October 22, 2006
David and I have been following a rather stringent "diet" lately, much to the chagrin of my family, by giving up sugar. It's not really a diet, more a life-style change, which makes it worse, I think, for most people when they hear about it. We've already more or less successfully given up hydrogenated fat (that's tough; we have to read labels on everything now), I'm a vegetarian when we're not traveling, we've cut out eggs and many dairy products and generally, everything has gone really well. But once we got back to Pittsburgh after this summer, we decided we needed to give up sugar, too. Sugar really messes up your system and we've (weirdly) turned all sorts of healthy in the last few years. So, other than the debauched weekend of Uncle Alan and Ellen's wedding (how could we not eat a piece of the cake?), we haven't had sugar this semester. Until tonight.
Craving pizza (clearly we haven't given up cheese), we went to Joe Mama's to eat. They have pretty good Italian-American food, and it's a nice place to eat that manages to balance it's mostly undergrad crowd with a grown-up feel. We had a stuffed portobello mushroom for an appetizer and then split a roma, mozzarella and basil pizza. But then, I heard the waitress talking about their tiramisu with a customer and I decided I had to have some. Fortunately, David has this great argument about moderation-in-all-things, so I got to use that to convince him that after 6 or 7 weeks of going without sugar, once wouldn't hurt us.
Of course we promptly felt like we'd consumed an entire 5 pound bag of sugar and were left feeling vaguely ill. We had to stop on the walk home because we each had a stitch in our sides and I'm now having to employ the backspace key with annoying regularity because my fingers are too jittery to hit the right keys.
It'll be a long time before we have another tiramisu. Unless we go back to Italy, of course.
