Devour Hour

I don't know what possesses my husband sometimes. He'll walk in the door from work and immediately start foraging through the pantry, "rooting for truffles" I suppose. And even as I am sautéing a lovely dinner a mere 3 feet from his turned back (making it VERY tempting to issue some form of corrective discipline, if you catch my drift,) he can't wait the 45 seconds until it's served.

He doesn't stop until he's worked his way clockwise around the kitchen, and he doesn't respond to auditory input of any kind (though in all truthfulness, I haven't tried an air horn yet.) I call this: the "Kawa Devour Hour" (think BOSTON accent: Kawa di-vow-ah ow-ah.)

He'll pretty much eat anything in his path. It's gotten so bad, we're missing a pot holder, 2 cats, and a box of happy-meal toys that (unfortunately for them) may have retained their french-fry aroma.

The worst is peanuts. He can eat a whole can of party peanuts in 3 mumbling mouthfuls. Even as I'm spooning mashed potatoes onto his plate, glaring white death at him. Massive nut intake, of course, throws off his whole digestive process, and I'm expected later to offer all kinds of sympathetic remarks, NOT (apparently) including "Wait till the CAN gets into your intestines!"

I sometimes attempt to derail the process before it starts, by hiding the peanuts behind the maple syrup. Because we all know that our men, though capable of killing saber-tooth tigers and watching twelve TV programs at once, cannot grasp the fact that there's a "behind" dimension that houses a bunch of stuff they might need. Alas, during one of his foraging missions, nothing is safe if it isn't nailed down.

I've seen a 3-month supply of Godiva chocolates (which I keep purely for medicinal purposes) sucked down in nine seconds. And believe me, the spatula swat he got for that one didn't hurt NEARLY as much as the ensuing hormonal imbalance he had to put up with. Suffice it to say, next time he'd be wise to eat the SPATULA, and leave the chocolate.

Sometimes he offers the justification: "But I haven't eaten all day!" Too busy. Dieting. Something along those lines. I'm sure Jenny Craig won't be picking up his technique any time soon: eat nothing all day, then devour (before dinner) your weight in nuts, cheese whiz, and small pieces of plastic.

The worst part is that he then eats DINNER, too. So I can't fall back on the "ruin your appetite" argument, one of the strongest catchall admonitions in a woman's vocabulary.

Shoot.

Sometimes he eats all the leftovers, too. Then the rest of the week, we get to play "guess what's for dinner," since all that's left are canned goods with no labels (pulled off by the suction.)

Luckily the Kawa Devour Hour doesn't occur every night. It comes in waves. While this prevents the kids and me from dying of starvation, or being forced to actually take up residence to the dry-goods aisle of a supermarket, the irregular nature of it occasionally lulls me into complacency. During hurricane season it's not so bad, because I keep emergency rations tucked away (behind large opaque things.) But off-season, I just pray that the KDH doesn't make an appearance when we have guests (that we rather like,) or at Christmas time, when small packages might be mistaken for petit fours.

And when my "Hi, Honey!" welcome is met by a ravenous lurch toward the point of highest average food density per square foot, I just GET OUT OF THE WAY, and keep my hands and arms well out of range.