Honesty
Aside from my natural leaning towards omission by way of fabrication and fantasy, I just have to tell you, I come from a long line of liars.
Maybe it's genetic, or maybe I learned how to be in this world by watching how the family acted. Mostly I believed them when they told me things, like my mother saying she'd gotten me a special dispensation from the priest to eat meat over at the Tannenbaum's house on a Friday night. I bought that one, mostly because Ruthie Tannenbaum made the best meatloaf and we never had that kind of thing at home. The Tannenbaums were all a little chubby so I fit right in...much more so than in my own family of stick people. Ruthie loved that I was a good eater, and there was never a raised eyebrow when I asked for 'more please'! Their kid Sheila was my best friend all through grammar school, and we would switch off going to each other's houses every Friday night. Sheila loved my family as much as I loved hers. We really should have switched.
Some of the lies were more successful than others. There was the time when our old sick cat Cleo needed to be put of her misery. Dad took her down to the vet and came back with another tabby, much smaller, with different markings. He tried to pass off this cat as the original Cleo, which I found ridiculous and insulting. I mean, what did he take me for? I never warmed up to that particular cat, named Amicus by dad, hoping we would all embrace him as a friend. It didn't happen.
My sister and I have no visual resemblance to each other, but our voices are identical, particularly on the phone. This led to all kinds of hilarity when she would have me pretending to be her with her various boyfriends. So I was raised with certain talents. Telling the truth was not one of them. Up until fairly recently, whenever I'd find myself in a spot, having double-booked for a party and a dinner out on the same night, or having promised to go hiking or swimming or anything requiring physical exertion, I would come up with a reason at the last minute why I couldn't go. My sister is far more masterful than I am at making stuff up, so often I would consult her for ideas and advice. 'Don't tell them you have a cold. They would hear that in your voice. Say you threw your back out, and make sure you won't see them for a week or so.' She herself has been using pink-eye as a fake disease for about a month. She finds it to be a great lie because nobody wants to be around that.
I have a young friend, Laura, who had the same bent. At a certain point she decided all the lies were backing up on her, keeping her from sleeping... making her feel that her moral fiber was being eroded. What she did to break the habit was to keep a 'lying journal' in which each night she would list the untruths she had told during the day. I think it's pretty brilliant, but then Laura is a much more serious and hard-working person than I am. I've found a middle ground in my middle-age. I wait for awhile to commit to anything so I can think it over. I keep quiet much more when something sounds like fun in the moment but might turn hellish as the time draws near. I've found my life is vastly simplified by a modicum of restraint.
But I really want to talk here about cauliflower. It's a vegetable that has gained huge momentum at a time when carbohydrates are getting a bad rap. There is cauliflower rice, and cauliflower pizza crust, and cauliflower gnocchi even. The shape is right, the color is right, but all these things taste like cauliflower ultimately, and that's a huge problem. I buy a head of cauliflower from time to time, and I'm charmed by the fact that it's in the cabbage family, and the actual part you eat is made up of immature flower buds. There's magic in that, but it STILL TASTES LIKE CAULIFLOWER! Don't tell me you like it, that can't be true. There is one way to eat it though, which is to smother it in sauce. Here is a very basic but flavorful cheese sauce. You could use this on any array of otherwise awful cruciferous vegetables.
Cheese Sauce
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
¼ cup all-purpose flour
2 cups milk
1 cup half and half
3 ounces cream cheese
2 cups grated cheddar cheese
pinch nutmeg
pinch salt
If you've never made a bechamel sauce you need to know how, for a whole variety of other sauces that originate with it. For this one there is the simple addition of cheese.
Melt butter in a heavy saucepan over a low flame, and with a whisk stir in flour a little at a time. Stir until this paste smells a bit nutty. You want to cook the flour a bit so it doesn't have a raw flavor. Add both milk and half and half slowly, whisking constantly to get rid of any lumps. Keep whisking as you add cream cheese. This sauce will be thick. Take off the flame and add grated cheddar and your tiny bits of spices. This sauce is a base for a cheese souffle, by the way. If you are going to use it over the dread cauliflower, take the whole head of cauliflower, minus green leaves, and place in a baking dish, drench with sauce and bake for about an hour in a medium oven. The sauce will produce a lovely browned crust. You could eat the crusty sauce and discard the cauliflower. That's what I would honestly do.