{"id":16711,"date":"2011-06-02T09:01:54","date_gmt":"2011-06-02T13:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=16711"},"modified":"2016-01-05T12:00:31","modified_gmt":"2016-01-05T17:00:31","slug":"make-peace-with-sardines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=16711","title":{"rendered":"Make Peace With Sardines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Until last year when my husband, Mike, began the Paleolithic Diet<\/a>, sardines were not one of our regular household foods.\u00a0 In fact, the only time I can remember having sardines in our apartment was in 1998.\u00a0 It was shortly before our wedding, before we had children (and before we both had type 1 diabetes).\u00a0 We lived in Jerusalem with a one-year-old Bullmastiff and a black kitten named Sabina.\u00a0 Sabina was the first cat we’d purchased.\u00a0 Previously, I had adopted strays. \u00a0But the strays wouldn’t stay in the apartment where it was safe.\u00a0 They yowled at the door and begged to go out to the street.\u00a0 After our second stray cat died, I swore I wouldn’t bring home another cat.\u00a0 The losses were too painful.\u00a0 Within a matter of weeks, however, Mike began to notice I was loitering around the trash cans at the corner of our block and saying hello to the cats who searched there for food.\u00a0 “People are going to realize you’re insane,” he said. “Let’s get a cat.\u00a0 This time we’ll get a tame, inside cat.”<\/p>\n

We saw a newspaper ad for Persian kittens, so we drove through the hills to the outskirts of Jerusalem and met Ruth, a woman with messy, dark hair, a gruff smoker’s voice, and fourteen cats.\u00a0 Had we known anything about Persian cats at the time, we’d have known that simply having long hair does not mean Persian.\u00a0 Or maybe we knew it then and didn’t really care.\u00a0 In Ruth’s basement apartment we saw kittens – a pile of black, long-haired kittens. I was in love, with all of them.\u00a0 Ruth saw that I was an easy target.\u00a0 She started to bargain.\u00a0 Using an unlit cigarette as a pointer she gestured at one of the kittens.\u00a0 “This one is very good,” she said.\u00a0 “I can give you this one for a special price.”\u00a0 We weren’t paying attention to Ruth because one of the kittens had come right over to us and snuggled into Mike’s lap.\u00a0 When he picked her up she pushed her face into his armpit, clearly a sign she was meant to be ours.\u00a0 Mike paid Ruth one hundred dollars, and we were the proud owners of a long-haired street cat.\u00a0 I named her Sabina.\u00a0 As days passed and we saw more and more clearly that Sabina had none of the facial features of a Persian cat, we had deal with the fact that we’d paid good money for cat just like any cat I could have plucked off the trash can at the corner.\u00a0 \u00a0Rather than allowing ourselves to feel duped, we decided to give Sabina a breed of her own.\u00a0 “She’s Peloponesian,” we said.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>All was good with our almost pretty Peloponesian cat, except that she seemed lonely.\u00a0 Or maybe I was. (Is one cat ever enough?).\u00a0 So I called Ruth.\u00a0 “Do you have any more Persian kittens?” I asked.<\/p>\n

“I don’t have any now, but I can get you one,” Ruth said.\u00a0 “Except…”<\/p>\n

“Except what?”<\/p>\n

“You have to come with me to get the kitten from Nancy and you have to pretend you’re just helping me.\u00a0 You can’t say it’s for you.”<\/p>\n

I foresaw an adventure with crazy cat ladies and though I probably should have steered clear, I jumped right in.\u00a0 “When are we going?”<\/p>\n

The next night Ruth and I met outside Nancy’s apartment.\u00a0 Ruth was pacing.\u00a0 “Remember to pretend you’re just helping me choose a kitten.\u00a0 Don’t say it’s for you.”<\/p>\n

“I would never,” I said.\u00a0 And after that, I said no more because from the minute Ruth let herself into Nancy’s apartment I had to hold my breath.<\/p>\n

I could have played hopscotch in the litter boxes on the floor of Nancy’s tiny apartment.\u00a0 There were no open windows.\u00a0 Nancy, who was obese, lay with her feet up in a Lazy-boy style recliner.\u00a0 She watched TV and never rose from the chair.\u00a0 I looked at the cats swirling around and felt sorry for them.\u00a0 I tried not to gag.<\/p>\n

Ruth gave me a little shove.\u00a0 “Look under the couch,” she said.<\/p>\n

I gagged, got down on my hands and knees, and peered into the dark beneath the couch.\u00a0 I saw five pairs of kitten eyes shining at me.<\/p>\n

“Pull them out,” Nancy said, still staring at the TV.\u00a0 Ruth shoved me again.\u00a0 “Go on,” she said.<\/p>\n

I gently pulled out the tiny, fluffy gray kittens.\u00a0 They mewed as I lifted their tails, looking for a female.\u00a0 I found one, and she was delicate and beautiful.\u00a0 “You should take this one, Ruth,” I said.\u00a0 “She’s perfect for you.”<\/p>\n

“Very nice,” Ruth said.\u00a0 She took the kitten from my hands and headed for the door without saying good-bye.\u00a0 Ruth walked me to my car where Mike was waiting.\u00a0 As soon as she saw Mike, she began to bargain again.\u00a0 “Look how special this one is,” Ruth said.\u00a0 “For this one you must give me two hundred dollars.”<\/p>\n

“We have to,” I said to Mike.\u00a0 “This kitten will make Sabina so happy.”<\/p>\n

I was wrong.\u00a0 As we walked into our apartment with the new kitten, Zoe, Sabina hissed.\u00a0 She growled and swatted if Zoe came anywhere close.\u00a0 “You’re a witch,” I’d say to Sabina.\u00a0 “How can you do that to a tiny kitten?”\u00a0 Tiny Zoe was beginning to hiss in return.<\/p>\n

The situation was violent, and neither kitten could be reasoned with.\u00a0 The dog tried to referee, but even he was intimated by the hissing and screeching.\u00a0 I didn’t know what to do so I turned to a manual on caring for cats.\u00a0 For such a situation, the manual recommended rubbing sardine oil on the cats.\u00a0 This would encourage them to lick one another, and through the act of “social grooming” they would form a bond, make peace.\u00a0 It sounded like solid advice.\u00a0 I told Mike about it and we decided to try.\u00a0 We bought several tins of sardines, poured the oil into a bowl, dipped our fingers into it and then rubbed it, generously, all over our kittens, as if we were shampooing them.\u00a0 If we’d had any foresight we’d have thought it might not be a good idea to have kittens covered in sardine oil in our apartment.\u00a0 But we only realized that after they began rolling themselves on the carpet, jumping on the sofa, and leaping into our bed.<\/p>\n

“We have to wash them,” Mike said.\u00a0 “Right now!”\u00a0 He pulled Sabina off of our blanket.\u00a0 Her fur looked like we’d spiked it with gel.<\/p>\n

“We can’t,” I said.\u00a0 “First the cats have to groom each other.”<\/p>\n

We waited several hours for Sabina and Zoe to approach one another.\u00a0 They never did, and why would they?\u00a0 Each one had plenty of sardine oil to lick off herself.<\/p>\n

With time, the cats learned to love each other without the help of any fish.\u00a0 And all these years later, sardines are lovingly back in our lives, or at least in Mike’s.\u00a0 He eats them all of the time as part of his Paleo diet, and I complain about the smell, a smell I find so foul I tell him, \u00a0“A marriage weaker than ours couldn’t survive this.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It turns out, sardines are good for survival.\u00a0 You probably don’t need to bolus for them, and they are one of the healthiest foods around: high in iron, protein, calcium, omega 3, and a one of the few good food sources of vitamin D.\u00a0 Sardines are also very inexpensive.\u00a0 You can keep tinned sardines in your pantry and always have them on hand for those moments when you need a quick meal that won’t make your blood sugar soar. Sardines make for good conversation, too.\u00a0 Almost everyone has a sardine story.\u00a0 A friend recently told me about swimming with sardines in Sardinia.\u00a0 My favorite sardine story is my father’s.\u00a0 During dinner at a restaurant in Buenos Aires he sat with a group of Argentinians who had what seemed to be an entire cow on the table- undercooked meat and plenty of bones.\u00a0 Since he keeps kosher, my father had asked to receive something else for dinner.\u00a0 The only thing the waiter had to offer was a tin of sardines.\u00a0 My father gladly accepted it.\u00a0 The woman sitting beside him, who had a large, rare steak on her plate, was less appreciative of the sardines.\u00a0 “Please,” she said.\u00a0 “Move those things.\u00a0 I can’t stand to see what you’re eating.”<\/p>\n

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We poured sardine oil into a bowl, dipped our fingers into it and then rubbed it, generously, all over our kittens, as if we were shampooing them…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":41463,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1449],"tags":[1582],"yoast_head":"\nMake Peace With Sardines<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Until Mike began the Paleolithic Diet, to help manage his diabetes, sardines were not one of our household foods. 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