Fondue and Fon-don’t

DOB is wasting away, if you can consider short and somewhat less fat wasting away. She says she has no appetite and no longer cooks. Her blood sugar was again in the range of 68, about half of what her doc says is a good place for her. So, instead of making and serving her more soup – the only kind she wants is mush, but I’m tired of blended butternut squash and blended leek and potato soup. Instead of more soup, I made fondue.

DOB: What’s this? (holding up a bite-sized piece of broccoli)

TCG: Broccoli. You put it on your fondue fork and dip it in the cheese fondue, and eat it.

DOB: (Tasting some and finding her single tooth (#23) is not up to the chewable challenge, sucking all the cheese off of it, daintily fishing it out of her gob and handing it to TCG) Here, I don’t like broccoli.

TCG: (Taking the de-cheesed broccoli.) Ok

UCC: Careful. She’s already tried and rejected that piece.

TCG: Maybe the dog will eat it. (He re-forks it and re-dips it in the fondue. The dog too, sucks all the second coat of cheese carefully off the broccoli and then rejects it) Then again, maybe not.

WISIMH: Gaaak! Is there no line of manners and civilized eating you people will not blithely cross?

UCC: (I then watched in a sort of heart-stopping horror as DOB speared two pieces of bread, dunked and swirled in fondue pot, only to remove and eat one piece. Looking inside the pot) Yup: there’s a few orphan bread and veggies in here.

TCG obligingly rescues the lost veggies and bread from the now-steaming fondue pot with his own fondue fork.

DOB: What’s this?

TCG: A piece of sausage, like a slim jim, only bite-sized. You may have trouble chewing it.

WISIMH: And I may have trouble watching you spear and dunk it in the fondue pot, gum it, drool, fish it out of your mouth, re-dunk it, and feed it to your dog. On second thought, that’s probably better than watching you try to get TCG to eat it after you have failed in your attempt to do so. Any food cooked “al dente” in this house is doomed. What was I thinking serving raw veggies? She can’t even chew a mushroom. On the bright side, perhaps this is the foolproof diet I’m looking for. I have somehow lost my appetite.

DOB: What’s this?

TCG: It’s broccoli, you stick it on your fork and…

WISIMH: I must not listen to this blather. Their unique table manners put the "eck" in eclectic, and their eloquent and informed dinner conversation (sic) inspires in me the most inarticulate musings about what can be done with a piece of raw broccoli. I meditate about whether there might be some action I could take that could awaken in them the same unblinking, train-wreck-watching horror I experience sharing fondue with them and the smelly dog. What could inspire in them the equivalent disgust-provoking flights of fancy about my own table manners? Let’s see. How about if I took my own fondue fork, rotated it gently it in my ear to collect earwax, then speared that hapless, pre-chewed piece of broccoli and dunked it in the fondue pot. As Homer Simpson would say, “Earwax and gouda fondue, mmmmm.”