I am one of over 38,000 people following Anfield Cat on Twitter (@anfieldcat). Anfield Cat, the cat who ran onto the field during a soccer game between Liverpool and Tottenham, is not the first tweeting cat in my life. For some time I’ve been following @CatFoodBreath. And yesterday when I felt a little clump of something in my mouth and began to gag, one CatFoodBreath’s tweets proved true: “A new study determined that over 60% of meals consumed by cat owners have cat fur as an ingredient.”
If only carbs had the same effect on my mouth as cat hair.
If only I hadn’t attempted to bake a sweet treat for my sons yesterday…
But it was one of those days when the weather was so bad we were stuck indoors. It wasn’t the kind of bad weather you’re thinking of, not rain or sleet, but a dust storm that blew over from North Africa. The sky was yellow. Air pollution. I could smell the dust. Everyone was sneezing. Everything felt yucky. So naturally, the thing to do on such a day is to say to your sons, “Who wants chocolate chip blondies?”
I went about making my usual eggless blondies recipe. (It’s eggless not because of an egg allergy, but because cracking eggs repulses me.) I had the ingredients out and after I mixed them all together something seemed wrong. Something seemed really wrong. The dough was paler than usual and the texture wasn’t right. Had I forgotten something? I went over the ingredients in my head: flour, baking powder, butter, yogurt, vanilla, chocolate chips. No, I hadn’t forgotten anything. I double checked myself and went over the ingredients again. I had put everything into the batter. Sometimes these things happen, I told myself. Batters don’t always look exactly the same. I put the blondies in the oven.
Thirty minutes later some seriously weird looking blondies were cooling on the counter. Mike came home, looked at them and asked, “Did you forget one of the ingredients?”
“No,” I said. “I went over everything in my head a few times. It’s all there.”
I began to rattle off the ingredients.
“Sugar.” Mike said. “Did you put in any sugar?”
“Oh my god!”
I panicked, not because I’d ruined the blondies, but because I was afraid I had some sort of dementia. How could I have forgotten the sugar? How could I have drawn such a blank? It’s true I’ve sworn off eating sugar, but I didn’t know I’d also completely wiped it from my mind. Is this what diabetes does to you if you take it as seriously as you should? I felt as stunned and confused as that poor cat on the soccer field must have felt.
“They might still taste good,” Mike said. “Try one.”
The blondies were warm and buttery. Bland, but not bad. I finished one, probably exceeding my daily carb limit in five little bites. But they were sugar-free, and if I was already eating white flour, why not have another? So I did. And then my blood sugar shot up. And then I went low and shaky so I ate another blondie. I got into bed exhausted and feeling like crap. I slept well until my cat pushed me off the bed just after dawn.
When Mike came home from his early morning run I showed him the clip of Anfield Cat. Then I checked up on CatFoodBreath and found out he’s tweeting haikus. I can’t quite explain why, but that makes me really happy.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keOEmSCiPI8&feature=related[/youtube]
