They tell me beans are good for the heart. I don’t know if that’s true, although it seems perfectly plausible, given that beans are a legume, and hence regarded as a vegetable, although there is some disagreement between botanists and nutritionists about whether or not this classification is truly accurate in the broader sense.
OK, really, you don’t care about that, and neither do I. What I started out to tell you was that I tried Popeye’s red beans and rice for the first time recently, and it was delicious. I love red beans and rice. I discovered the dish as an adult, which is odd; I love beans, I love rice, and I love spicy food, and here’s a dish that’s all three and I didn’t try it for the first time until I was nearly 40 years old.
I discovered a frozen food version from Zatarain’s. It was red beans and rice with smoked sausage. Brah, it was amazing! I loved it, so of course it was discontinued. So I started buying the dry foods version, adding my own smoked sausage, and it’s been a weekly dish ever since. One upside to my weight loss regimen: now that I’m controlling my portions better, Instead of eating the whole box at one time (which I am not proud to admit I often did), I get four meals out of it (which is still more than the box recommends; the box say sit contains 4.5 servings, but that’s just too small to really satisfy, in my opinion.)
Anyway, at Popeye’s I knew I was going to get the tenders. I always get the tenders there because the tenders are seriously banging. Since the main course is fried, I didn’t want French fries as the side. So I decided it was time to try the red beans and rice. So I know now what I’ll be ordering there from now on. And I have to tip the hat to Nitty Gritty. When I was halfway through the side she reminded me to only eat half; this is something I asked her to do in order to help me keep from overeating. She was apologetic about the reminder, but I stressed that I appreciated it. Without that reminder I would have polished off the whole meal at once and it would have amounted to more than half of my day’s calories. I’ve said it before but a lot of times it feels like I’m now paying penance for overindulging for years. But the truth is, when I stop eating after finishing a normal serving rather than eating everything just because it’s there I feel like I’ve accomplished something. Good habits can be a real difficult thing to establish, especially when the bad habits you’re trying to break hit the reward center of the brain so hard, like overeating did for me. Restraint can be one of the most difficult things to learn, but once you’ve got it it’s a great thing to have.
