Marching on his Stomach

Cranky had a craving.
He's had a lot of them lately, come to think of it. Must be a reaction to the upheaval of dismantling our worldly goods and cramming them into boxes. He gets oral. Yesterday he had to — had to — have sushi for lunch, and later in the evening he stuffed chocolates into his mouth. (The chocolates were unearthed as I was unloading the china hutch; they were leftover goodies from my Christmas stocking that somehow got stashed in a candy jar and shoved behind closed doors.)
So the other day he became obsessed with bagels. Ordinarily, Cranky and I talk about our food lusts together, refining and honing until, YES, let's have THAT, that's EXACTLY what we want to eat! But I wasn't in on the bagel discussion. There was no discussion. He simply came home with the ingredients — the only ingredients — that would sate his appetite at that moment.
This meant he had to buy an out-of-season tomato... but it was a very good, hothouse-grown tomato of a dark and lovely variety (probably purple Cherokee), from the spunky ladies at the farmers market.
It also meant, of course, that he had to buy fresh bagels, (red onion and cream cheese were already in the house) and some sort of cured salmon. What he found at Whole Foods was not lox, not nova, but a genuinely smoky, tender treatment of wild Northern California salmon. Not too smoky. Perfect.
Cranky's craving was satisfied.
Me? I had a very nice lunch.