Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It's a Friday in Lent and I just ate meat.
I didn't mean to do it. I packed a vegetarian lunch -- a veggie quinoa dish I'd made for a food section story on Passover for Jewish vegetarians.
(Quick sidetrip to the subject of Passover and vegetarians: Seems that not only leavened bread is out, but also legumes if you're Ashkenazi. That means no tofu, no beans, no nothing it seems.
Enter quinoa. It could pass for cous cous, but it comes from a plant. It's not technically considered a grain and K-Star Kosher Certification gives it the thumbs up for Passover, in part because the stuff -- it hails from Peru -- was unknown to Old Country Jews when they set out all those holiday dos and don'ts.)
So anyway, I had to make cous cous so we'd have a picture in the paper. I figured I could eat some of it for lunch after the photo shoot. I left the food with the photographer and intended to claim my quinoa when he was done.
And then someone had to go and buy Sheila Dixon's Persian lamb coat!
We knew the other day that the mayor's lamb and mink coats were sold on eBay, but only this morning did I reach one of the buyers. And it turns out the gal who snapped up the lamb had a funny story: the buyer is a university lawyer who wants to use the jacket as a prop when she trains staff in ethics.
I'm not blaming the ex-mayor -- I've picked on her plenty -- but her illicit lamb coat led me to illicit lamb pizza.
I got busy writing the fur-coat story. The photographer got dispatched to shoot the buyer's picture. And my quinoa got locked in the photo studio.
By afternoon, with no sign of photog or quinoa, I decided to order an Iggies pizza. Looking up the number on the Web site, I saw the restaurant's Pizza of the Month: roasted peppers, roasted potatoes, lamb sausage and mozzarella. Sounded great. I phoned in the order.
Only as I walked up Calvert Street to claim La Pecora Nera pie did I remember that lamb and Lenten Fridays do not mix.
Maybe a good Catholic would have picked off the spicy little sausage rounds. Or stuck the whole thing in the fridge until Saturday.
But that little pizza cost me $10.07. I was eating it whole and hot.
Surely God wouldn't want good pizza to go to waste. (And it was good.) How about I go meat free tomorrow and we call it even?
Sun photo by Kenneth K. Lam