My Darling Roommate (MDR) is quite a chef. He cooks up full meals every morning to get him through the day, and by full meals I mean a full 10-course meal including beans, hummus, gardenburgers, spinach, rice, salmon, apples, bananas, peanut butter on pita and trail mix. By then, he has already eaten a bowl of oatmeal (with strawberries this week – how decadent!), a bowl of cereal, and possibly another banana. Every evening he comes home to make a similar 6-course meal involving some type of meat product (this week has been pork chops and shrimp), some more rice, a spinach salad with nasty red peppers on top, and more often than not, more hummus on pita and then another bowl of cereal. Coming from someone whose daily caloric intake often hovers around the 1000 mark (if you don’t include calories obtained from alcohol, which of course I don’t), this amount of food seems tantamount to a UN Care Package for an entire African Village.

Despite it all, though, My Darling Roommate is in fantastic shape, as he should be since nary a day passes without his mandatory trip to the gym, after which he races home to try and beat me to the garage. (He’s still seething over my win the other night which kept his jeep out in the subsequent snowstorm, if by “storm” I mean “flakes.) His BFI (Body Fat Index) likely hovers around a ridiculous 5%, something that also makes me fantastically jealous being that I eat 1/10th of the calories that he does in a day and my BMI is, well, let’s just say it’s higher than that. He eats very healthy, you see; in fact, his suggestion on what I should give up for lent is “Hydrogenated Fats” since apparently those things cause nasty cancers that will eat away my very being like a latter-day ebola virus. A shame, since apparently they run rampant in my core food groups: Mini Oreos, Baked Lays, and Zone Bars. Damn.

But back to My Darling Roommate and his predilection for cooking. He is one who sticks tight to traditions, especially if that tradition is making the same meal nearly every day, using the same pot and pan and plate and bowl and fork and spoon (note the singular nature of these words – that’s not by mistake!) for his daily feasts. When it comes to food, if it ain’t broken, why try and fix it? (That said, he devours my Veggie Lasagna, so at least we’ve made a bit of a shakeup in his life!) So when it comes to replacing his tinfoil pan, the very same pan that he cooks his salmon or pork chops or [insert other sundry non-red meat meat here] for dinner, let’s just say thanks to $1.99 and me being a Darling roommate right back, I’ve changed his life for the better.

C’mon – Hydrogenated Fats can’t be worse than THIS: