Dinner: A Dialog

Person 1: There, that's the squash for tonight's dinner, and I'm making the crepes now
Person 2: Um...when do the Spring vegetables arrive?
Person 1: Well, considering it's the middle of January, I'd say a couple more months
Person 2: So that means I'm stuck eating squash and fennel for the next couple of months?
Person 1: I can make you beets...
Person 2: Uh...
Person 1: Or you can eat [expletive that rhymes with "quit"]...

I'll leave you to determine who is who in this dialog...

A Collection: Things I Never Thought I Would Say (or would never have to say)

1) We don't clean the furniture with fruit

2) Don't throw the chicken (N.B. we were talking about a live chicken in this instance)

3) Yes, I'll get you some ketchup for your pizza

4) Peanut butter is not evil

5) Cheese and crackers really aren't a proper breakfast

6) So what if she got pizza sauce in her hair? She's still going to bed in 5 minutes!

I'm quite sure there's more. These are the ones that came to mind right after I said #3.

Foods I Hate

Tell me blue Go Gurt comes out of pajamas. And the answer to the obvious question is: I didn't give it to her. The little angel next to her gave it to her. Guess I can't fault him for sharing.

No more Go Gurt in my house, ever!

P.S. You'll notice it's Wednesday and I'm still alive. Guess the strawberry jam is OK to eat (well, that one jar, anyway).

Mini Post: Frustration!

I hate when this happens!

The Scene: My house; I am preparing to go to the grocery store. I have my list in my hand.

Me: Oh, I wanted to make that [recipe recently seen]. I had better make sure I have all the ingredients. I will look at the recipe. It was right here in this book.

[picks up book and flips to index, looking for name of recipe]

Me: [baffled] Why, I know it was right here in this book...or, well, maybe it was this one...I was reading it recently, too...

[checks another book lying on table]

Me: Hm, not here either...oh, well maybe it was in this magazine I was reading the other night...

[flips through magazine without success]

Me: Argh! Where was that recipe?!?!?


Google! Get on this--I need to be able to do a keyword search of my brain!!!

Rainy Day Musings

The rain is a solid mass falling from the soggy pile of clouds above. I had to drag my reluctant children through this watery onslaught into their daycare, then slog onto and off of the ferry to my office. I had an umbrella, but on the Seattle side, the handle broke, leaving me to juggle my Pumpkin Spice latte, my bag with my computer, and my lame duck umbrella, and with the ABBA song “Waterloo” playing an endless loop in my head (don’t ask—every morning some occurrence lodges an irritating long-forgotten ditty in my head and I spend the rest of the day trying to rid myself of the earworm). Now I’m sitting in semi-gloom, figuring out how long I have to stay in my office while people drag in and see me here, so I can get credit for showing up, before I could cut out and go home (somehow the homeward slog seems less…sloggish).

And what would I do when I got home? Well, read magazines, for one. I have a stack (which includes the last four issues of Gourmet, the December issues of both Sunset and Martha Stewart Living, and the November and December issues of Cottage Living, plus some extras like Dwell and Body + Soul), or I could read one of the four books I have going—“Alva and Consuelo Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age,” “Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories,” “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and “Marcella’s Italian Kitchen” (a steal on the remainder table for $9.98--I may already have a copy of this that my mother bought in the 1980s, but I wasn’t sure so I grabbed it anyway; if I unpack and find I have it already, well, my sister-and-law will likely be offered the new copy).

I could watch Christmas movies. I simply adore Christmas movies, the sappier the better. Nothing depressing, please—no dark comedy (sorry, Tim Burton, but I really don’t care for The Nightmare Before Christmas). Give me sweetness and light. Give me boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl-back. White Christmas, Holiday Inn, Christmas in Connecticut (bonus—this one is food-centric), National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, The Santa Clause, The Year Without a Santa Claus, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (animated and Jim Carrey), A Charlie Brown Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street (Natalie Wood version only, please).

I even love Christmas movies that are only tangentially Christmas movies—Meet Me in St. Louis (Judy Garland sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to that precocious little snot played by Margaret O’Brien), Love Finds Andy Hardy (Judy Garland at age twelve with Mickey Rooney; the only thing Christmasy about it is that they decorate a tree—the events could have taken place any time during the year), Little Women (the first few scenes take place at Christmas, that’s it), Trading Places (again, the events could have taken place at any time of the year, but Eddie Murphy is a scream—“Beef jerky time!”)

What I could not do with any great success is cook. We have, you see, eleven days until we move into our new house, so we’re packing. Yesterday I packed most of the plates, all but one coffee mug (only because it was on a top shelf and I couldn’t reach it), most of the cereal bowls, and a few of the salad plates. I also packed the pizza pan, the broiler pan, several cookie sheets, and the huge aluminum bowl I use for rising when I make double and triple batches of bread. I suspect my kids are going to get a lot of delivery pizza the next few days.

But the more important questions hang heavy on my mind. First, how will I organize the new kitchen, and second, what will I cook first in it??

In mulling the second question, I was thinking of a book I read called “House: A Memoir” by Michael Ruhlman, who is also very well known for his books on chefs and the food world. This one (which I recommend—a fast, interesting read) is about his experience with the renovation of an old house, including the gutting of the kitchen. When the kitchen was done, he said the first thing he made was a roast chicken, feeling that a roast chicken is the homiest thing you can make.

I can see that, and I’ve toyed with roast chicken. Whatever it is that gets made, it must use my new stove (or range, as the appliance people say), and preferably the oven part. So roast chicken is possible, but if I make that, only Alex and I will be eating it. My children wouldn’t touch roast chicken because it’s not ground up, reformed, breaded, and (most importantly) dinosaur-shaped. If I could get a regular roasting chicken in the shape of a dinosaur, I’m quite sure they’d suck it down.

Real estate agents often encourage people to bake cookies before houses are shown to prospective buyers, on the theory that the homey smell of chocolate chip cookies makes the buyer feel like they’ve wandered into an episode of Leave It To Beaver. And there’s something to be said for that. So chocolate chip cookies are a maybe too. Those my kids would eat. But my husband just made chocolate chip cookies this weekend, so I’m feeling a little CCC’d out. However, we are talking about eleven days from now.

Bread presents itself. It’s elemental (as is the roast chicken), the smell is homey, it requires time and effort, but not too much (I do have to get ready for Christmas, after all). My kids might eat homemade bread (if I didn’t tell them I’d made it). But somehow bread just doesn’t tickle my fancy.

Or do I do something a little more complicated, but that my kids might eat? Homemade pizza, for instance. I could make the sauce myself (excuse to use the stovetop), and they’d eat it, I know. But I really want a pizza stone, and so far I don’t have one (Santa). Plus my kids will be coming off a longish spate of delivery pizza as we shut down one kitchen and prepare to open the other, so they may not want pizza by then. We might go crazy and give them hot dogs for their first dinner in the new house (wacky, that’s us).

Some kind of soup and maybe biscuits would be nice. Again, like the pizza this lets me use stovetop and the oven, the soup isn’t terribly labor intensive, and the biscuits are quick. My kids wouldn’t eat the soup, but they’d eat biscuits. The question would be, what kind of soup? It would have be something that used chicken broth, because I have about two gallons of it frozen right now, and I need to use it. I’d like to do a vegetable soup, and I have a butternut squash sitting on my counter. The downside to this is that my husband doesn’t like butternut squash soup. He thinks it’s too sweet. I know—I didn’t find out about this character flaw until after we were married. I might be able to make a nice cream of cauliflower or something, I suppose.

Of course, apple pie would be a good choice too. Or perhaps apple turnovers. We’re in the heart of apple country (well, OK, we live near the heart of apple country—still, apples are a local food by any definition), and I have a wonderful recipe for Shaker hand pies that I’ve been wanting to try. I love the Shakers (more on this in another post), because their simplified way of living was just what we should all aspire to anyway—eating close to home, using the freshest of ingredients to make simple dishes that are comforting and delicious.

Anyway, this is a long debate I’ve been having for some time, and that I will continue to have for the next couple of weeks (or rather, ELEVEN DAYS—not that I’m counting), and I’ll be spending plenty of time thinking of just the right thing to make first in my new kitchen. Something homey, basic, warm, cozy, yet something meaningful. The same kinds of things that suit a rainy day--soup, bread, pie, cookies, a nice roast--are all the same sorts of things to make for a "first ever meal" because they're satisfying, but without being complicated or requiring a lot of fancy tools or ingredients. So this grey, rainy day is the perfect time to give it this subject the attention it deserves. I'm off to surf the internet for ideas.

Bite Me

Somehow, there are certain bites of things that always taste best. The first bite, the last bite. This morning I realized that there’s another bite that always tastes best: the bite you don’t get. The series of events that brought this to my attention I refer to as the Toast Episode.

At 4:30 this morning, all of my children got up (how do they know when I stayed up too late and could use an extra hour of sleep?) They wanted breakfast. Patrick wanted muffins, Matthew wanted toast. There were no thawed muffins, so I lied and told Patrick we were out of them (I know, I know, I’m going to Hell for lying to my children). He agreed to toast instead.

I took the bread out of the package, and put one slice in the toaster, then the other. Patrick wailed in protest. You’d have thought I was smearing the bread with sulfuric acid and insisting he eat it.

“No, no, no, no, no! No in toaster!”

“You just want it like this?” I asked, holding up the slice of bread.

“Yeh.”

So I put it on a plate and handed it to him. “There you go,” I said.

“’Ahnt pieces,” he insisted. (Translation: I want it cut up into pieces.) So I cut the piece of bread into squares, put it on the plate, and put it on the table in front of him. He looked at it like a scientist who had stumbled on a very common and not very interesting specimen.

“’Ahnt butter.”

Butter. Okaaayyyy.

“I don’t suppose you could have told me that before I cut it into all those small pieces, could you?” I asked rhetorically. I spread each little square with soft butter and returned it to His Majesty.

“Butter,” I said.

Pause. Pause.

“’Ahnt jam.”

Jam. Fine. So put a tiny dot of jam on each little piece and set the plate back down in front of him. About this time, Matthew’s slice of toast was toasted, spread with butter and jam, cut into pieces, and set down in front of him. Patrick looked at his “toast” and then at Matthew’s. Clearly Patrick’s didn’t measure up, even though I gave him exactly what he asked for.

He reached over to Matthew’s plate while Matthew wasn’t looking, and took a piece of toasted, butter-and-jam spread bread off of it and ate it. Matthew looked back just as the square disappeared into Patrick’s mouth.

“Ahhhhhh, give it!” Matthew whined.

I intervened and explained that the piece was gone.

“All gone!” Patrick repeated proudly.

Matthew sulked. Clearly that was the very best, most delectable square of toast on the plate, perhaps the most delectable in the entire history of toast. And it was gone. All gone. And Patrick got it. I’m going to have to comb the phone book this morning and see if perhaps there’s a support group I can take Matthew to.

The fallout from this is that as soon as I post this, I’ll be thawing some blueberry muffins. I’m not sure Matthew could endure that kind of crushing blow two days in a row.

I Never...

When I was younger, my friends and I played a drinking game called “I never” in which the object was to stay something completely humiliating or bizarre that you’d never done, and anyone who had done that thing had to drink. The idea, clearly, was to discover what outlandish things other people had done. (The game should, of course, be called "I've Never" to be perfectly grammatical about it.)

Something reminded me of this game a few weeks ago, and I’ve been thinking about the culinary version of it. What cooking-related things have I never done that I think I should have done, or that I’d like to have done? So here’s my list. As you read through it’s not necessary to drink when you come across a thing you have done that I haven’t (unless you want to, of course, in which case, by all means, do so).

I’ve never made hollandaise sauce from scratch. Or béarnaise sauce. Or really any of those classic butter-based sauces. Probably because I’ve never served Eggs Benedict to anyone. Although I have served filet mignon, which I’ve had served to me with béarnaise sauce in restaurants, but since my husband hates béarnaise sauce, I’ve never made it to go with filet at home.

I’ve never poached an egg. I don’t know why—it’s just never come up. As I said, I’ve never made Eggs Benedict, and I’ve never had any other need to poach an egg. Nor have I ever really craved one. I’ve eaten them, but I’ve never made them.

I’ve never made pudding from scratch. As a child of the packaged food generation, pudding was powder out of a box mixed with milk. My mother never made pudding from scratch either (my mother never made a lot of things from scratch), so I guess it never occurred to me to think of how “real” pudding was made (or even considered that there was such a thing as “real” pudding) until I was an adult, by which time I didn’t like it so much anymore. I might make pudding for my own kids one day, since pudding is a very kid food.

I’ve never had any success with buttercream frosting. It always tastes iceboxy. And it’s always too…too much. I don’t know if it’s greasy or slick or heavy or rich or what the exact word is I’m looking for here, but real buttercream that I’ve made is always too much for me. I might have had other people’s buttercream and loved it (I can’t recall every single encounter with buttercream in my life), but when I make it for my own cakes, I always am not enamored of it. I want to like it—after all, I made it, and I made it with good ingredients—but I just can’t warm up to it somehow. Maybe this is just me, and not the frosting.

I’ve never made jam. I really want to, but I have a couple of things currently stopping me. The first is my four children. They don’t leave me a lot of time for picking berries, preparing them, cooking them, and putting them up. The second thing is my fear of botulism. Marion Cunningham, updater of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, assures me that my fear is unfounded, and that it’s perfectly safe to put up preserves, but I’m still a little reluctant. That, combined with my conviction that all the lids would blow off the jars as I tried to “process” them, leaving my kitchen a mess and me a scarred shell of a woman, has kept me from making jam. In the next couple of years I’ll get over this and take the plunge. No doubt the details will be recorded here (assuming I survive the explosion[s]).

I’ve never had any luck frying chicken. In spite of the fact that I think this is one of the more important things every cook should know how to do, I confess that I pretty much suck at it. I know technically how to do it, but I’ve never had any success with the execution. Just like some people can’t make pie crust, or bread, or white sauce, I’m just a Fried Chicken Failure. It’s always burnt on the outside and raw on the inside. Maybe I’ll try again someday. Better make a note to do it before making the jam, in case the exploding jars take out my kitchen.

I’ve never made fish stock. I’ve never really had a need, to be honest. We don’t eat much fish, we don’t eat much fish soup, so I’ve never had either the components or the need. There are a few things I’d like to make that call for fish stock, such as bouillabaisse. As my kids get older, one of my goals is to start introducing them to more fish so that we all become more fish eaters (it just seems a crying shame to live a ferry ride + a short walk away from Pike Place Market—Home of the Heaved Salmon—and not eat more fish), so no doubt I’ll remedy this at some point.

I’ve never cooked a whole fish. See above. Also, the idea of a fish with its head on kind of ooks me out. I have a friend who insists that she doesn’t eat anything that ever had a nose (which I think is kind of an overly cute way of saying she only eats chicken and fish, and I’d like to point out that chickens do have noses, just not in the traditional sense that we as humans do, but whatever), and I for one am somewhat put off by a dish that can actually look me in the eye. Which isn’t to say that I won’t eat it, or I have a rule about not eating food that can stare back at me or anything like that. I just have some reservations on this one, and it’s going to take me a little time to get over them. I think we’re looking at a lot of fish filets and steaks until I can work through this one.

I’ve never made puff pastry or croissants from scratch. I’m a bit intimidated by this kind of dough, frankly. I, who stand as a mighty soldier before yeast, am a tad cowed by the whole butter-flour-fold it-turn it-refrigerate it type of dough. It just seems there’s more chance for me to screw it up. With bread dough, I toss in the yeast and it does its thing. As long as it’s not too old or too hot, it complies. With puff pastry, there’s more of me involved in the process, and therefore more chance that my fallibility will reveal itself.

I’ve never made pasta. This is something I’ve always wanted to do, and think it would be such fun, but I’ve heard that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, and this would be one of those things that I would try to make for a dinner party, and my guests would arrive to find me sobbing uncontrollably over a misshapen pile of goo. They’d try to comfort me: “Really, it’s great looking linguini!” and I’d wail, “It was supposed to be tortellini!!” Maybe one day when I’m feeling brave, and cavalier about the possibility of dumping a couple of pounds of flour right into the trash, and just have a few hours to do absolutely nothing at all, I’ll give it a try.

There are plenty of other things I’ve never done—made pate from scratch (my mom was big on doing this, for some reason--she never made pudding, or dinner, but she'd grind up chicken livers and wrap them in bacon...go figure), cooked on a woodstove (my aunts have both done this), tried brains or sweetbreads (I have an uncle who has eaten just about everything deemed edible by any group of people in the world). On the other hand, my aunts and uncle have never roasted a whole pig.

Or Not To Make

As anyone who’s been following along knows, there are many things I won’t hesitate to make from scratch, in spite of perfectly acceptable versions being available in any grocery store (English muffins, yogurt, etc). But there are a few things that I promise never to make from scratch because I think it would just be such a total waste of time.

Marshmallows
I was reading an article about saving money, and one woman was remarking that in almost every case, she could make homemade versions of things more economically than she could buy them at the grocery store—cookies and so on. One thing she said was a flop was homemade marshmallows. They took four hours to make and didn’t taste very good, she said.

I only ever knew one other person (besides Martha Stewart) who made marshmallows from scratch. I worked with a woman named Betsy who brought them in to our office one time, and was offering some to the CIO of the company while I was standing in the kitchen.

“Homemade marshmallows!” she exclaimed, “Try one!”

I can’t remember if he did or not, but I do remember my coworker Laurie and I exchanging looks, and Laurie saying, “Why would you make marshmallows?” and my replying, “I thought you needed chemicals to make marshmallows.”

So I promise never to make marshmallows. Maybe I shouldn’t say never on this one, but I at least won’t rant about how great homemade marshmallows are if I do make them.

Dried Fruit
I’ve already said I don’t really care for dried fruit, except for dried cherries. I can also handle dried blueberries in scones. But I will never bother to make my own dried fruit, even if I do someday come around and decide I like it a lot. I knew a couple who had one of those dehydrators, and he used to make things like beef jerky (surprisingly, this was before the low carb craze) and dried apples. It seemed weird to me then, it seems weird to me now.

Tortillas
I don’t really anticipate this ever happening either. The ones I can buy at my grocery store are fine, and I don’t care enough about Mexican food to go to the trouble of making them. Along these same lines, I won’t be cutting up tortillas to make my own chips, either.

Salsa
Kind of ties in with tortillas. Newman’s Own mild chunky is good enough. I find homemade salsa to be too watery, because no one ever lets the tomatoes drain properly, so you wind up dipping your chip into a pool of water with some tomato in it. The chip just gets soggy. And the onions always taste too raw to me in homemade salsa.

Noodles & Sauce Type Dishes
I went through a flirtation with making homemade facsimiles of those noodles-and-powdered-sauce products you can buy. I will not do this again. I went so far as to research sources of powdered cheeses (kingarthurflour.com). I think I may even have made a couple of them. It won’t happen again, I promise.

Peanut Butter
Store-bought peanut butter is perfectly acceptable. I have no urge to shell and grind my own peanuts. Even the stations in the grocery store where you can grind it on the spot the way you can grind coffee don’t hold any interest for me.

Vegetable Juice
I just drink V-8 sometimes. I don’t need to buy a $300 juicer and make my own. Also, I’m sure I could never get a combination of juices I liked. It would always be too heavy on the carrot, or too light on the tomato or something. And the idea of single-ingredient vegetable juice (other than possibly tomato juice, and even that’s pushing it) makes me curl my lip. No carrot juice for me.

Chocolate Syrup
The same woman who didn’t like homemade marshmallows also makes chocolate syrup for her kids. I’m not even sure how to begin making chocolate syrup, other than to buy some chocolate. Would it just be chocolate and Karo syrup? That seems kind of disgusting, although that’s probably what’s in a can of Hershy’s syrup (note to self: check ingredients on Hershey’s syrup can when next at grocery store). Still, I don’t think that’s anything I’m ever going to bother with, mostly because I really don’t want to encourage my kids to drink chocolate milk instead of white milk. Right now the oldest one will drink chocolate milk occasionally, but the twins still don’t like it, so let’s just keep it that way. White milk is a lot better for them.

Those are the things I can think of right now that I’m unlikely to ever bother making. All bets are off on things like sausage, ricotta cheese, pasta, ketchup (although this one is unlikely, since I understand homemade doesn’t get as thick as the commercially made product), mustard. Tune in next week and you may read that I’ve made fig jam, but I won’t be serving it with homemade marshmallows.

Just Lukewarm

I’ve been reading cookbooks (again!) and I realize there are a few things I just can’t warm up to. It’s not that I hate them, or would refuse to eat them if they were served to me, but they’re things that thus far I haven’t been able to get friendly with, and I don’t know if I ever will.

Raisins
I’ve seen so many recipes for savory things with raisins in them lately, mostly calling for golden raisins. I’ll eat an oatmeal raisin cookie, and my cousin recently gave me some homemade granola that had golden raisins in it that I was surprised to find I really liked, but on the whole, raisins just don’t do it for me.

In fact, let’s just make that dried fruit. I don’t mind dried apples, and I’ll eat dried apricots, but I don’t like dried fruit that has been soaked in something (generally wine) and used to make an entrée. The only thing I kind of like is dried cherries with duck. I don’t know how dried cherries make it onto the list, but I do like them.

Bow Tie Pasta
I know this is just pasta in a different shape, but I think bow ties are a dumb pasta shape. Somewhere in my vast collection of cookbooks is one of the first books I ever got after I got married. It’s the Eating Well Rush Hour cookbook, and while I couldn’t tell you much of anything else that’s in it off the top of my head, I know that the first recipe in the book is a sort of pasta primavera that calls for bow ties. I know that because I used that cookbook hundreds of times, and I always snorted with derision as I flipped past that recipe. I have no idea why I’m so hostile toward an innocuous pasta shape, but I am.

Cornish Game Hens
Yes, yes, they’re darling and isn’t it cute that each person gets their own little chicken. How about if each person just gets their own chicken breast, and let’s call it a day? Cornish game hens just seem kind of silly to me. I can’t eat a whole one, and because they have all those little bones, they’re hard to pick apart. I used to want to make them, and my husband used to resist, so maybe that tainted me. He’d never let me make them, so gradually I came to be contemptuous of them.

Cranberries
Too sour for me. And here’s a story that my sister-in-law will remember (and I hope smile at, just as I now tell the story and laugh): one Christmas we were visiting my in-laws. My sister-in-law and her family have a few holiday traditions that she likes to continue, even when she’s not with them. Brunch out on Christmas Eve is one, a cranberry apple pie is another. Somehow, there was a swirl around the pie—I never did really understand what happened, but I think my mother-in-law expressed a total lack of interest in the pie, and my sister-in-law gave up the idea of making it. Then an hour before dinner (or something), my mother-in-law turned to my sister-in-law and said “Well, aren’t you going to make the pie?”

So the pie was made, but my sister-in-law was annoyed with my mother-in-law, so the whole subject of The Pie was a sore one. At the dinner table, I tried to stretch my ice cream out so that it would match my pie (the sweet of the ice cream compensating for the cranberries). I failed, so I figured I’d just leave the last little bit and no one would notice, or care. My husband looked at my plate and announced in a loud voice “You’re not eating your pie.” I did eat the rest of it, but he got a talking-to about not ever, ever remarking on what I was or was not eating during the meal. And, to give him his due, he never has since.

That’s the Cranberry Pie story. The End.

Olives
I’ve really, really tried. I’ve eaten green, I’ve eaten black, I’ve eaten tapenade (which I can actually eat because it usually goes on bread). I just don’t care for olives in things. Or plain. And one of the great travesties of our time is that generic cocktail party fare is now hummus with pita chips, a bowl of olives, and possibly a bowl of nuts. In the 70s at least you got deviled eggs and cheese and crackers.

Things Made with Fresh Corn
Yes, you’re right—I am a Communist. I don’t really give a damn about fresh corn. On the cob, off the cob, don’t care. Things made with it—chowder, salads, corn bread—don’t care. Which is not to say I don’t like corn bread, or polenta, or grits. In fact, I love all of those things. It’s the corn itself I can do without. My husband loves it. I never cared much about it as a kid, although I do remember being sad that it was hard to eat corn on the cob with braces, but as an adult I really don’t care about it. And the rhapsodic verse that flows forth from the pens of cookbook authors and newspaper columnists every summer when corn is ripe influences me not at all. I just don’t get it, I guess.

Rice Salads
Rice is not something out of which salad should be made. Pasta salad is pushing it. Let’s just all stop trying to make salad out of rice. Thank you.

There are probably other things that I could think of, but I’ll stop there. Reading cookbooks always makes me think of these things that are not high on my list of favorite foods. Of course, in between I wind up salivating over things that sound great. Sometimes I just need to whine a little about things I don’t much like, just as other times I need to extol the virtues of things I love. These aren't things that I loathe with a passion, you understand, I'm just completely lukewarm about them.

My Trip to the Grocery Store

My daughter is home sick today (nothing serious) so I got a chance to do what I love to do most. Well, one of the things I love to do most—I got to browse around in the grocery store. I needed infant Ibuprofen for her, and so naturally I figured I’d just check things out and see what was new. A few random thoughts occurred to me that I thought I’d toss out there.

There Just Isn’t a Brand of Natural Peanut Butter I Like Out Here
I prefer the “natural” peanut butter to the stuff with sugar and other random ingredients in it. Although I was raised on Peter Pan, I switched over to the natural kind for reasons I no longer remember, and now can’t stand the peanut-flavored sugar spread.

Today I was looking for a crunchy natural peanut butter to use in a recipe. I used to buy Smucker’s, but for some reason, while they carry all varieties of Smucker’s jams in my grocery store, peanut butter is beyond the realm of their imagination. Or they don’t have the shelf space. Or something. Anyway, all they have is this brand, Adams, which is nast. I tried it when we first moved out here. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, since how can you screw up pulverized peanuts, but the company that makes Adams has found a way.

And because I’m an internet-addicted freak, I just looked up which idiots that would be who make Adams natural peanut butter, and lo and behold, it’s our old friends at Smucker’s. I kind of had a hunch that was the way it was. Best Foods mayonnaise is Hellman’s, and Eddy’s and Drucker’s ice cream are the same, too. I suspect there’s a lot of this. But knowing this doesn’t help me at all, because they’ve done something to the formula of Smucker’s natural peanut butter and it just doesn’t taste right. I did find that Skippy (or maybe it’s Jif) makes a “natural” version that’s OK, but this particular store didn’t carry it, so I’ll have to look elsewhere, I guess.

This 100 Calorie Pack Thing is a Pretty Annoying Trend
Something you just can’t avoid if you set foot in a grocery store these days is packs of high calorie junk food in “100 Calorie” bags. Everyone is packaging everything you can think of in 100 calorie packs. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for portion control, but this is ridiculous. I can now buy 100 calorie packs of Oreos (except they’re not Oreos—they’re just little chocolate wafer cookies, which I think is false advertising), Chips Ahoy!, Cheez-its, and both cheddar and chocolate Chex Mix. Oh, and Doritos and Cheetos. And because they’re in 100 calorie portions, they’re healthy, right?

On the plus side, I did get a giggle out of it. The Doritos and Cheetos are, of course, on the chip aisle. As I was continuing down the aisle, I noticed the large bags of Funions and started thinking about how they could do a 100 calorie pack of those things. You’d either get three, or they’d give you a little pouch of Funion dust. I can’t wait.

Grocery Stores are Dangerous
This isn’t something that’s exactly a new thought to me. I realized it a long time ago, but it came home to me again today. I went in for one thing, as I mentioned: infant Ibuprofen. I walked out with this: infant Ibuprofen, infant Tylenol Cough & Cold (I think I can be excused for this), fresh rosemary, cream of tartar, smoke flavored sea salt, two toothbrushes, the July issue of Gourmet magazine, the July/August issue of Cottage Living magazine, and a greeting card.

Just what was I thinking? You may well ask (or you may not ask, but if you keep reading, you’re going to find out anyway).

The rosemary I realized we would want because we’re having lamb chops for dinner tonight, and the rosemary we had in the fridge is pretty old so I wanted to make sure we had enough to make the recipe.

The need for cream of tartar occurred to me because I made blueberry muffins yesterday, and as I was making them I was thinking (as I always do when I use baking powder) of making my own baking powder. It’s just a combination of baking soda and cream of tartar, so it’s not like it’s hard, but homemade doesn’t have the sour taste that some commercial baking powders have. I’ve never gotten around to making this, but I always mean to, so I bought the cream of tartar so that next time I get the urge (and have my copy of Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking unpacked, which it is not right now because we’re in residence limbo), I’ll be ready.

The smoke flavored salt (which sounds like a nasty cousin of Liquid Smoke) was called for in a recipe I was reading over the weekend, and I toyed with the idea of making it, so I bought the salt when I saw it, rather than risk it not being there when I was ready for it. This has happened to me far too many times. I see a recipe and think “Hm, that looks good…I’ll make that some time.” It calls for an unusual spice or seasoning, which I notice in the grocery store the next time I’m there, because of course I’ve just been reading about it. Finally the day arrives when I’m ready to make the recipe, and I go off in search of juniper berries, or orange flower water, or smoke flavored sea salt, and it’s nowhere to be found. This time I decided to buy the salt when I saw it, since salt doesn’t go bad, and it’s not exactly a staggeringly expensive ingredient to be stockpiling.

The toothbrushes were on sale, and I realized I didn’t know if we had any spares. I dropped mine on the bathroom floor this morning after brushing my teeth, and that, naturally, was the end of that toothbrush. So I bought two new ones, just in case.

I love magazines, and I probably ought to just flat out subscribe to Cottage Living, because I think I buy it every month on the newsstand anyway. I bought Gourmet to confirm that I still hate Gourmet. Several friends and I agree that Ruth Reichel just ruined that magazine. It used to be interesting, and have good recipes, even if it was a little pretentious. Now it’s lost the interesting parts, and the good recipes, and has retained the pretension, so that it’s downright unbearable. But every couple of years I buy it to confirm that, yes, I still hate the “new” Gourmet, and won’t be buying it again until Ruth Reichel moves on to something (anything) else, and someone else takes over and makes it a good magazine again. Check back in a week or so, and I’m sure I’ll have a tirade about what it is I hate about the “new” Gourmet magazine posted here.

The greeting card is for a friend. It was one of those “This is TOO perfect for so-and-so” cards, so naturally I had to buy that.

A friend of mine and I had a discussion about this very topic the day she went in for something like bouillon cubes and walked out with $75 worth of stuff. She remarked that it seemed that every time she went to the grocery store, even if it was just for “one little thing,” it set her back at least 50 bucks.

I think what’s so dangerous about grocery stores is that it all seems so legitimate. You have to eat, after all. And you need things like paper towel, and greeting cards, and those things don’t go bad, so why not buy them while you’re there? I know this is just exactly what the grocery store marketing people want me to think. Well, congratulations, ladies and gentlemen, it worked. Of course not everyone is as big a sucker for a grocery store as I am. I just go in to browse. But even for people without the strange genetic flaw that causes them to find grocery stores to be fascinating places to wander around are taken in by this marketing ploy. I can’t decide if I’d rather be an unwitting victim who just wants to get in and out of the grocery store but winds up leaving with a sackful of things anyway, or if I’m glad I’m an informed, interested victim who falls willingly into their outstretched hand. It’s sort of a moot point, since I am fully aware of what they’re doing, and yet continue to be sucked into the scheme.

So those, as my mother used to say, were my thought processes. I’d have thought more thoughts, but along about aisle 12 my daughter started to get fussy and I felt it was best to get her home and give her some Tylenol and a bottle. And I’m sure everyone reading this is glad I did, and kind of wishes maybe my daughter was less patient, and had gotten fussy on aisle 3 so I’d have had less time to think things.