With a heart full of darkness (chocolate, that is) . . .

. . . and if you think I am capable of eating strictly on the basis of survival and good health, you’re seriously deluded. Oh, wait–your impressionability is why I like you so much anyway, isn’t it!

However, I’m not utterly irredeemable. At least, not in the way of All Things Ingested (ooh, a good companion program to All Things Considered?). F’r’instance, while I found the above-pictured S’mores Brownies (simply a then-favored brownie recipe topped with marshmallow fluff and lightly oven-toasted, as I had no twig substantial enough to hold the entire 9×13 pan inverted over my campfire for full authenticity) perfectly edible and acceptable, I have since realized that I’m not as willing at my age to trade those moments of indulgent bliss for the mean-spirited monkey-wrenching that wheat seems, increasingly, to give my internal clockworks. So I have sauntered through a slew of my favorite cookery books and foodie websites and learned how to make a damn tasty brownie with almond flour rather than wheat (take that, grass meanies!). So far it’s such a fragile and airy brownie–unless smashed into fudginess with a fork, a style of eating to which I am not averse myself but others might find a bit less than perfect as tea-with-the-Queen manners go–that I will still have to tweak the recipe to discover a perfect lightly crisp outside, dense chocolaty inside brownie to meet my exacting standards. Or I’ll just pre-squash the entire pan of almond-flour brownies, if that’s what it takes.

Revise? Sure! Eschew the chew? Erm, unlikely. Never been much in the way of abstemious.

Meanwhile, back at the table, I can also lay claim to being broad-minded (and -beamed) enough to happily eat the great majority of things put in front of me. While I have tailored my cooking, and therefore my everyday eating, to better suit the tastes and needs of my partner in life and dining, I still enjoy eating stuff he’ll never touch, so there are divergences on our plates from time to time.

I gladly eat my vegetables. I like all kinds of “good-for-you” stuff. Though there may be few things that in middling-to-large quantities aren’t a bad dietary idea, there are even fewer that I won’t willingly overindulge in when my self-restraint gauge is on Low. So I’m trying over the years to get smarter and fill up that particular tank with the more permissible and sustaining pleasures of less processed and fresher and more carefully produced foods to at least divert attention from, if not lessen the lust for, those things I’d otherwise dive into in my full fressing gear. I am no ascetic and am not planning to become that one almost universally feared at table, the person whose foodly preferences go far beyond anaphylactic necessity into the territory of requiring that I be hand-fed a peeled butter lettuce leaf wrapped around a single organic and humanely free-range raised haunch of butterfly with a drop of steam-distilled chive water in a room spiritually cleansed of tomato effluvia by two shamans and a fruit bat.

Hey, I’ve even been known to eat and drink those relatively few things I really don’t like if I think it’s diplomatically appropriate or just good guest behavior. I’m not a complete jerk.

But no matter how eagerly I’ll scarf down the eggplant and brussels sprouts and gladly chomp my choppers on tasty roasted what-have-you, there will always be room for the perfect lard-crisped carnitas (available, by the way, at Tacos Guaymas on 38th and 72nd Streets in Tacoma, Washington: http://www.tacosguaymas.com/tacostacoma/menu-broadway.html) and rich fat salmon oven roasted in Jack Daniel’s, and homemade ice cream and cardamom butter cookies and yes, probably even brownies made with wheat flour. Definitely brownies made with almond flour, and I do plan to get those down to a science someday–though I’m doing just fine for now, eating the current version with a spoon.