Breakfast with Amber

July 2023: The Never-Ending Hunger

I know what you're thinking. "Daphne, what does the title mean? Was it a never-ending hunger for life? Adventure? New experiences? After all, you have a job and an apartment now. This is the start of your adult life." No. It's completely literal. There was a two-week period of my life where I felt hungry all the time.

We begin on July 7, move-in day. We got up early in the morning to load the U-Haul and begin the drive to San Antonio. Mom would drive in her van while Dad and I would ride in the truck, and in a rare move, we actually made it out ahead of schedule. I have to say riding in a moving van is way different than I thought it would be. I had to step really high to get in, and there was enough room between me and Dad to fit my backpack. There was also no XM radio, so we'd listen to FM radio and flip between stations whenever a commercial break or a song we didn't like came on, and there was one point in the middle of nowhere where most of the listening options were just static. Sometimes, we couldn't even hear the music because we were in the world's loudest moving van in the middle of a torrential downpour, and there was a gap in the roof of this particular van that let the rain into the cab and onto my shirt.

We eventually made it out of the room and to Avalon Apartments at 1:30. We hired a couple of movers to move all my furniture into the apartment. We spent the afternoon unpacking boxes, moving furniture into position, hanging stuff on the walls, setting the clocks on the appliances, calling Spectrum at 10 at night because my modem wouldn't connect to the internet, having to go through about a million recording trees before giving up and plugging the thing into a different coax outlet, which worked. Once we had the place set up, we had dessert at my new dining table and went to bed.

My parents spent the night on air mattresses in the living room because it's more cost-effective than staying at a hotel. We had breakfast in the room and spent the morning doing more setup stuff. Then we had lunch at a Wing Stop down the street. I had the garlic and parmesan boneless wings, which were amazing, but little did I know they'd be the last satisfying meal I'd have for a while. You see, after lunch, Mom and Dad left for home, leaving me to cook my own dinner.

The recipe was simple: a one-pan Italian chicken and rice skillet. We had already bought the ingredients in a Wal-Mart grocery order that morning. I just needed to cook 'em.

I started following the recipe: season the chicken with ¼ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon of pepper. Cook the chicken in the skillet for six to eight minutes. Remove the chicken from the skillet. Add an onion (or half an onion if you live in Texas), two teaspoons of minced garlic, half a teaspoon of salt and ¼ teaspoon of pepper and cook for three to four minutes. Add a cup of rice. Cook and stir for another minute.

The issue came when I had to add a can of crushed tomatoes. I had already learned to use a can opener, but the one we have at home has to be held horizontally, which apparently isn't normal for can openers, and the one we bought for my apartment wasn't the same as that one. I could not figure out how to hold this can opener for the life of me. It took me several minutes to get this can even remotely close to open while my rice sat in the skillet overcooking. Sometimes the can opener would stop cutting through the metal. Sometimes it would deviate from the edge. I tried using the knife I used to cut the onion to cut the lid off manually, scratching up a perfectly good paint job (because the kitchen knife set from Amazon Basics is rainbow-colored). I think I got the can halfway open before I just decided to squeeze the tomatoes out of whatever opening I had made. Since then, I have exclusively bought cans with pop tabs.

The chicken came out nice and juicy (probably because it wasn't sitting in the skillet while I wrestled with that can of tomatoes), but the rice was unusually crunchy. I thought it was because I had undercooked it, but now I can surmise what happened.

I ate my chicken and overcooked rice while watching Despicable Me on my phone because my internet plan came bundled with Spectrum TV, which we never really asked for, but okay. I continued watching after I ate dinner and sat on my couch, and I noticed I was still hungry. I initially dismissed it because I had read in some magazine years ago that it takes your body a few minutes after eating to realize that it's full. The real concern came when I ate dessert and was still hungry afterwards.