Moving Part 1 - No Cooking/Eating Out

For the past several weeks the wife and I have been embroiled in the process of moving from Los Angeles to an undisclosed location in another part of California. One of the most trying aspects of the moving process was the kitchen shutdown. It began during the packing process and extended many days after we arrived at our new place. We eagerly unpacked the boxes labeled "kitchen"first in the hopes of becoming operational but candles, corn syrup and wedding present vases seemed to be all we could find. In fact, tonight was the first proper meal I've cooked in about two weeks (more on that later). When you can't cook your own food for days on end and you eat out virtually every meal, restaurant food quickly loses its appeal. You begin to realize how much they rely on salt and fat to impress you with a quick flavor hit. Don't get me wrong, I hold salt and fat in high regard but when used excessively, as most eateries do, they make eating out drudgery. I don't get how some people eat out most nights. Maybe they're the ones who die unexpectedly at age 40. I can't really remember the order of eating events the last couple weeks but I do remember a few meal snippets that exemplify how important timing is to good eating. During one arduous moving day I was brought an Apple Pan hamburger for lunch (which was delicious) and an In&Out hamburger for dinner. By the time I was eating my second hamburger of the day I realized there is a hamburger envelope and I had exceeded it. Our final meal in L.A. was at a little Italian joint owned by a little Italian guy in a little strip mall on a stretch of Venice Blvd. in the Palms/Culver City area. (It's funny how the word "Venice" in the Italian context conjures up charming canal images while in the Los Angeles context the canal loses the "c" and the image is much less charming. ) We ordered our favorite appetizer - thinly sliced eggplant rolled around a stuffing of ricotta cheese and pine nuts covered in a tomato sauce - and we split an entree-sized pizza. Normally this would have been a light, toothsome meal but after so many restaurant visits in a row the flavors were so flat and salty we couldn't even finish it. Getting three to four hours of sleep a night for several nights in a row is unhealthy for normal people but for someone like me who usually logs 8+ hours a night it was devastating. I ached from days of packing and hauling boxes around and felt bound up by the restaurant diet. This is the state in which I hit the road for our new home at midnight in an old Honda with bald tires in the driving rain with a complaining cat next to me. Before logging the first hour of driving the wife called from the other, nicer car and asked if I was drowsy because I had started driving much slower. Fessing up, I pulled off at a gas station in Camarillo for a cup of coffee and Krispy Kreme donut. I must admit, it pumped some life into me but instead of getting two large coffees as I should have, I only bought a medium. By the time we hit La Conchita the cup was dry and my eyelids were made of lead again. Normally the caffeine laden swill from a gas station keeps me awake for hours but my epic fatigue rose to the occasion. I toughed it out to Buelton where we finally found an open gas station and reloaded. It must of helped some but it didn't really feel like it. Nevertheless, thank God we made it safely, arriving at 3:30 A.M. Three hours of sleep on the floor later and the movers called to tell us they were a couple minutes away.