Ding! Ding! Your order's up!

I would like to preface this post by saying that Mr. Jelly Belly is the world’s greatest and most supportive husband. However, that being said, he does tend to be my dietary cross to bear.

You see, Mr. Jelly Belly is a finicky eater. And “finicky” may be too mild of a term for the type of eater he is. He eats exactly two vegetables: peas and corn. But not together – perish the thought. He likes peas with specific meats and corn with specific meats. Heaven forbid I should try to serve pork with corn. Pork is a “pea” meat. He tells me I can easily remember this by putting the “p’s” together. Pork-peas. Get it? He’s so helpful.

He has an allergy to, supposedly, all things from the sea, although I seriously doubt he would allow fish to taint his plate even if there weren’t an allergy issue to blame.

He doesn’t like soup, he hates multi-grain breads (white bread only, please; wheat “tastes funny”) and there is not one single fruit that he will eat. Unless you count applesauce.

He turns up his nose at the suggestion of trying new foods. He would eat a salad, but only if it consists solely of iceberg lettuce drowned in French dressing. Period. He hates the idea of replacing ground beef with turkey and thinks anything labeled “organic” is suspect.

All of this tends to make cooking for the two of us a bit of a challenge.

For a long time while I was changing my eating habits, I made two separate dinners every night. For example, fish, couscous and stir-fried vegetables for me; steak, fried potatoes and corn for him – and do you have any of that Italian bread handy?

This worked for quite a while because I was so determined to lose weight and to eat better that I was happy to make myself something else so that I didn’t fall into my previous bad overeating habits.

Eventually this got old and I stopped making something different for myself. And what do you suppose happened?

A gold star for you if you guess that I started falling back into the old eating habits. Because I’m lazy and it was less work. And when you fall back into old eating habits, what happens? That’s right, you gain weight. And what happens when Mrs. Jelly Belly starts gaining back all that hard lost weight? She develops a really bad attitude, that’s what happens.

So it is with a clogged and heavy heart that I announce the grand re-opening of Mrs. Jelly Belly’s short order diner. I know I can’t continue to eat the way I have been eating so I’m officially flipping over the “Open” sign.

PS: Yes, yes…I suppose I could get hard-nosed about it and tell him to make his own damned dinner every night, but I wouldn’t want to do that to the poor can’t-boil-water guy. Besides, when we got married, we kind of had an understanding of who was going to do what and I happily took on the cooking responsibilities. Of course, I also took on the laundry responsibilities and I haven’t washed towels or underwear in years.