to get into Bacon and Eggs Benedict as a hangover cure. I am you see a hypocrite. I love my meat as long as I don't have to slaughter it, scale it, pluck it, fillet it . . .oh my what a dilemma . . .now where's my Moosewood Cookery book . . . one good thing that came out of America.