Friday. Day 5 of our beloved 12-day detox.

Our annual neighbourhood fair opened tonight, and I had to drag the sulkiest Wayne you’ve ever seen up to the street where all the action is. “You usually love this thing,” I told him. What was he so miserable about?

“It’s basically an eating fair,” he complained. An eating fair where everything was totally off-cleanse.

He was kind of right. We walked (more quickly than usual) past the folding tables covered in warmer trays filled with sticky-sweet barbecue, flour-wrapped spring rolls and their requisite sugary sauces, fajitas and rotis stuffed into floury wrappers. Then there were the cinnamon buns the size of my head. It was useless.

We did buy some barbecued corn on the cob that tasted so sweet I accused them of dipping it in sugar water. (They hadn’t.) And some hippie-tastic “pizza” from the raw-food restaurant (palace of the cleansers) made with a sprouted buckwheat crust (no flour!) and cashew “cheese.”

On the way home, I excitedly suggested we share a so-called Power Ball from the organic café on our corner, a healthy little meatball-sized cookie-substitute made for the Enchanted Broccoli Forest set, that contains sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, almonds, agave and carob chips. Dwayne took one bite and curled his lip down. “This is off-cleanse,” he said and handed it to me without looking at me. He was disappointed. “It’s like a chocolate bar, basically.” No sugar, no chocolate, no caramel, no nougat, no wafer, no hydrogenated wonderful anything, yet it was a “chocolate bar” – had we come that far?

I took a bite and loved it. I wanted to eat it forever; but he was right. The carob chips probably weren’t unsweetened. And there were rogue craisins in there that weren’t on the ingredient list. He glanced over to see what I’d do next. I inhaled it with the urgency and pleasure of an addict.

When I got home, I took my dejection into the kitchen, looking for something sweet. I wanted dessert. I wanted it super-badly. I swore at the goddamn strawberries. Does this look like dessert to you:

But I have to tell you, after five unsweetened days, these berries delivered! They made me swoon like a dessert-bereft castaway. I retracted my bad swears fully.

Still, it isn’t always a juicy berry that you want when you’re surrounded by the cinammon-bun eaters out there. So tomorrow I’m making my own frigging Power Balls. Stay tuned for reactions from Wayne, and a recipe.