Here's me and my guinea pig, Pavel:



Pavel and I, it turns out, have a lot in common. We both have wild, wind-in-the-hair coiffures, we're both kinda . . . well, round, and we eat a very similar diet these days. Pavel eats a ton of vegetables and some timothy grass. I am trying to eat a ton of vegetables (although I have no taste for timothy grass).

Since I've been back from China, I've been trying to continue to eat the way I did there - I felt really, really good, and I lost, like, ten pounds in the month I was gone. To be honest, I didn't think it was physically possible for me to lose weight like that without starving myself; I had pretty much decided that my metabolism had ossified as I aged or something. The weight loss was nice, but even better, I just felt good - I could eat as much as I wanted and I never got that overfull, sick feeling. And I never ate a meal and then thought I needed a nap to recover from it. When we first got to China, actually, I was disappointed by the food. Everyone told me I would love it, but I didn't love it at first. It took a while, but eventually it grew on me.

I think about 70-80% of our calories came from vegetables. A typical dinner would consist of three or four veggie dishes, and maybe one dish with meat. The vegetables were mostly stir-fried, which really doesn't get at the sense of it. I think "flash fried" is more descriptive. The idea is, you fry the vegetable in trace amounts of oil, and then when it begins to release its flavor (when you can smell it, essentially), it's done. Then you throw in a small amount of some sauce (just enough to add a layer of flavor over the original veggie flavor) or some seasoning, take it all off the flame, and voila. (Then you wipe out the wok, and repeat with some other vegetables.) I've gotten the hang of preparing most things this way - spinach and cabbage are my big winners.

Still, it's amazing how hard this diet is to sustain. The thing is, in China, they have almost as many vegetables as they have people. I'm sure I don't even have a clue about what vegetables I ate, but I know there were several different kinds of cabbage, leafy things that looked like houseplants, lotus roots prepared a gazillion different ways, and all of it fresh, fresh, fresh. (If things are only cooked until they become aromatic, they better be fresh - there's nothing to hide under.) By comparison, our produce sections look very sparse. In mid-September you would think the shelves would be bursting with the summer harvest, but already we're down to spinach, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and some peppers . . . the same things we'll get all winter. And some things just don't appear in the same form. For instance, in China cucumbers are served cooked and unpeeled, but when I buy them here they're coated in wax.

There's always the Asian market, which is a great place. The challenge there, of course, is that there are a bunch of veggies I don't recognize. (And I can't read the labels that hang above the bins, because they're written in Chinese characters. It's a weirdly familiar sensation!) But still - the place shows great promise and the variety of vegetables suggests to me that many of them can actually be grown in this climate; I can't believe they all come from overseas, or even from California or other sunny, warm places here. (I have the sneaking suspicion that if the health department ever peered too deeply into that place, they would try to regulate it. I'm sure not gonna say anything . . . and I think that sentiment is widely shared.)

And beyond that, there's the question of volume. Last night for my dinner, I made a quarter head of cabbage just for me - and I ate every last bite (along with a hefty portion of asparagus, too). I swear, I feel like a were-rabbit (remember Wallace and Gromit?); mealtimes come, and I Must Feed. It's just hard to get enough to stop me from being hungry. (It was so-ooo much easier to fill up on pasta, cheese, and prepared foods!)

So I don't know if I'll be able to keep this up indefinitely, but in the meantime, I really do feel a lot better. And I'm developing lots of tasty vegetable recipes, if anyone's interested . . .

Now I'd better go find something to eat . . . It's been a few hours since my last cauliflower fix . . .