Making Endsmeat

I'll be finishing my BA (double major in Linguistics and English, if you forgot) in December. I'm one of those exceedingly fortunate people whose parents saved up for her education when she was wee, so she didn't have to worry about money ever, really. (Aside: That's not to say I'm irresponsible with money, I have just been very lucky with it being provided for me... Don't judge.) With my impending initiation into adulthood coming up I've been getting more and more anxious about life after university and how the hell I'm going to survive without Mummy and Daddy's generous financial support.

I intend to become certified to interpret American Sign Language (henceforth known as ASL), but like everything there is a cost to this training. That cost, according to my careful, if somewhat liberal, calculations, comes to around $13,250 with textbooks and various other accoutrements, over a four-year span (one year of which I'll likely be able to work full-time, thank god).

Why am I talking about money crap? Well, for two reasons: one, it's my blog and I can write whatever I want, so nyah. And two, it made me think of the funny (well, I think it's funny) anecdote that forms the title of this post. Given that I (and GP, if he's so inclined, which I think he is) will have to move to Vancouver for my schooling, our lives are going to be hella (ha, I'd never say that in person but it seems appropriate here) expensive. And I am wondering how I'm going to make my ends meet. I doubt GP will really have to worry because he's a lawyer and we all know lawyers are rich.

Anyway, the point is I got to thinking about the idiom "make ends meet" and how, when I was a kid, I always thought it was "make endsmeat", like you're making a kind of meat. As in "What are we having for supper?" "Endsmeat and potatoes, dear.". That kind of thing. And now I think it's funny that I thought that, but it makes total sense because people always say "makeendsmeet" so quickly that it's hard to tell where the word boundaries are. (I want to make some nerdy linguistics joke here, but I'll refrain, mostly because I can't think of anything witty enough right now.)

What I'm trying to say here is that kids don't think about money because (hopefully) they don't need to. Obviously I have to think about money more and more, the less kid-like I become, but I think remembering your kid-ness is important because it reminds you that taking time to have fun and think up imaginary things like endsmeat is just as important as taking time to plan out how to make ends meet.

A picture (or two, or three) of a very simple dinner, which consisted of grilled garlic/lemon chicken, a beautiful salad, and some yummy iced tea I made (from scratch, of course):

What's for dinner?

A delightful pesto of spring greens, parmesan, sage, pine nuts and garlic artfully plopped onto perfectly grilled and succulent local chicken (see below), accompanied by garlicky sauteed bok choy and mushrooms. Sounds good to me. You can see the end result of this delicious creation at the end of this post.
I love dinner. I also love breakfast and lunch. And I love sharing these meals with people. Since moving in with GP I've been doing most of the cooking. I don't mind this at all. Sometimes I don't feel like cooking and we don't really eat dinner, but that's only happened maybe twice. God forbid I ever have children and I don't feel like cooking dinner: Future teacher: "Suzie, what did you have for dinner last night?" Future child: "Nothing, Mummy didn't feel like it and Daddy was at the office." How utterly depressing. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Anyway, what I was going to say was that I like eating and I like eating with people and I like eating with GP because it means I can cook more food more often. I have to admit I haven't been as adventurous as I'd hoped to be once I was cooking for two instead of one, but I am a work in progress after all.

Being a vegetarian is another thing I've had to struggle with of late because of this damned P90X. The diet plan is a bit confusing because it basically says to vegetarians "You're vegetarian, you know how to do this stuff already, so just adjust the meat recipes to be vegetarian". That's a lot easier said that done when I don't feel like eating tofu and "mock" meat has sooo many chemicals and is expensive. I miss my legumes. Alas, I don't feel like I can eat them because they have too many carbs and I don't want to have to do all that tedious math to figure out how much lentils I can have. So I guess it's back to meat for the time being.

I feel pretty crappy about this decision. It's not like I'd ever eat pork or beef, but even just going back to eating chicken and fish regularly is really not what I want to do. At the same time I don't want to have to rely on SO MANY soy products and fake food to get me through. I want the best of all worlds: I don't want to have to make animals suffer so I can get high quality protein, but I also don't want to have to do the mind-numbing calculations necessary to include legumes, which I'm not really sure I can do anyway even if I did do the calculations because they're simply too high in carbs, and I don't want to have to consume soy and chemicals all day long!! So I guess I just have to go the road of least resistance: find dead animals to eat that haven't been treated badly before they died. I foresee a lot of wild salmon in my future.