No solids? No matter. I liquid lunched instead.

A double wisdom tooth extraction ruined my planned week of eating. Could I salvage it by drinking my meals instead?

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God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers.

Hi, it’s me, I’m Strongest Soldier.

Last week, I had two wisdom teeth removed. Removed is too meek a word for the chair-gripping, tear-eliciting experience I was subjected to. How about: I had two wisdom teeth savagely yanked out by a dentist who (genuinely) grunted with effort. In a dreadful attempt at calming my nerves, he told me not to worry if I heard a few cracks in my mouth. Reader, I did hear cracks. I can still hear those cracks. They haunt me at 03:13 every night.

I genuinely believed my recovery would be a cute situation, a day-long semi-gezellig tooth ache, requiring some ice cream and a good, ol’ binge-watch of some comfort TV. Instead, my jaw felt snapped in two. I cycled home with a mouthful of clot and collapsed on the sofa. The dog began violently sniffing at the pungent, irony scent of my blood.

👉🏼👈🏼

Worse yet, it was only after the dentist removed my teeth that he informed me I would need to eat wet food for three days. Three days! Of wet food! What the hell! Sorry, but had I known that I’d be consigned to a wet food diet I’d have scheduled the major surgery for another day. I had to cancel a week’s worth of eating, and I was not happy about it.

There are two danger zones with me when it comes to eating (you can ask my husband): one, my hanger can reach Hulk-like levels. I genuinely need to be fed – if you don’t feed me I will get hangry, local law enforcement will need to be deployed, you don’t want to test this theory, trust me. Two, I hate being told what I can and can’t eat, it’s why I cannot diet, why my attempt at intermittent fasting lasted a day. Put me on an eating plan and I’ll become the most combative version of myself. I’ll become an imp with a pointed tail, shoving 15g of butter into my mouth when no one’s looking.

Soup, the dentist said. Just have soup. Sorry, but I don’t like soup. That’s right. Soup is flavoured water. It doesn’t fill you up. The best thing about it is the side of bread. If I wanted textureless gloop I’d sneeze into a tissue and lick it. ‘Soup season is coming soon!’ Oh, great! Bowls of hot fluid! That’ll make me feel better about my impending seasonal depression! Why can’t we have salami season? Spaghetti season? Shallow fry season? No? And before someone splashes me with paint, let me say: not all soups are bad. Polish soups are good. Korean, too. And ramen, duh. But I don’t see those as soups, more like meals in broth.

Anyway, what all this meant was that I had nothing in the bag when it came to writing this week’s Smaak. I was faced with a choice: skip Smaak this week (boo) or embrace the wet (yay?). I’m never one to shy away from a challenge. So, on the first day I felt able to, I went out in Amsterdam to test its best of wet. I wanted to liquid lunch and I wanted to do it fabulously.

My plan was to structure my outing by finding a wet amuse-bouche, wet starter, wet main and wet dessert. To start then, an amuse-bouche of iced coffee, specifically a full fat cow’s milk latte. I needed the calories. Back to Black is a cute café on the corner of Lijnbaansgracht and Weteringstraat. Back to Black is a little Friends inside: people sit on sofas chatting the day away, obvious to work obligations. My iced coffee was definitely not American-sized, being a stubby little thing with a disproportionately large straw rocketing out the side (I’m not allowed to use straws as they may dislodge the clot, FYI). It tasted like iced coffee. I’ve had better. The best iced coffee I can think of is Bakkerij Wolf’s iced coffee but I need to stop talking about Bakkerij Wolf before they issue a restraining order.

Chapo’s smoothie.

Pumped with coffee, it was time to move onto my starter, but I immediately ran into a crisis of existential proportions: should soup be my starter? Or should I save it for my main? You see? Soup has no real identity, it’s wishy-washy. Are you still following this Substack? I hope so. I made the snap decision to move soup into the ‘main’ category. For my starter, I opted for a fruit smoothie from Chapo, the coffee-to-go spot on Kerkstraat.

Chapo is a cute spot, somewhere you might meet the love of your life as you both reach for the same coffee, tee hee. Their smoothie menu was extensive. I went for Berry Love, which had açaí, blueberry, blackberry, banana, strawberry, date and hemp protein – a combo so potent in vitamins that I expected my wound site to heal by the end of the day. It was a tall, punchy smoothie, both sweet and sour, uniform in texture but not too thick. I was impressed by the balance of berries, no one type stood out over the others, and thankfully the banana stayed firmly in the background. I absolutely adore banana smoothies when they’re the primary ingredient but when not, I don’t want to taste a literal gram.

By now, I’d had two full cups of thickened liquid. Was I in any way satiated? Perhaps physically. On an emotional level, I was a sunken ship, sea bottom sad. Is that dramatic? Picture Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a cross-section of Toblerone. That’s what food means to me.

Anyway, with a belly more rotund than Santa’s, I hopped over the road to Soup en zo, the small chain offering soup to-go. I’d avoided this place until now because of my soup aversion, but also because there’s something a little office lunchy about it, the kind of place you’d pop to with Debra from financing because you want to ‘be good,’ your cream of tomato eaten at your desk while you mindlessly scroll Instagram for 15 minutes, the air around you fermented with the scent of a hundred reheated lunches. Based on the people in the queue, I wasn’t totally wrong.

“Soup.”

I chose pea soup with mint. I’ll be honest and say at first I didn’t like it, but as the spoons went in, I perhaps began to change my mind. It was a very bitty pea soup, which I suppose is fibrously good, but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to chew or not. In the end, I opted for hamster micro-chews, willing no pea skins to worm their way into my wisdom tooth cavity. There were other bits in the algae-green gloop, a sprig of something, a flake of mint leaf. ‘Swampy’ was the word that came to mind. It reminded me of the soup Yoda made Luke on Dagobah in the The Empire Strikes Back. Still, for all my reservations, it tasted very real and categorically not made in a factory – and that’s something I respect. I begrudgingly finished it, annoyed that soup can have merit.

By now, my stomach was a frothy, volatile mix. One sudden move and I’d fountain out a multi-pronged plume of coffee, smoothie and soup.

But I was not to be beaten. Dessert was the one part of this challenge I was excited about and that’s because, reader, I was going to Stacks Deli for a milkshake.

I don’t know what Stacks put in their milkshakes to make them taste so good, except I do, because they told me, but I’m not sure if it’s a secret so I won’t spill. But I will urge you to go get one because they’re an insanely delicious treat, a dense, calorific super-drink that’s sweet as a smile, but in no way cloying or crass.

Stacks’ milkshake.

I went for vanilla because that’s my favourite milkshake flavour. But you know what they say, vanilla milkshake in the streets, hard Oreo shake with extra whip in the sheets. Without a straw, I could only squeeze it into my mouth from above, and I did this at an embarrassing pace, frosting my moustache, staining my tee. It was heaven as a bright, white cupful of dairy. It tasted like growing up in America, even if you didn’t. My wisdom teeth wished they’d been there. For my pain-addled mouth, it was the perfect way to finish this insane fluidic quest.

Four courses of liquids – I jiggled like a water balloon on my cycle home, breaking gently so that the G-force wouldn’t slosh out my contents. What did I learn doing this? Oh sure, it made me appreciate how wonderful it is to be able to eat, that health is never, ever something you should take for granted. It made me go try things I normally wouldn’t, like soup, but also smoothies and iced coffees at new cafés. Yes, but really it taught me that food – crunchy, textural food – is my life. I hate living without it. Oh, I also learnt my bladder can hold an ocean.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s been a week since my major surgery and I have some extra crispy pork belly with a side of crackling to eat.

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OK BYE!

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