Once we reconvened at their house, I wandered into the kitchen to explore the raw zone she's created. I was being my usual forward self and smelling tubs of stuff and being perhaps more disparaging than I ought. Treecup offered up "cheese" on a "cracker." Sly says that her food has entirely too many quotes. The "cheese" was made of cashews and was a rough approximation of cheese. Like, if we were in the cheese ballpark and cheddar was playing first base, this was in an obstructed view seat in the upper upper deck. Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd, buy me some (raw) peanuts and cracker flax...
Anyway, if the cheese was in the cheese bleachers, the "cracker" was maybe standing on the street waiting outside cracker stadium to catch a long ball hit by a saltine. When Teresa asked how the seeds could be made to form a "cracker" Treecup informed us that, when soaked, flax seeds exude a semi gelatinous substance and then can be made into cracker shapes. Handy. (See, there I go again being more disparaging than I ought. Still, I have anti-flax seed feelings just at the moment).
We departed soon after our raw experience. (I should note that I demurred for us when Treecup offered up a viewing of her new raw dvd). She claims it very inspirational and I think we may need to watch it next time.
Anyway, I kept pulling flax seeds out from my teeth with my tongue. One of them got lodged in my windpipe just as I was steering the FJ onto the 10. (Non-SoCal note: Socalies use the definate article when referring to freeways. I've lived here long enough that I do it too. "The 10" = "Interstate 10" which stretches from Santa Monica to Jacksonville, Florida. It's 2460 miles long, which makes it longer by 270 miles or so than my high school distance. I can code-switch well enough that when I go to Atlanta I switch back to "I-75"). So, there I was getting on the freeway and needing to merge onto "the 57" (aka California 57, which runs from Glendora to the Orange Crush for a distance of almost 24 miles) and I'm choking on this flax seed. Coughing with watering eyes choking. It persists all the way up the 57 until I merged onto "the 210" (aka California 210/I-210 which runs from San Fernando to Redlands for a distance of 86 miles, it swiches from I-210 to CA-210 at the 57). Choking and coughing so hard, I'm hoping not to vomit choking.
Honey was very supportive during my coughing episode. She offered my some tepid lemonade and offered to drive. She also refrained from saying disparaging things about my Garmin nüvi
, which was telling me to do things vis à vis the freeways. Teresa vacillates between thinking the Nüvi is rude and thinking it might lose the will to live. She doesn't like that it interrupts her (which it does) or that I defy it (which I thoroughly enjoy doing ). I agree wholeheartedly with my co-worker who says that all Nüvis (she has one, too) are "judgemental" when they say "recalculating" after you've defied their direction.As I merged onto the 210, I finally stopped coughing. I noticed at that very moment a Dodge station wagon (of the modern magnum/charger variety) that had a brown body and bright orange expensive looking rims. It also had sepia tinted pictures painted across its sides. Of Jesus. Both sides. Sepia Jesus on a Chrysler product.
WHY I stopped coughing is up to debate. Some possibilities:
Chance?
The 210?
The biological dislodging of the flax seed from my windpipe?
The shock of the sight of the car?
Divine intervention?
Very hard to say. Maybe if I had watched the raw dvd I'd know better.
Cracker flax, know thine enemy.
2 comments:
Sorry for the attack! I should have warned you that flax seeds can be, um, persistent.
I just nominated you for an award (http://rawpomona.blogspot.com/2009/02/kreativ-blogger-award.html) - Feel free to participate or not, I just wanted you to know you deserve it! :)
I've been known to search cracker aisles of grocery stores for the seediest-looking crackers—meaning, of course, that I seek a high seed-to-cracker ratio in my snack product, not that I seek low-class or even suspected criminal character in my crackers. This was before I knew that one could create "crackers" entirely from seeds! So in the short term, I looked forward to this new vista in crackerdom with far more enthusiasm than raw-suspicious Sporks. But having now tasted the flax "cracker," I'm in favor of wheat-based binding agents—and also baking them.
The "cheese" spread reminded me of something that tasted like food, but not food of a particularly cheesy nature—and by cheesy I don't mean "tacky," but "tasting reminiscent of cheese or cheesy products."
Sporks was in grave danger of flax asphyxiation.
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