Day Four of the Great Vegetarian Experiment:  risotto!  Mushroom risotto, to be precise.  I didn’t know what risotto was until I started watching Gordon Ramsay shows, and now that I’ve made it I can never stop.  Soooo goddamn good.  Tomorrow will be some sort of pasta, I think, and then I just have to make it through Friday and Saturday and I can have an entire pig for breakfast on Sunday if I want.

I’ll admit I cheated a tiiiny bit on this one, because the risotto was made with chicken stock, although there isn’t any actual meat in there.  However, I said in the ground rules that I wasn’t going to worry about chicken stock, and the people at Slate say chicken stock isn’t meat anyway, so nyah.  (Sidenote:  I’m entertained to note that the guy in the article is also using chicken stock to make mushroom risotto.  That’s a coincidence, I swear.)

Today was the first day where I really missed meat, to be honest– which manifested itself in three different ways:  first, whatever the kids were having for lunch in the cafeteria smelled really good.  Second, I hit the vending machine for a snack during my prep period (my lunch is really early in the day, so this happens probably more often than it should, since my prep is last hour) and was halfway toward getting vending machine jerky before it hit me that a) vending machine jerky is meat, and b) are you kidding?  Vending machine jerky?  Like hell I’m eating vending machine jerky.  Then on the way home I drove past Arby’s, which is still prominently advertising their Arby’s Smokehouse Brisket Sandwich, and… I’m not gonna lie, there might have been some drooling.  No buying, no eating, but drooling.

I promised “odds and ends” in the title of the post, but the two other things I was going to talk about– the bullying movie the whole building had to watch today and the release of Bill Ayers’ Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident both kinda feel like full-sized posts now that I’m thinking about them.  So maybe I’ll overpost for the next couple of days if I get them written.  Many of you are probably tired of hearing about food by now anyway, I imagine.