I had some kim chee fried rice in the fridge, brought home from an asian fusion restaurant I will go to multiple days in a row. It was exciting at first, knowing that it was in there, the thickly spiced cabbage fried with perfectly al dente rice, hard to to the tooth, as I like it.

I made lots of food plans. I would have whipped some eggs with a bit of cold water, heated up a frying pan with a thin layer of oil, cooking a pale yellow skin to hold the rice in a warm embrace. These rice omelets are the stuff I grew up on, afterschool treats and Saturday lunches, moments when my mother or my grandmother had some time to care for me, in between the intense crush of their jobs and complicated immigrant lives.

My life is complicated too, but in different ways, and I have little time to cook or even eat, which ravages my waist even more than stuffing myself. Not eating is way fattening for whatever reason. It always has been with me. The less I eat, the more of me there is. The more I eat, the slimmer I become. I wanted that rice omelet but it never happened, and the kim chee rice aged poorly in the uneven cold of the fridge.

Cabbage rots and emits a gas, and that permeated the entire ecosystem of the refrigerator. The sumptuous wheels of brie and gouda suffered from the proximity of the leftovers. Every time I opened the fridge to get a Whynatte, I would get a sulphurous punch in the face. The decay was hanging in the air around the kitchen like a cloud, a wet rain of funk, soaking everything.

I held on to the dream of the rice omelet, even though it was surely stillborn. I thought that it was going to happen, that even though it smelled like shit, it wouldn’t taste like it. I thought I would have time in the near future. As I slept, my dream self broke open eggs and heated pans. My real self never got that far.

Finally, in the middle of the night, I couldn’t take it anymore. I padded out to the kitchen pulled the offensive container out of the fridge. Like a sleepwalker I crept heavy and somnabulent down the hallway to the trash chute. I threw the rotting kim chee rice in its box down many floors, into the abyss, but the smell still hangs on, haunting my home as if it never left.

There is a love I have for raisin toast that is indecent. It’s got to be a small loaf, in order to contain the raisins, and the cinnamon that is the raisin’s common-law companion. The best is when the bread has been freshly baked, but that is rare. I usually buy a loaf that looks appealing, then freeze it until my desire becomes too much to bear. I eye it in the icebox, as I reach for the other forbidden things in there, vodka and boxed chocolate and lemon pies, the raisin bread hard and cold, slices tightly bonded with frost.

When I am finally ready, I am altogether clumsy with want, all thumbs reaching into the bag and trying to pry the slices apart. Raisins fly onto the floor and I eat them right off the linoleum. Pride and passion have little in common with each other. I break some pieces off the loaf and load them haphazardly into the toaster, set to unfreeze and toast them just to a light medium brown. I check the temperature incessantly, cancelling my toasting and touching the hot center. I know it by feel, like I am searing a well marbled steak.

The surface of the toast gets hard and brown and slightly rough and I know this is right. I will take one out of the toaster and butter it immediately with unsalted fancy butter, the kind that tv chefs use, in their wide cubes. After buttering one side of the toast I flip it over and then drop another generous pat on the other side, then immediately position the second piece of toast onto it, melting the butter into the bread and making an impromptu ‘cake’. I do not butter the top of the second slice. That is my one concession to dieting.

Then I eat them, and I take a long time. Sometimes there’s a lacy fried egg, crunchy with salt, to distract and prolong my pleasure, but often, it’s just me and the toast. If I have drank some more than I would have or should have, this will be a late night occurrence, and it will just be one piece of toast, pried off the still frozen loaf in the dark of my kitchen. Ill hold the bread farther from my body, as not to stain some precious evening ensemble. The butter will still be hard and it will melt as I eat the toast. There is no patience in that kind of eating you do to ward off a hangover, or the middle of the night eating that both defines me and threatens my naturally narrow waist at once.

Well that was a much looser yogurt than I had signed up for. You know there is nothing better than a thick pot of greek yogurt, full fat or 2% fat if possible. I like a drip of honey on it, or a hand split overripe fig dragged into the creamy middle. I go to artisanal shops and get some artisanal dairy and the labels are pretty and classy enough, so I assume that the more rare it is, the more toothsome, the more sour, the more funky and rich it will be. Some days this is true, but not today. It’s thin as milk and lumpy like an unblended vichyssoise.

I discovered the Fage brand of greek yogurt – the undisputed winner, the kind that makes me weak in the knees, each time I slip the wax paper top off the creamy head of a new container – while living in new york with Princess Farhana. She made eating it look so refined and elegant and decadent, as she does with most things, and I had to copy her.

Back then I would take a large fuji apple and cut it into 16ths with a bad, dull knife. I would eat the apple shards and take a bite of yogurt and this was my communion and my sustenance and my apple yogurt life. At the end there might be a tiny spoonful of almond butter to punctuate the meal, to put a period onto its completion.

I try other brands of yogurt, thinking yes there must be one that is more strained, one that is higher in fat content, one that will hold the spoon up unaided in the middle of the pot, but there is none but Fage. My refrigerator is full of these dairy mistakes I have made and now I must go to the store again and face Fage facts.

Don’t despair, eat. It’s probably not the most healthy thing to say, but food is a balm for me, especially carbohydrates. I am drained by humanity. People are disappointing and taxing, rueful and mean, bullying and boring – this is just the truth. There are those with potential to be heavenly however, so these few and far between but fabulous friends keep me in the game. And the rest of the time, I just eat and keep going.

Here is my most disgusting and shameful treat, one I turn to when there is no one and nothing else. Perhaps it should be kept under glass for me with instructions to shatter it when all becomes too much to bear, but honestly it doesn’t keep well, and you’re better off if at least the perishable parts of this meal are reasonably fresh.

You need a good, thick cinnamon raisin bagel to start, sawn in half but not toasted, the dense, airless bready interior raw and soft, the glossy chewy exterior sticky and studded with raisins and cinnamon. Try to cut it evenly, that is all I ask, as for whatever reason, this vastly improves things. Do it with a good knife, possibly with a sharply serrated edge, as bagel injuries are common among non chef types like myself. Bread and knives can conspire hurt you so don’t be unwise.

Take the raw halves of the bagel and slather generously with cream cheese. I do prefer the kind sold in bricks. It’s dairy density mimics the bready density and might as well go big with it. I will make the cream cheese layer almost as thick as the bagel. I mean what I say.

On a plate, arrange the bagel halves prettily and then open any size doritos you like. i tend to be a big grab type of girl. Also, I wouldn’t do a cool ranch or alternative flavor doritos for this recipe. Nacho cheese works best, in my experience. Pour the entire contents of the bag over the cream cheese so that the cheese powder coats the cheese making a kind of compound cream cheese. If you want, you can also drizzle a bit of gulden’s brown mustard onto this, but I generally don’t do this. Eat as a kind of dip at first, using the doritos to scoop up cream cheese in efficient mouthfuls. Then when there is nothing else that can be done, make a sandwich of the bagel halves and shove additional chips into the deepest center. It makes for a crisp, cheesy surprise with each bite. I know this sounds really fairly disgusting, but oh my god it’s delicious. There is something to the pairing of nacho cheese and raisin, the odd mole note of cinnamon, the fatty whiteness of cream cheese and the comforting quality of bread baked in circles. It’s a basic and revolting childish sort of snack that has little nutritional value and no true comestible merit but how good it is and how much I have needed these flavors and textures in hard times.

Make no substitutions. Its got to be this, or nothing.

I haven’t made a sauce but if I could I would make and authentic bolognese, which is my favorite, hearty and red and cooked down for many hours, making my mouth water all day long. I might actually sear a ham bone and cook it down until the meat and tendons and marrow melt into the oblivion of sauce.

It’s a big deal to make sauce. Italians I know say ‘I’m making sauce’ and then I accept that I wont see them all day or possibly all weekend. I get it. They’re making sauce, I will see them when it’s ready. Its often family recipes, or something cribbed together from online cooking blogs and ancient, fragrantly stained cookbooks. I haven’t made it so I am only speculating.

My favorite isn’t even homemade. It’s served in the Trump Soho Hotel, the fearsome electrified glassy tower I stay in sometimes in New York, the greatest of all the cities, when theres an expense account of some type and I don’t have to run to the corner deli for potato chips and bad headache inducing wine for dinner.

The room service will bring me a immigrant perfect rigatoni bolognese, the pasta a slight hardness to the tooth, big tubes of semolina flour and egg, filled to bursting with the best sauce I have had.

There will be a deeply verdant broccoli rabe, tiny curls of crispy onion on it. I’ll dump the vegetables right onto the pasta as well as all the cheese that I can beg from the hotel kitchen. There will be red pepper flakes on there too – more than I care to admit.

I will mix it all together and eat it with the smallest fork, like a fish fork or a dessert fork. I don’t care. I have no pride when it comes to this kind of late night hotel room eating. There are no witnesses, save the room service waiter, and they’ll get a hefty tip for their silence and complicity.