Kosher Meal Fatigue

I have wanted to try a Kosher meal all summer. If you don't know what a Kosher meal is then imagine a microwaveable tv dinner without any cartoons or iconic marketing smeared across the cover. Remove any semblences of sugar or desert and your main entrees become Roast Chicken with Rice, Salisbury Steak or Filet of Sole. The meals are fully cooked in 5 minutes in a microwave, and then brought out with a sealed package of plastic utensils and a plastic wrapped napkin to our guests who are "Kosher". I decided upon the Roast Chicken and Rice- mostly because it was the gluten free option. Curiousity in the summer led me to read the ingredients. There wasn't any wheat. For the summer one of those frozen packs laid in our freezer for me till I opened one tonight. I placed it in the microwave, and read for the five minutes as our Orthodox meal quickly thawed and bubbled its way from a Frigidaire hibernation to a hot, perky meal. I instantly didn't like the Kosher. I burned my finger when taking it from the microwave. The plastic felt like the plastic that you would peal away from a morgue or an old church that no one visits anymore if morgues and churches with abandoned choirs came plastic wrapped and frozen. It was exactly that type of plastic. I used a metal fork. I forgoed the full Kosher experience by using one of our forks. Honestly, I like a metal fork; plastic ones just don't have any backbone.

And then I started to get sad. I am not sure how to say how I felt, but I think loneliness is sitting in a dining hall after work by yourself eating a microwaved Kosher meal. I wondered if maybe somehow I could reKosher the little glorified TV dinner. Rewrap it in its odd plastic wrap, and place it back in the freezer. If I was a Kosher meal I would want someone to give me a second chance and wrap me back up like that morgue that sits next to the abandoned church that no one uses. Or maybe I am plastic wrapped already. It could be that I am at a stage in my Kosher meal lifeline where I am plastic wrapped and frozen. Or maybe I am thawed out, and have been thawed out for a while. I wonder how many people look at me and stick their tiny Kosher forks at my side dishes and pick apart the entree? I think I'll ask to go back into the freezer- morgue and church wrap and all; to take the time to see it over. To watch everyone go by and slowly grow old. I think frozen or thawed we still grow old, and whiny. We grow old and whiny sitting late after work eating an antiquity of orthodox culinary law that has been reduced to a three bay piece of microwaeable plastic, and whose contents quite honestly taste a lot like the dining hall food. (I don't think any of the cooks read this, and honestly by this point they would have stopped reading)

Elysium of the roofless. Hence my happiness at last.-S.B.