“If you could only have one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

The other night, I decided it’d be fun to play a little game.

I’m sure you’ve played similar games.  The difference here is that when YOU played them, you were probably twelve years old.  Or maybe you used these types of getting-to-know-you questions when you were first dating the person you eventually ended up life-partnering with.

I, however, play these games with the hubs whenever they pop into my head, which is usually at 10:15 at night, when the lights have been shut off, the wind machine is purring, and he’s four millimeters away from a sound snore.  This is, coincidentally, precisely the time my brain kicks on and starts rattling off all the anxieties of the day, magnifying them from paper cuts into amputations, and peppering them with some random “never gonna happen” crap that, in the light of day, barely even makes SENSE to worry about.

It goes like this.  (You know this one.  Hum along and join me when I get to the chorus.)

About a half hour before you want to go to bed, you start your “good sleep hygiene” routine.  Phone off.  Melatonin.  Lavender.  After a few minutes, you start to get a bit sleepy, so you go through your nightly rituals:  Face, teeth.  Floss, cream, rinse.  Contacts.  Tweezers.  Cozy jammies.

You crawl into your bed and settle onto the memory-foam-topped mattress, preheated by your electric blanket.  Ahh.

Lights off.

And suddenly, your brain comes to LIFE, translating “siesta” into “FIESTA!!” and smashing the serenity piñata wide open, spilling mental trinkets and brightly-colored snippets of images everywhere:

Work?  Will be impossible tomorrow.  Plane overhead?  Crashing into your roof.  Kid got the sniffles?  It’s meningitis.  And you have it too.  Hubs a bit distant?  International love affair.  (OK, too soon.)  And let’s throw in there the fear of random shootings, traffic deaths, and aneurysms.  ALL HAPPENING TOMORROW YO.  Or maybe tonight, while you sleep.  HAHAHA AS IF SLEEP IS GOING TO HAPPEN.

It’s like my mind is the opposite of solar-powered.  I’m working on powering down, and then BOOM!  Activity kersplosion all over my pillow.  Lights (out), camera, ACTION, cue the panic parade with the giant cartoonish balloons barely tethered to earth.

So, in desperate need of a mental detour, I drop deep, thought-provoking questions like these on the hubs JUST as he’s floating off the cliff of consciousness.

“If you could only have one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

Now, I never really considered this to be a valid life-compatibility screening tool.  I really just wanted a distraction from the maniacal hyperstimulation of my mind’s runaway imagination.

But his answer surprised me. (Well, the second answer.  The first answer sounded more like “mmmzzzkkbk…rrrrruh…what, hon?”  Bless his heart.  He really takes my special brand of quirky in stride.  Whereas if he tries to wake ME up, he loses a finger.)

“Hmm.  Well, it would have to be something that offers a nutritional variety.  So it’d have to have some veggies in it, some protein.  Obviously, it’d need to have a lot of ingredients so I don’t get bored.  Something like an egg bake.”

An egg bake?  AN EGG BAKE?!?!

To be clear, I have nothing against egg bakes.  In fact, I often make this one:

(If you cut the recipe in half, it bakes very nicely in a pie plate.  Plus it’s super versatile; you can use any veggies you get in your crop share.  Kale, shredded carrots, onion.  I often skip the meat, use whatever cheese is fifteen seconds from molding in the fridge, and add garlic and splash hot sauce over it when I eat it.  It’s delish.)

But “egg bake” is sooooo NOT the answer to this question.    What you’re supposed to do here is name your absolutely favorite food ever, the one you love so much that you want to marry it and eat its babies too.

Clearly, HE WAS PLAYING THE GAME ALL WRONG.  (I guess he wasn’t invited to many preteen slumber parties as a child.)  By applying logic and rational thought to this question, he TOTALLY messed up the answer.  And after I got done laughing at him, I told him so – and shared a MUCH more appropriate response:

“See, for ME, the answer would have to be either pizza, or chocolate.  Although a world without chocolate would be tragic and largely pointless, I know I can ALWAYS eat pizza.  Even when I don’t feel well.  But…WAIT!  What I could TOTALLY do?  I could invent a NEW pizza that is normal pizza in the middle, but the crust has Hershey kisses BAKED INTO IT, so I would have, like, DESSERT after EVERY SLICE.  Now THAT I could live off of for forever and ever.”

<smugly pausing so you can admire my amazing genius here>

After he rolled over and went to sleep, though, I had some time to think about this.  (All night, actually.  YAY ANXIETY.)   And because I had all night to ponder either homeless cats or egg bake, I started to see some interesting parallels between how we approach this type of question and how we attempt to navigate relationships.

When we start dating, we swoon over a really good thin-crust pizza.  We do naughty things with chocolate bars, and open our minds to the possibility of inviting peanut butter to the party.  (Not mint though.  That’s just disturbing.)  Our senses are heightened, we’re over-stimulated, and we stuff ourselves with emotion, drama, and longing.  When presented with a hot, fresh, gooey pizza, logic and rational thought about a balanced diet fly out the window on a cloud of basil, garlic, and oregano.   Thougths of physical fitness can EASILY be buried under piles of rich hot fudge and fluffy whipped cream.

That’s all tomorrow.  That’s later.  I want this NOW.

But when we think about what we’re looking for in a life partner…doesn’t it look a little more like an egg bake?  Stable.  Balanced.  Sustaining.  Nourishing.

It certainly almost never resembles junk food; it’s not a thing that brings only momentary pleasure followed by disappointment and discomfort that leaves you simultaneously sort of disgusted with yourself, yet craving more.

I suppose this is the difference between lust and love.

And I’d also guess that this is the root of demise for many relationships.  You date the pizza, you marry the pizza, you try to build a life with pizza, only to find that you can’t realistically LIVE on pizza.  So you try to turn him into chocolate-crust pizza.  But pizza was never SUPPOSED to be dessert.  It was a whole food on its own; when you tried to change it, it SOUNDED like a great idea, but the chocolate melted into the red sauce and mixed with the pepperoni grease, making you not only realize that this was a terrible idea, but also turning you off from something you used to love.

Because once you eat pizza with chocolate chips, odds are you’re going to be off pizza for a bit.

It’s not a terribly romantic thought to know you’re someone’s egg bake.   I mean – snore.  Wouldn’t you rather be someone’s Seven Layer Chocolate Sin cake?  That’s passionate, romantic – splurgeworthy.

But, now that I think about it, it’s really better to build our lives around a good, solid, reliable egg bake.  Good for us.  Makes us better and stronger.  Sustains us.  Feeds our souls.

Asking someone to be your egg bake might sound kind of droll.  And it could be, but only if you let it.

The beauty of the egg bake is that you have a solid base, and you can mix up the recipe to match your mood and your need.  When life hands you carrots, shred ’em and toss ’em in.  Too much kale?  Wilt it and see what happens.  Radishes?  Well, we can try it once.  Watching your cholesterol?  Reduce the cheese.  Need iron?  Spinach is the green leafy of the day.

And it certainly can’t hurt to add a dash of hot sauce now and then.

Just don’t try to pour caramel sauce over it.