November 3, 2017:
Khoriatiki.
For the duration I live happily on country salad and bread with tzatziki. There's more, of course, but these are the dishes I crave. I could live permanently on this diet week after week after week.
Nothing is more striking to me than this enormously happy evolution. Back in the day I became so repulsed by cucumber salad that for three decades the smell of cucumber left me profoundly nauseated.
I was permanently weak. I ate too little, frequently skipping meals, partly from illness, partly from lack of western alternatives to the Greek cuisine I hadn't yet come to revere. I dropped fifteen pounds and returning home felt like a newly released prisoner of war. For a month I gorged on hamburgers at the local diner, frequently in company with the very beautiful and very kind school friend I'd missed and thought of continually. We read Tom Jones to each other at mealtimes and howled with laughter.
Over time I regained the weight, stopped eating hamburgers, learned to love Greek cuisine. Broke up with a very beautiful GF, took up for a time with the school friend who'd shared meals and Fielding, left school without graduating, moved home to stop wars and make the world safe for Central American refugees, failing spectacularly to achieve either.
For me, khoriatiki will ever be permanently associated with all of this.