Some say, "Where's the beef?"... I say, "Where's the color?!"

This past week my friend and I treated ourselves to lunch. Expensive lunch. At one of our favorite close-to-work-expensive-treat-ourselves-for-any-variety-of-bullshit-reasons restaurants where we both usually enjoy (read: salivate) over the $15 cheeseburger. On this particular day though, we went out on a limb and both ordered that which came with the highest recommendation, the stuffed baguette.

Twenty minutes later as lunch was placed in front of me, I bit back the urge to politely tip the plate off the edge of the table and launch into a shameless Pretty Woman monologue... "Big mistake. Big. Huge. I have to go shopping now!" Instead, I looked up at my friend, leaned over the offensive food substance and muttered out of the corner of my mouth, "this is the most monochromatic meal I've ever seen."

It was beige, stuffed into a hollowed out beige baguette, topped with beige and served with a side of fried beige. It looked about as appetizing as licking the beige sidewalk outside...and unfortunately, was just about as dry. Never before had I so deeply considered the rule of making sure your plate was full of color. Where in the world had the color gone? Where were the vegetables that were promised to also be stuffed into this damn baguette? What natural food is the color of office paint? Even a friggen potato has a brown skin when plucked from the earth!

I can see it now...Sunday morning...wads of bills stuffed into my handbag...losing my mind and savings at the farmer's market. Fast forward a week to find half of the purchases turning into new, mushy colors in my fridge, as clearly I was too busy dining out and therefore too busy to prepare vegetables at home!

That's reality though. And for now, I just want the lovely, hypercolor fantasy of juicy, jewel-toned foods...

Teen's kitchen is so ridiculously sterile & clean...I could've taken this shot in a labratory!

The lesson to be learned in all of this? Eat your vegetables - or I will.