Incapacitated, laid out, poisoned…by macaroni & cheese (?!)

Of all the injustices in the world, surely food poisoning has to be among the greatest. Losing the ability to control your body and being reduced to involuntarily ejecting projectiles (from both ends) is definitely a punishment devised by someone wicked. To make things worse, sometimes you don’t even know which end it’s going to come out of until you get to the toilet. And to make things even worse than that, your toddler gets it the same time that you do, vomiting 7 times in one night. And THAT is how my weekend went, thank you very much. This was the culprit:

Yup, good old Whole Foods’ 365-branded “Elbows & Creamy Cheddar Sauce.” This is normally a staple of my family – I think I’ve written before that it is one of the few things that I even know how to make, given my absurd lack of culinary skills. So I’ve made it, what, 10 times? And never had a problem with it. And Thursday night, I made it again (plus some extra for the Little Apple to take to lunch at day care the next day), and before we knew it, my daughter and I had boarded the puke train. Thank God my husband did not partake, or there would have been no one to clean up after us.

I think this is a sign. It’s a sign that I need to broaden my kitchen horizons and learn to cook healthily from whole foods. It’s a sign that I need to limit eating out of a box so much, just like a real holistic Mama would do. I keep making the excuses that a) I’m so busy from working full-time; b) I suck at cooking; and c) she loves mac ‘n’ cheese, when it’s really d) I’m just lazy. I always say that I’ll make a change and so something to improve my life, and then I procrastinate and procrastinate, until the Universe comes along and gives me a sign – what I call a “brick.” A “brick” is usually painful, and is the Universe’s way of forcing me to make the change. I have a whole quarry full of these metaphysical bricks, by the way. I am that stubborn.

Well, the food poisoning brick was a doozy. I won’t soon forget how THAT felt. So, here is what I am going to do. First, I’m going to recover – I am still so weak that today I could barely down half a salad. Second, I’ve placed an order for the following books and I am going to start in on them as soon as they arrive:

1. Vegan Lunch Box: 130 Amazing, Animal-Free Lunches Kids & Grown-Ups Will Love! by Jennifer McCann
2. Vegetarian Family Cookbook by Nava Atlas
3. Better Than Peanut Butter & Jelly: Quick Vegetarian Meals Your Kids Will Love! by Marty Mattare and Wendy Muldawer

No more excuses. This is IT. The real deal. I am glad I have a blog, because I can hold myself to this new course…and if I don’t, hopefully my readers will kick my a–. So stay tuned and watch out for posts about me trying out these recipes on my husband and toddler. And please keep your fingers crossed for me – my little one is a finicky eater right now, so she’ll give me some very honest feedback, very quickly, if she doesn’t like it.

P.S. – I emailed Whole Foods about the food poisoning today, gave them the UPC code and batch number, too.