As hard as it is to give up things that are bad for you, there’s almost always a way to replace a vice with a virtue. This is just as true in the kitchen as it is in the rest of life, and one of the best examples I’ve found is substituting apple cider vinegar for other unhealthy cooking sauces when I’m grilling meat. Many a man would never think of firing up a grill without a bowl of barbecue sauce handy, but you can trade the sugar for the tang of vinegar without missing a beat.
In recent years I’ve become and expert at giving things up because I spent so much time indulging in things that I probably shouldn’t have been. The list is long, with women, alcohol, and cigarettes at the very top. A bad diet and a dismal lack of exercise were a few notches down on the list of vices, but they were still there. And even though I loved every minute of my twenties, when I turned thirty it was time to start thinking of giving some of those vices up.
The women and the heavy drinking had to go when I became a father. The lifestyle that I was living just wasn’t compatible with the duties and responsibilities that I suddenly found myself with, and hard as it was to change my ways it was necessary. Luckily, at that point, there wasn’t a vice in the world that couldn’t be replaced by the overwhelming love that I had for my daughter, so I didn’t miss them as much as I would have under other circumstances.
I should probably have given up smoking then too, but I didn’t. I loved smoking. Except for the high probability of a painful and disgusting death as a result of it, I loved everything about smoking. And it was built into the (very thin) mystique that I had developed for myself as a burgeoning dramatist. In the end that had to go as well, of course, and after a couple failed attempts to quit I discovered that giving up an actual addiction is easier to say than it is to do.
Ultimately I used medication to quit, and the specific drug that I chose delivered every side effect one could imagine a medication giving you. It was a little like a comedic take on the pharmaceutical commercials, where an announcer goes on and on about side effects like your lungs collapsing and your spleen turning into a green bunny rabbit. The drug threw my system completely off, and I had to change my diet in order to return to some semblance of myself.
Unlike my other vices, my eating habits didn’t actually qualify as a deadly sin, but they weren’t healthy either. I’m a workaholic. The work always comes first, and it’s not uncommon for me to go for more than a day without food when I’m working. When I do eat it usually isn’t something healthy. It’s whatever I crave at the moment that hunger gets unbearable.
Even without the smoking cessation drug my diet needed work, and after taking it I was pretty much desperate to undo the damage I’d done. I looked at various diets, and after trying a few I ended up with a regimen that includes a great deal of meat and vegetables and very little sugar or grain. One advantage of this diet is that I get to use my grill a lot more, but it also means that I can’t use most of the meat sauces on the market, including barbecue sauce.
No man gives up his barbecue sauce easily, and by the time I got down to barbecue sauce I was about done with giving things up anyway. But instead of just rejecting the idea I decided to experiment, and when I tried apple cider vinegar I found a winner. It gave meat, especially bland meat like chicken and pork, a little extra zing.
