I may never eat again... Food Channel overdose.

[politicat]

As some of you may remember, I'm in Indiana spending time with my great-grandfather before he finally dies (though that day is looking farther and farther off every day; he's recovering faster than I've ever seen him recover from anything, and this was pneumonia AND a stroke.).

My grandmother is also here, and while I'm a foody, she's a serious foodie of the midwestern variety who, until she quit to come up here and care for my grandfather, was food services director for a very busy fraternal organization. (Carbs, carbs, carbs, carbs, carbs, carbs, carbs, carbs, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat!) We keep having arguments over the amount of vegetables I eat (7 servings a day) and the number of eggs I don't (I don't eat real eggs. I like Egg beaters.) She's made a cake, a pie, cookies, donuts and an icebox pie since I got here. (She's bored, she won't go out in the weather, so she bakes...)

She is a Food Network addict. She watches it all day long, every day, until we take a break for CSI or similar (and if those shows won't kill an appetite, what will??) But all this food imagery is really starting to make me nuts. (The TV drives me nuts as it is; I don't watch TV at all at home since Showtime took Dead Like Me off the air.)

The upshot is, I'm developing an aversion to butter. I never want to see heavy cream slowly poured into a kitchen-aid on low power again. The process for making chocolate genache is making me break out in hives. Sauteed garlic, sweating onions and weeping vegetables of all sorts make me want to drive as fast as I can to the nearest White Castle and never come up for real food again. And the woman with the Flip and Grip spatula is going to eat her own product if I ever meet her in a dark alley.

My great-grandfather, a retired farmer whose only hobbies were horticulture and animal husbandry, watches RFD-TV constantly, until it repeats, and then he goes for local Indiana farm information. Of course, RFD-TV ALSO has cooking shows (including one crazy Cajun who hauls cans of tuna and a table-mount rotary grater out to the back of beyond to use while cooking during camping). It's really fun when he's got that show on at loud volume in the family room, she's got that Southern, older lady with the Savannah restaurant on in the living room, and I'm in between, working on my projects in the formal dining room. Warring recipes and warring accents. If I'm not careful, I'm going to end up putting On-yons in the Peek-can pies....

Help!!

[NMDemDist2]

1. see if you can get her to switch to HGTV for a couple hours

LOL

[Stinky The Clown]

2. I Feel Your Pain

Maybe one of these will help. Put it onto your IPOD and chill out!

http://www.softpile.com/Multimedia/Miscellaneous/Review_18795_index.html

BTW, since FoodTeeVee is on constantly, I assume you got to see SavannahLady (Paula Deen)'s wedding and her follow-up guest shot on Ewok (Emeril)'s show?

[Neecy]

3. oh, she's so horrible...

That Paula tank grates on my ears, she really does...I just can't handle hearing 'bread' pronounced with two syllables. Most of the stuff she cooks looks like prison food.

I think I'd go berserk with Food Network on all day, every day. I find most of their on-air personalities obnoxious to an extreme. The PBS cooking shows have *much* more tolerable hosts.

[babylonsister]

4. Now yours is a funny post!

Sounds like a bit of cabin fever settling in, but on the upside, I'm happy gr. gr. grandaddy is getting better. Look at it this way; mine had both died by the time I was born. I hope you get to escape soon!

[politicat]

5. I'm happy he's doing well, don't get me wrong...

The cabin fever is getting better now that I got new tires on his car (which we no longer let him drive) and can come into Panera to use their wifi connection.

He's really doing very well, and YES, I know how very lucky I am to have had my great-great-grandmother until I was 7, my great-grandmother until I was 25, and (at this rate) my great-grandfather into my thirties. (They all married young and were productive and lived good, clean lives.)

I'm coming home to Colorado on the 28th, after my sister gets here to take over. Her husband is leaving for Iraq on the 21st (second tour - send good thoughts is way, please, and hope for a boring year for him), so the timing is pretty good. She'll need the distractions, and he would love the company of she and my niece.

And she has switched to HGTV... not that it's much better. I know far more about interior decorating, horse training, pork futures and soybean rust than I ever wanted to know.

I miss my husband, but this is the way things go. It's the least I can do for the man who made sure I had a good image of what men are supposed to be like after my father's miserable example. I know that without Pop-pop, I would not have been able to have a healthy, adult relationship with an adult male.

Pcat