winter comes back or maybe it never left

It was just a little bit above zero when I got up this morning. It barely got above ten degrees this afternoon. And we thought spring was coming. Paul Douglas says this March will not be like last March. No kidding. Here's the bunny update:


Regis is reading me the forecast which sounds grim, indeed. An inch of moisture and high winds next week. An inch of moisture translates to an obscene amount of you-know-what.

I made chicken parmesan for dinner. Very simple Rachel Ray recipe except that I didn't know what a chicken cutlet was. Regis knew, having experienced this dish in the past. I don't know how it slipped by me. He says it's an Italian dish so there you go. No wonder. I'm not much for ordering chicken out in any kind of cuisine.

I made myself some seared ahi tuna which was delicious and enough to make lunch for the next two days. Regis has a bad Catholic history with fish of any kind but tuna especially. I buy a better quality of canned tuna now than I did in my old days but I have fond memories of tuna. Tuna casserole, tuna sandwiches, Tuna Helper. Kidding about the last one. Tuna Helper comes out of the same culinary hell as Jello and faux meatballs.

My kids always loved box macaroni and cheese. I tried to sever them home-made mac and cheese once and they objected because it wasn't yellow like the real stuff. They still prefer box cake mixes and Tiffany prefers Stove Top stuffing. I can sort of understand that. I haven't eaten a frozen pizza for a long time but I do get a hankering for them. It's like a completely different food than real pizza but still good once in a while.

I used to teach a class for Community Education called Kitchen Writing. One of the pieces I wrote was about the Jeno's Pizza of my youth. There was a little bag that you made the dough from, a tiny can of sauce, and a wax packet of parmesan cheese. I swear my mom cut wieners into slim slices in place of pepperoni. She says this is not an accurate memory and she could be right, but really, where you find pepperoni in Canby in the 60's? We thought the pizza was wonderful, with or without wieners, and it's one of my predominant food memories. (Mom was a good cook. This pizza memory is no reflection on her!)

The Kitchen Writing class was a real kick. One of the things I had people do was to choose a kitchen from their past and draw a map of it, a bird's eye view. Amazing things came out of the maps...things they didn't even know they remembered, hidden in their minds, waiting to come to the surface. I don't teach any writing classes anymore and I miss it.

Maybe after I retire, I'll gather all those little pieces of writing that I did with students over the years and publish them here. I lost a lot of my writing when I changed computers a few years ago. I didn't know much about PCs and as I was moving things onto an external hard drive, they disappeared. Poof. Ah, well. Such is life.

I finally mailed a package to Nicole and Jason's new baby today. I wanted to shop for him at the new gift shop downtown but I went there 4 (FOUR!) times and it was never open. Had to shop in a different place, then it took a week to get the stuff in a box, then another week to address the box and go to the PO. Am I the only person who takes this long to get something done? Good grief.

Off to bed. I managed to stay up until 7:15. That's it.

Comments

mom said…
Hey, the Lutherans in Canby love those faux meatballs. I put them in a crock pot with some Famous Dave's sauce on them. The crock pot is always empty when I pick it up after a church pot luck dinner. I have heard some men saying "yum". Maybe their wives are horrible cooks.

Popular posts from this blog

festival of winter fun

being thankful

dreams and sucking out the bad stuff