FREAK SHOW STRAWBERRY FRUIT SALAD

I'm on a health-food kick.  It started a while ago, but I kick it into high gear when I get on the scale at the doctor's office and the number basically causes me to crap myself.  (Not literally -- if that actually happened, I'd weigh less.)

So, in addition to the ridiculous amounts of greens and salads that I have been eating (enough to make my entire digestive tract go into processed foods and chocolate withdrawal along with serious health shock), I am adding fresh fruits in again.  Usually I freeze the fresh fruits and make smoothies with juice, but now I figure I better mainline as many fruits and vegetables as possible.

I may not lose any weight, but I'll be a damn healthy, unprocessed, unchocolatey chunky person.

I  spend three hours (yes, THREE HOURS) prepping my salads and fruits for the next few days, cutting, mixing, storing, and finding room on the fridge for it all.  I realize too late that I forgot to get the pineapple and the watermelon, but I have enough fruit in my fruit salad to feed the entire block should we suddenly run out of food.  No matter, I chop and slice and dice until my heart's content: spinach, lettuce, peppers, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, then grapes, cherries, blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries.

The fruit is amazingly healthy for this time of year.  A lot of times this early in the season, the stores sell the not-so-ripe strawberries that have been sprayed with food coloring (don't think we don't notice this shit).  This time, though, the strawberries are practically farm-worthy.  This makes me very happy.  Making me even happier is the fact that these wonderful strawberries are extra-large.  Not huge, but damn close.  And they are sweet, just like the ones at the pick-your-own places.

Making me the happiest, though, is the freak strawberry.  It's like Rosie Greer and Ray Milland in The Thing With Two Heads.  It's the Frankenstein of berries.  It's the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey freak show of strawberries.  It's Todd Browning's freakiest of Freaks in the strawberry world.

It is the best freakiest strawberry I've seen in a long time.  I truly hate to cut it up.

Alas, that is what strawberries are for, my friends, and so, with serrated knife in hand, I hack that motherfreaking strawberry like I'm Norman Bates.  Tomorrow, when I eat my fruit salad with yogurt, I'll think about the carnage and the freak I hacked up, and I'll smile all the way because I know that the strawberries in my fruit salad are the closest I can get at this point of the season to taking them right off the vine myself.

Okay, so my body is getting healthier.  I never made any such disclaimer about the health of my mind; that, my little pretties, is still circling the Outer Limits, or perhaps the Twilight Zone, where my chunky little body can exist in another dimension ... the dimension of processed food and chocolate.