Fat Cat by Robin Brande Read Free Book Online Page B

attached. Still achy, but not nearly as bad as yesterday.
    Stomach? Still a little queasy, but also so empty I could eat a whole boatload of bananas.
    Mood? Hmm ... hard to tell. It might take some interaction with my little brother to really test that out. Last night he got on my last nerve by asking me, "You sure I can keep your TV? You're not kidding? You swear?"
    "YES!" And then I cradled my poor head in my hands because some unthinking person had just shouted.
    I think I fell asleep around seven-thirty last night. One minute Iwas reading about the Abolitionists and the next it was morning. That combo of starvation and caffeine deprivation must do wonders for insomniacs.
    But now it was morning and it was time to test my legs. I swung them over the edge of the bed and stood. Tried to stand, I mean. My head got all squirrelly, and I had to collapse back onto the pillows or I would have pitched straight down to the floor. I lay on my back for a few minutes and waited for everything to stop feeling like a bad carnival ride.
    And that's when I knew I can't keep living like this. Either I have to give up and go back to my modern ways--Diet Coke (bless you!) and all--or I need to figure out a way to get through the next seven months without suffering every day. Otherwise there's no way I'll make it.
    The fact was I needed food. A LOT of it, and NOW. Fruit and water for breakfast just weren't going to cut it. I was truly dying.
    What would Hominin Woman have done? Saturday morning, 1.8 million years ago. She'd been scavenging all week, running with the men, maybe supervising a kid or two, but this particular morning she decided to kick back and do a little cooking.
    Was it going to be nuts and berries again? No way. They could have that any day. No, I think today she woke up starving, and she decided to make something special.
    Like maybe an early version of pancakes--without the butter and syrup, of course. Or how about some bread? They did have this kind of wild-growing grain called goat grass back then, even though it's not exactly like what we have right now. But I can adapt.
    The closest I could find to a natural grain in our kitchen was a box of plain oatmeal. So I treated myself to two bowls of it--just oats and water--with sliced bananas and walnuts and raisins on top. BLISS.
    But it wasn't enough. I'd been almost entirely without bread ofany kind for two days already (except for the emergency toast), and there was a hole in my stomach the size of a loaf.
    Which led me to my first big ethical question: Am I allowed to make bread or not? Even if my cave woman had grain, it's a separate step to say she figured out how to mill it into flour. And then another step to say she knew how to combine it with other ingredients to make some sort of bread. Not to mention figuring out how to bake it.
    But I do know how to do that, right? If I were transported back there in a time machine, I'd know to gather up grains and start smashing them into a powder. I'd know to add some water, mix in a little honey (they had bees back then--I checked), maybe add a stolen bird egg or two, and then cook the thing on top of a hot rock. I would be the most popular cave girl in the region.
    So that's what I decided: I'm not going to penalize myself for my skills, I'm going to take advantage of them.
    I mean, what's the point of knowing how to cook if you can't actually save your life with it? Cooking is just chemistry. You take a little of this, a little of that, you keep tasting it and adding a little more, and pretty soon you're feeding your entire cave family a nice, nutritious meal of fried insects and leftover rabbit and a soft slab of bread. Right? It's just science.
    Not that I'm going to start cooking insects and rabbit. The point is I can do this. I, more than anyone I know, should be able to live for seven months without a food processor, a mixer, a microwave, and normal ingredients like sugar, butter, and premade salsa. Throughout all of