Real Food Versus Swill

You may have read about the horse meat scandal in Europe.  Years ago, also in Europe, I felt certain that I had been served horse meat.  By the way, it wasn't very good with a sort of sweetish taste.  Yuck!

A restaurant in suburban Chicago used to substitute shark for swordfish.   Double-yuck.  

This European horse meat ended up in processed foods.  Why was I not surprised?  Have  you ever read the labels on frozen dinners?  "Meat product."  What the hell is meat product, I mean, is it Meat?   You will read a list of chemicals as long as your arm.  Beware of processed foods and learn to read labels.

Yesterday, we were at Walmart buying cat food and picking up a few grocery items.  Our Walmart has a huge new food section with good prices.  Not only do they have the usual grocery products, but they have beautiful organic salad greens and Polish ham.  It's become a nice place to shop.  The cheese dept. if scanty, but hey,  you can't have everything.  They even have chopped up kale with the stems removed.  This is a chore I don't mind doing (see below) but if you need it in quantity, it would be a real boon.

We are in the checkout line behind a mother and son.  Son still sits in the cart and looks to be five or six.  Mother is fairly nondescript but pleasant-looking.  I can barely cast my eyes on these two, because they are glommed onto a package of dollar-sized pancakes.   50 to a package.  Precooked.  Never seen anything like it.  The rest of the order was one over-processed item after another, and the only "fresh" food was a clamshell of strawberries.  And she spent over $100.00.  On junk food.  That poor kid.  Child abuse comes in many forms.

Now I have to confess that we don't always make pancakes from scratch, but rather haul out the Bisquick and add milk and egg. Sometimes I substitute orange or cranberry juice for part of the liquid.  Add frozen blueberries and such.  Takes maybe two minutes to prepare the batter.  After that all you need is a skillet or  grill and a spatula.  Pre-made pancakes?  And I thought waffles were silly. 

Read the label on a margarine container or (horrors) reduced fat cream.  Even Egg Beaters.  Explore the wonders of chemistry.  You will never find "all natural" on any of these products.  Maybe some good honest horse meat would be better.  If you knew what it was.  Does your lasagne taste different lately?  

People, for heaven's sake, learn to cook and get rid of your lipophobia.  Eat real food.  Eat real good.  Your body will thank you.

OMG!  What are your kids eating at school?

"Ovenable" pancakes. Wha????

Tweet! Tweet!

I've been on Twitter for a few years and finally amassed over 1000 Tweets.  Don't think I use the system right, as I don't read anything except when  I sign on to Tweet.  My Facebook comments seem to end up on Twitter and my Tweets on Facebook, something I will try to fix. 

One of my big Twitter peeves is all the people who begin their descriptions with either the words "Mom" or "Dad."  I don't know these people, and I do not really care if they are a mom or dad, and the adjective "loving" is even more off-turning.  II have stopped following anyone who mentions the fact of parenthood.  Lots of us are parents, and this aspect of our lives does not inform the tweets that might interest me, tweets about writing, publishing, food, gardening, travel, Boston, or the things I find interesting.  If someone notes a recipe is "kid friendly," well, that may be of interest, but I don't care if these are your kids, grandkids, the neighborhood gang, or whomever.  End of rant.

Beautiful fall day in Boston. Maples are turning.  25 mile backup on the Mass Pike yesterday.  People heading to the Berkshires for the long Columbus Day weekend, or may to New York City.

Made a quick trip to Walmart before the crowds.  Beginning of the month is always crazy, because that's when the Social Security, Pension, etc. checks come in.  Our Walpole Walmart has a great new supermarket.  Cider and apples are dear this fall, and the stores have already raised the price of canned applesauce, although I suspect it's not necessarily made with this season's apples.  Always a big Gotcha!  The price of cider is out of sight.  Grrr.

Dogwood and Rulon, the two who mix it up early in the morning in the bedroom

Grumpy today because awakened by a cat fight in the bedroom very early.  Can't they  find another room?

We thought someone had stolen our "Garten Zwerg"  (garden dwarf) but Significant Other  had brought it in and forgotten that he did.  The dwarf is small, smiling a jolly smile and he grips a mug or beer.  Brought all the way from the Fatherland.

The deck begonias are blooming their hearts out.  Nasturtiums still good, as is verbena.  Picked the last two tomatoes yesterday.  Still lots of color in the gardens.  I've seen daisies blooming as well as asters.  My sedum is glorious.

The Pope's Butler got 18 months.  Too bad he wasn't assigned cat care.  See previous post.  I am off to do some garden chores and give the cat her insulin.  Schedule got a little disrupted yesterday.  Usually she comes and tells me.  Animals are amazing.

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Report from the Trenches

So, I'm prepping to convert from PC to MAC, and yesterday I took a gander at some old Zip drives to find out what was on them, because the new computer won't have a Zip port, and well, you know. At one point I made the HUGE mistake of clicking on a MONEY backup and the PC asked did I want to Restore to this Version and I said, no, cancel, get the hell out of there.

Hours later, when I got into MONEY, eeek! You guessed it. A fresh clean copy asking for me to input my data. O.K., this happened once before and I just restored the latest copy, except somehow I had backed up the Null copy, so the backup was no good. I had to go back into all the ZIP drives, and sure enough I found a 4 day old backup. Except the system wouldn't get it. It found it, but wouldn't restore. So I jumped through hoops (all this while I am cooking two new dishes for dinner) and moved (finally) the backup to a new folder on my hard drive, because I had saved ALL the old Money backups, many of them archives, and the folder was too confusing.

This damn PC always knows when I in a hurry and it's slowly dying, hence the haste to get off. Stress to the max. My restore worked, and I only had to rekey a few items, and I fished the receipts out of the trash next to my desk.

We let the produce man at Roche Brothers talk us into buying some unfamiliar squash varieties, and yesterday was "let's cook 'em up" day. I had a good sounding recipe with prunes, walnuts, brown sugar and bourbon, and yes, it was delicious, but kind of time consuming. Then the chicken which was supposed to last for 2 days turned out to be 3 pieces, which meant a quick trip to the store today. I used the opportunity to buy a wreath, more about that later, some bone-in pork chops (hard to find in this era of shortcuts) and 2 sweet potatoes, the memorial alas-no-more-Mrs.-Pauls potatoes. RIP.

Lots of buzz today about Amazon vs. Walmart, and I shopped in both today. A coffee maker for a Christmas present on Amazon, and a trip to sundries at Walmart. Well, the trip was mostly for Thisbe's diabetes syringes, except we got the wrong ones. Bought a bunch of other stuff. Not the zoo I expected today, but the bus had dropped the seniors off, with wheel chairs, etc. Nice that they get to shop there too. And Save! I found Barkeeper's Friend. Mine was so old that I feared it wasn't even made anymore. The scrubbing POWDERS are becoming fewer and fewer. Remember when that's all there was to clean a sink. Since, like 6th grade, I had to clean the bathroom sink every morning at home and it had to pass my Mom's white glove test. I did all the ironing except my Dad's shirts, too. Can you imagine? Poor me! A child slave.

On the way out of Walmart, I saw a woman with 3 boxes of Stovetop Stuffing Mix, and felt sad for her guests to have to eat over-processed stuffing out of a box. The woman in front of me, looked to be between 65 and 70. She bought $95.00 worth of stuff, including 6 big packages of tin foil baking pans, like for a small fruitcake or bread, except double, for two, and each with it's own clear plastic lid. Ye gods, she was gearing up for a LOT of cooking. Must have had over 100 pans. I'll bet no Stove Top for her, and the idea of whipping up so many fruitcakes, cranberry breads, whatever, is daunting.

While I stood in line at the drug counter, S.O. looked at Walmart for wreathe, way back in the gardening department, and he related the weaths looked kind of scraggly and behold, they were artificial and made in China. BUY A REAL WREATH, FOR GOD'S SAKE!!

So I came home and made mini-Halloween pumpkin cupcakes with a butter/cream cheese frosting, half of which I dyed orange (food coloring). They look awfully cute, and I'll take some to the neighbor's tonight and the rest to our host tomorrow, along with my dessert and the green bean casserole from scratch.

If you want to make the cupcakes, I think they'll be great right thru the holidays. I had to buy special self-rising flour, but it can be utilized for biscuits, and what could be yummier than home-made biscuits? I know! More home-made cup cakes.

http://www.bonappetit.com/magazine/fasteasyfresh/2009/10/mini_halloween_pumpkin_cupcakes

Breathless but productive,

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Typical Day in the Life of a Retiree

Awake at nine and a half-hour in bed with coffee and the still-with-us Boston Globe. Cat comes up for lovey time. Plunks herself down in mid-paper. How sweet it is.

Down to the kitchen and make blueberry pancakes out of yesterday's waffle batter. Two slices of bacon per person, our idea of dieting. It warn't turkey bacon, either.

Clean up kitchen, spot clean tablecloth and throw in a load of laundry. Monday is still washday.

Give Thisbe her insulin shot.

Onto computer for email, blogging, and working on today's reading for the writing group. Wrote 4 pages yesterday. Good for me.

Shower, etc.

Off to Walmart for cat litter, insulin needles, cat food and a few assorted groceries. I used to scorn Walmart, before retirement and the cats many needs.

Looking for rhubard for rhubard bread later in week. Hope it's not $5.99 per lb. again.

Drop off key for cat sitter with instructions.

Baking food processor bread, and freeform blueberry tart. Dinner is a salad with grilled steak (cooked last night) on top.

Watch a little Wimbleton.

Water houseplants.

Print out reading for tonight.

Wine and cheese, then dinner. La-de-dah!

Off to writing group.

Blueberry tart. Maybe a little reading or TV. Insulin to cat again.

Read more of Eat, Pray, Love on Kindle. Lights out!

Surviving a Water Landing

A few years ago, researching a short story that I have yet to write, I ran across the following article which is germane to yesterday's crash landing of a passenger plane in the Hudson River. See the link at the end of this blog.

Isn't it just unbelievably great and cool and wonderful to have a bit of really good news? And with the inauguration coming up, life looks good even if the economy is still in the toilet.

A mini-report on the economy as witnessed by me today: Chinese restaurant C.K. Shanghai in Wellesley, good crowd, good food, cheap menu. I went for General Gau's chicken.

At the AAA in Westwood: lots of people. Like us, they must be getting maps and guides to go somewhere. Price of gas is up again.

At Walmart: again, lots of people, many buying groceries. We got cat litter, cat food, cat diabetic supplies and bottled water. I am buying Fancy Feast without gluten for the diabetic cat.

At the tire store: not crowded but phone ringing and some customers. Ye gods, what a new set of tires will set you back. Holy freakin' crap!

People are out and about and buying lunch, planning trips and cruising the Walmart aisles. This is good.

Here is the link to the water landing site:http://www.equipped.org/watertrees.htm

Notes from All Over

Caption: A cats gotta do what a cats gotta do.

Everyone and his brother, mother-in-law, and 2nd cousins was out running errands today, after three days of snow. I have this to report:

More people are shopping at Walmart than Nordstroms, and Walmart had some pretty decent women's tee shirts for $5.00. I buy them for a) workouts and b) pajama tops. Walmart has the cheapest cat litter in the country. And the cats like it!

It used to be that baggers in a super market, unless they were totally out-of-it sixteen year olds, knew how to, well, how to bag groceries. Now, no matter the age, no matter what we say, the baggers still stick two big bottles of cranberry juice and 2 large jars to tomato sauce in the same sack. If you bring reusable bags in, as we do, and there aren't quite enough, the bagger just jams everything together. Do they ask, "Paper or plastic?" for the remainder. Nope.

It can be hard to intuit where in the store grocery items are stored. Sometimes, when you ask, the clerk knows, and sometimes, there's much head-scratching and wandering about, and it's like a treaure hunt with no map until finally, finally, the missing item is located. So far this month, barley has been the most elusive foodstuff.

The main roads are plowed, but major roads are still hard to park on, i.e. poorly plowed at the edges. This was true in Providence, where we damn near died getting across the street, over the snowbank, past the sheet of ice and in the door. Damn! This is living dangerously. My idea of living dangerously is going into town for dinner without reservations, although this year, that is probably not an issue.

Last night, still recovering from the stomach whatever, I felt like chilling on the sofa and watching some nice Christmas show. The only thing I could find was on the Grand Ol Oprey channel. A group, Clay Jar or something like that did a wonderful "Little Drummer Boy," but "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was too much of a "treatment" for me, and I looked for something else. Zilch! Can you believe it? No Christmas music the Sunday before Christmas?

This afternoon Annie gave voice to two mad meows. S.O. was her target. Where were you? Why didn't you take a nap today? She offers no quarter. Besides her tail, a cat's ears give her emotional temperature away. Of course the eyes tell their own tales. Very emotional creatures, are cats. This year they've been respectful of the tree and (most of) the ornaments. Sometimes a cats just gotta do what a cats gotta do.

More anon,

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Black Friday

Greed is ugly whether manifested by greedy bankers and businessmen or greedy shoppers, whipped to a frenzy by advertising and the lure of Black Friday"bargains."

I am appalled. The fact that a horde of "Christmas" shoppers would trample store employees like pilgrims in Mecca is shocking. Well, Christ left Christmas years ago and not only that but the true spirit of giving is gone, along with fellowship and charity. Now I guess all those shoppers were "holiday" or "seasonal" shoppers. They were rampaging clods and to an extent you have to blame retailers for creating this kind of a climate. This whole season and economy reminds one of why the moneychangers were driven from the temple.

Retail was my unwilling corporate home for years. I always hated it. Loved manufacturing--"fulfillment" was somewhat short of fulfilling, but oh god, retail was detail, and the people in the back offices were often not my type.

Retailers bitch and moan about everything. Too hot. Too cold, Too this. Too that. Of course this year they have the economy to bitch and moan about. You could not pay me enough to stand in line at 4:00 a.m. to get into a retail store. Are these people crazy? The so-called bargains will be just as good in two-three weeks. Maybe better. We don't need them anyway.

This frenzy for consumer goods is really getting to me. My friend, when we were discussing the wardrobe malfunction of Caribou Barbie, said, "Well, any blouse costs $400! "
Excuse me? Last winter I found a very nice shirt at Brooks Brothers outlet and it cost nowhere near that.
Of course my friend lives on Fifth Avenue and shops on Madison Avenue, and I know she shops the sales, but nonetheless.

If I bought a $400 blouse you can just about bet that it would have a grease stain on it before you can say "spot remover!"

I am thinking of a Christmas boycott this year. Books, yes, magazine subscriptions, yes. Maybe warm socks or pajamas. Flannel shirts, the soft warm kind. Mittens. Cat toys.

But all this consumption is disgusting. Really.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/business/29walmart.html?em

Bah humbug.

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Old Farts at Wal-Mart

Ye gods, Wal-Mart has become super busy lately, and I guess that tells you something about the economy. We buy their kitty litter, which they are usually out of, but that's a different story.

After finding n0 litter, we popped into Dunkin' Donuts for, natch, a donut and coffee, and would you believe everyone in there was a senior and some of the folks, were senior-seniors. Looked like we had stumbled into a rest home cafeteria. Except for the guy (no spring chicken, either) who yakked to his lawyer on his cell phone the whole time, saying some pretty interesting stuff about lawsuits, his son, his money, yada yada. There is no vignette so small that it wouldn't interest a writer.

So found a tiny table amidst the wheel chairs and walkers and tired looking white-haired shoppers. Maybe Wal-mart has half-price perscriptions on Fridays. We bought Shout and Mouthwash and a bottle of Cranberry Juice.

Last time I was at Wal-Mart was on a Saturday. They place was mobbed, and people were dragging up multiple shopping carts. Looked like the world was going to end and everyone just had to buy a bunch of stuff first. Or something.

We bought one box of litter and two Polly Pockets dolls.

Thisbe (I missed cat blog day this week), has been extra pensive of late, and looks a bit out of sorts. I told her about the pope who visited Boston liking cats a lot. Thisbe has a white cross on her chest, and maybe she thinks she missed a special blessing or something. I don't know.

I'm leaving for Northern Nevada (nice alliteration, huh?) on Tuesday and trying to get out of town is always such a hassle. Idea for mystery novel set in a tiny town in the desert. I tell myself I won't write anymore mysteries, but if a plot comes, a writer answers.

So there.

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It Ain't Easy Being Green

We are now a one car household, which demands communication and scheduling but we manage.

For the prior month, we had planned to drive to Wellesley today for 1) Dr., 2) barber, 3) Dentist, 4) Roche Brothers, 5) hair dresser, 6) lunch, and 7) over to Natick to pick up pants that were being hemmed. On the way home we would stop at Walmart for cat litter and get gas.

Things started to fall apart yesterday when the hair dresser called and had to re-schedule due to a funeral. Well, not happy, but okay.

This morning, the snow started at 7:00 a.m., not at 10:00 as forecast. Then the dentist called to change times.

Everything fell down like a house of cards, and after some fancy footwork, everything worked out except the hairdresser, where I go tomorrow, adding another 60 miles to the car.

Overnight, gas jumped from $2.97 to $3.15. Yikes!

While I waited for S.O. at the barber, I read a fancy-schmancy Wellesley-Weston magazine. All kitchens must have an island with granite counters. It's de riguer. I mean, that's what you have to have. We have no island and formica counters. Picked up a pair of kids shoes at Nordstrom. Double yikes! $150.00. Okay, they were Prada. Who knew? Small guest ain't gettin' none.

No other wisdom gleaned, except the new Roche Brothers still has traffic jams in the produce aisle just like the old store. Nice checkout guy let me into an empty 12 items and only line with approx. 15 items. Hideous mess in the snowy parking lot and I almost took out 2 kids, another car and the guy collecting carts.

Now the snow is coming down pretty good, and we are home. Stopped at Acapulco for a very reasonable and tasty Mexican lunch. $7.99 for a big platter of food. Can't beat that. Generous wine. I think the willows were a little yellower than last time I looked.

Can spring be far behind?


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Clothes Horse

Since leaving the work force, I have noticed that my wardrobe needs are simple: jeans and shirts or sweaters, work-out clothes, a couple "decent" outfits and one "good" outfit and one fancy dress and jacket tucked away for a New Year's Eve kind of event.

In spite of the fact that I haven't been a clothes horse since I stopped smoking and left the size sixes of this world to inhabit, shall we say, a roomier size, the closet still contains a fair amount of clothes, so many tops, for example, that I wear some only once or twice a season.

I am actually wondering how long I could survive without buying anything. Would it be six months? A year? Two years? This strikes me as an interesting and a money-saving experiment. Trying to decide if I am up for it. What would be the first garment? Undies? Pajamas? Socks?

Why do we have so many clothes? I have a friend who has so much stuff she'll buy something and not wear it for a few years. Naturally she is not terribly style conscious and wears so-called classic stuff, nothing too trendy. Some women have lots of cheap stuff, some have a few good items and others have whole closets full of clothes.

Did I mention that I still adhere to the seasons approach and in late-April and mid-October perform the seasonal wardrobe swap? A few things span the seasons, like jeans.

Good old jeans! What would we do without them? I am always horrified when I see jeans that aren't really jeans, say, they zip at the side or have the wrong cut. Too weird.

So let's see how long I can resist buying something. Daresay it won't be two years.

Sitting here in new Christmas robe and what passes for pajamas. Do you know what passes for pajamas these day? I refuse to spend $45 and up for "real" pajamas. Kmart has t-shirts for $6, and the Ocean State Job Lot has flannel "lounge pants", read p.m. bottoms for $7.00. Nice ones, too, from J. Crew. Cool pajamas for $13.00 instead of $45? Such a deal. I have also discovered "lounge socks" at Ocean State Job Lot. We ventured in for the cheap jam and saurkraut and came out with the damndest stuff.

Come the recession (is it here yet?), I'll blog money-saving tips, having been through various recessions before. So, stay tuned, as they say.

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