Glucose close call

          Chef/author Gabrielle Hamilton forever endeared herself to me in a scene in the middle of her memoir in which she finds herself in the Brooklyn Children's Museum, kids, bags, and strollers in tow, and realizing, ever so slowly, that she is about to lose her essential blood sugar level, and her cool. Simply put by Hamilton, if her blood sugar drops, it becomes her sole profession to ruin your flipping day (for the record, the actual text doesn't say "flipping"so much as another expletive that starts with "f," but hunger is real, and it's ugly. This blog, however, has to maintain some level of propriety). I feel remarkably similar. I don't want to be that sensitive of a person, but I am. If I don't eat, you don't want to be standing next to me. My mother and I recently took a road trip to Maine to test out our relationship in blood sugar extremes. We actually went in search of foliage, but there was none to be found, so instead our vacation turned into a culinary adventure in testing the limits of the essential glucose levels of my body. On the first day we ate lunch a little too late; that is to say we ate after I began sobbing hysterically in the driver's seat because I'd missed the turn to Ogunquit and the GPS was telling me to take a right down the next lane which was clearly just someone's private driveway, and I thought we should just give up on life altogether. Then, after lunch, I loved everything again. And so, each consecutive day after this first hungry incident, whenever I said, "I'm getting hungry," my mother's eyes filled with a terror I've never actually seen before. We planned pretty well for the rest of the trip, spacing meals and snacks appropriately, but there was one day when we got stuck in the no man's land between Rockport and Rockland and things were looking bleak. And that's when we found the Home Kitchen Cafe. We settled into a table willing to accept some mediocre reuben sandwhich or a dumpy burger with fries, but were surprised with one of the best meals of our trip: a spicy tofu stir fry and a well seasoned gyro sandwich. If you're lost outside of Rockland, which you likely are not, it's entirely worth a stop.