Foodie, Oh yes you are!

I am beginning to realize that I have some sort of, oh, I don't know, connection into aspects of culture that I'm not even conscious of until they become, well, conscious. For example, years ago I got into birding. That was when I still called it "bird-watching," even though you can barely see them most of the time. (I have tapes of bird calls, and do most identifications by sound.) Lo and behold, some time into that, I read that birding was the fastest-growing leisure activity in America. I was "in" with the culture, and didn't even know it! Same thing with cooking. I didn't know I was inside a trend until it got, well, obvious.

Why am I going into this? Because my fellow-sister here in Chicago, Sr. Helena, is also in sync with this same cultural trend, but she is in deep denial about it. Yes, my friends, Sr. Helena is becoming a foodie.

I'm not saying that she can cook. (Far from it.) But she has begun to do little things, like notice that what I did with the carrots today was to "puree" them. And a while back, she dressed up a commercial pasta sauce with a handful of dried mushrooms and some other pantry item. She was proclaiming her ignorance about preparing apples for pie and then said, "For all I know, you have to soak them in something." And, of course, soaking the apple slices does keep them from turning a distasteful brown. I told her it was subliminal knowledge, but she denied, denied, denied. She glories in her affected disinterest in food.

But I'm beginning to know better.

Sr. Helena, you're on the slippery slope to foodie-ness!