LEONARD GRAY

Gourmet that I am, I’m feeling guilty

Food is one of the mainstays of life in the River Parishes, and anyone who knows me knows I have a life-long love affair with food. Curiously enough, I was always under-sized as a child, all the way through high school. When I was a manager with the Hahnville High football team, the pre-game meals often included baked potatoes. Once the team discovered I enjoyed eating the skin from the baked potatoes (I knew they were cleaned and were packed with vitamins), they would pass them over to me. I had this reputation for being able to eat a phenomenal volume of food and apparently never gain an ounce. This led, naturally enough, to incredibly poor eating habits. I could, and did, eat anything I could arm-wrestle down my throat. Of course, I was picky about certain foods. Spinach, cooked cabbage and collard greens, especially, never passed my lips. In college, my eating (and drinking) habits only blossomed and I struggled to gain weight, ballooning from my high school graduate weight of 115 pounds to the amazing 140 pounds after five years of gastronomically-enhanced chowing down. Then two things happened which forever changed me – and my body frame. One – I took a yoga class in my last year of college. I was one guy in a class filled with gorgeous young ladies. They were trying to lose weight (needlessly, I thought). I was trying to gain weight. They were chained to a prescribed diet plan. I was told to drink more beer. It worked. By the time I got married a little more than two years later, I had reached 160 pounds. Two – I got married to a lovely lady who also happens to enjoy gourmet cooking. Susan, I feel, is genuinely talented this way and her lasagna dinners, chicken gumbo and Indian dishes cannot be beat. Consequently, my weight went up, and up, and up to where I’m hovering around 220 pounds, puffing at a fitness center, trying to bring it back down below 200 pounds. Long-time readers will be aware of my battle of the midriff bulge. It hasn’t worked, folks. Hardly a smidge. And it’s unfortunate in this respect that I live in southeastern Louisiana. Drive around and you’ll see restaurants of every conceivable variety. And Susan and I have tried them all. Last weekend, after I went alone to see “Hannibal,” Susan and I met friends at a sushi place. Yes, even after watching Sir Anthony Hopkins sautee some FBI brains, I was able to cheerfully chow down an eel. Susan was successful over the years to get me to eat and enjoy cooked cabbage and spinach and they now among my favorite foods. As a young child, I practically lived exclusively on Cocoa Krispies and french fries. Now, I’m paying the consequences of my cosmopolitan culinary tastes. Sometimes, I think I was better off with the potato skins.At least I was much more skinny. LEONARD GRAY is assistant managing editor for L’Observateur.