Healthy curly fries are a lie

A bald-faced lie.*

When it comes to nutrition, I try to nail the basics. I have a large regimen of supplements I take daily, I work hard to hit my five veggies per day, I drink the lawn clippings that are powdered greens, and I shoot for a minimum of 64 ounces of water (and no, sadly, I don’t count my coffee, otherwise I’d easily double that number).

While I try to focus on eating whole foods and avoiding processed stuff, I also have my 20% of the time (sometimes 30% or 40%) when I eat what I want. Usually on Friday nights.

And one of my favorite splurges is curly fries.

Looooooove me some curly fries.

Which is why, in perusing the internet for healthy recipes, zoodle curly fries caught my attention. Zoodles, if you’re unfamiliar, are strands of zuchinni that you spiralize into noodles. You can use them in place of pasta as a healthy alternative.

I’m not a huge fan of pasta, so I never mind the substitution. Which is why I thought I’d give the zoodle curly fries a whirl.

The end result?

Well, after dipping spiralized veggies in egg and rolling them around in a Parmesan cheese breading mixture, my hands were covered in something akin to baby vomit and the green strands on the baking sheet looked like a pile of grass-puke from my dog Vinnie.

Sheila popped out to the kitchen to survey my progress.

“Stop pretending that’s going to be a curly fry.”

I was hanging on to some optimism though. I mean they hadn’t even gone into the oven yet. I showed her the picture of the golden brown zoodle fries on my iPad and insisted that this was going to be a worthy, healthy alternative.

“Keep telling yourself that,” she said, walking away.

I looked from the picture back at my baking sheet of sadness.

Do you ever have that point in trying a new recipe when you realize that it’s going to be an epic failure? Every time you cook? No? Oh. Me either….

After an hour in the oven, I had baked baby vomit strands and the crushing realization that I’d been avoiding for so long.

It was time to call a spade a spade.

A zoodle is a zoodle. And nothing about a zoodle, baked, air fried (although I suspect this would be better), or otherwise is only ever going to be a zoodle. Nothing about a zoodle is going to come anywhere close to tasting like the hot, crispy deliciousness that is a curly fry.

I’m all for finding healthy alternatives when it comes to my nutrition. But, while I like habinaro baked chic peas and find them tasty, if I put more than three in my mouth at the same time they suck all of the saliva like the saltine-sponge that they are. And while I don’t mind them as a crunchy alternative, they are not Doritos.

Sometimes you want some variety and a healthy alternative to stay on par with your nutrition and zoodle fries, chic peas and soggy-home made kale chips are worth the effort.

But, as with putting cream in your coffee, life is too short to pretend that zoodle fries are curly fries.

Sometimes you just have to eat the curly fries.

*Most sources agree that the original expression, coined in the late 1600s, was actually barefaced lie. At that time, bare meant brazen or bold. At that time in history, almost all men sported a full set of whiskers, and it was considered quite daring or even audacious for a male to be clean-shaven, or barefaced. Eventually, the word for “hairless” went from bare to bald, and so did the description of a blatant fib.