WEEVIL FOR DINNER

I had boiled a chicken and when it was cool I and cut the meat into chunks. I cooked carrots, celery and maybe peas, I don’t remember for sure. I thickened the broth, tasted it and knew it was just right. I put the chunked chicken back in the broth along with the veggies and added boiled noodles. My chicken noodle soup was as good as that served at Heaps, our favorite restaurant.

Gillmore Girl was at Emily’s and wasn’t home for dinner so we ate without her. After we ate, someone noticed weevil sitting on the top of the leftover chicken noodle soup. There were gagging noises made and then much laughter when we realized we had all eaten weevil—they must have been in the bag of noodles. "More protein," someone said, as if that made it all right. More gagging noises and finger pointing and things said, like, "weevil eater," but everyone had weevil-soup-filled stomachs so we were laughing at ourselves, too.

Gilmore Girl was due home in a few minutes. What was I going to do? We had all eaten the weevil, the soup had been delicious and I had nothing else to feed her for dinner. So I did what any woman who lived through the Great Depression would do—okay, I didn’t actually live through the Great Depression but my mother did and I’m nothing if not my mother’s daughter. I skimmed every weevil off the top of the soup and then stirred it up in case any others surfaced. They didn’t, so I was confident I had found them all. Then I warmed the soup and threatened the kids to say nothing.

Gilmore Girl came home and ate dinner. After she was finished I threw the rest of the soup out. It wasn’t until later—much later that I confessed to my daughter. There were more gagging noises and even a little anger, I think, but you know what? She is the daughter of the mother who is the daughter of the mother who lived through the Great Depression and Gilmore Girl is as thrifty as I am—maybe more so—and I think she may have forgiven me by now. We’ll see what she has to say in the comments section.

PS This is not actually a photo of my chicken noodle soup. I pulled this off the Internet. You can tell it's not mine because there aren't any interesting protein bits floating on top.

SIX WORDS FOR HARVEST'S BOUNTY

Tomatoes, drying, jam simmering, soup frozen.

DRYING TOMATOES and MAKING PEAR JAM.

It's that time of year. Harvest time. This is a picture of the tomato plants in the garden.

The tomatoes are ripening and so it is time for me to start slicing the Roma's and put them in the dehydrator. This means I watch mindless TV in the kitchen. Today it was the Today show and Rachael Rey. When Phil had to go to BYU I tagged along and spent an hour in the bookstore.

There is nothing like a bookstore to restore your creativity. New ideas for books sprouted and festered and then I fled before they boiled over and made a mess that I wouldn't be able to explain.

The regular tomatoes are also FINALLY ripe and so I fixed a plate of tomato and basil sandwich fixin's, right on the breadboard where I cut the Roma's. Then back to the tomato-cutting grindstone. I watched MASH, and The Barefoot Contessa where I learned how to make truffles. It looked so easy. And delicious. Doesn't that look delicious? Here's the link in case you want to put it on your Christmas To-Do list. Oops, did I mention Christmas? Forgive me. It's only September, after all. I'm not mentioning Halloween yet, so that was really a slip.

You'd think I had kids at home. They always talked about holidays months and months ahead of time. I heard about what Halloween costume they were thinking about wearing right after Easter. That is enough to drive a mother crazy.There are mothers, all over the nation with glazed looks in their eyes from hearing, for the 78th time what their kids are going to wear for Halloween. Even mothers in countries that don't celebrate Halloween can understand.

Okay, back to the subject, sort of. After I filled the dehydrator I didn't have my quota of mindless TV today and so I watched some more TV while I made pear jam. A neighbor had given me a sack of pears and we have eaten pears until we are pear'd out. I couldn't throw them away--I should have sliced them and put them in the denydrator but it was full.

Phil reminded me later that we don't like pear jam. It's true. We don't. Actually we don't eat hardly any jam at all but I have jam-genes and it's hard not to answer the call of the fruit at Harvest time. It's a hypnotic call, you'd recognize it if you grew up in my house with my mother. It's sort of a haunting, do-not-waste-anything sort of a call.So, here is my pear jam, which we don't like. There was a bit left over. See the lovely chunks of pears in there. I also added some lime juice. I don't know why. It was the jam-gene, mutating.They all sealed--all the jars of jam we don't like. How lucky for us.

While I jammed I watched a movie so bad that even I was appalled. It was Final Days of Planet Earth. Daryl Hannah was the star. That should have been a clue. Finally it was coming to a close when...the sequel started. The SEQUEL! So, I made soup because I had to find out if Planet Earth really was having it's final days. I'll save you the pain. Planet Earth still has more days left.

I couldn't find the pinto beans in the basement and so the Kale and Bean Soup was made with kidney beans which, I'm sorry to say, was a mistake. If you try this soup DO NOT use kidney beans. You will loose faith in me as a cook, a pear-jam-maker with mutated genes, and a movie reviewer. But, I had made a double batch and so I froze four containers of the soup with the evil kidney beans. I'm sure I will be grateful by Halloween, when I don't have time to cook because I have to dash to the store for more candy for the greedy little goblins and ghouls, who have known what they were going to wear since Easter.

SIX WORDS FOR BAD STUFF I ATE AND WHY

Soup's gone so I ate lasagna.

FOILED BY THE MISSING SOUP

I am trying to eat better--and eat less--so I can loose a pesky eight hundred and eighty-eight pounds--more or less--and not have to be have a wall of the house sawed off and then be have to be carried away on a flat bed truck.

I went to lunch at Applebee's with Gilmore Girl and Tuesday and ate too much or maybe just the wrong kinds of things. Bacon should not have been eaten by an eight hundred and eighty-eight pound housebound woman who has a flat bed truck and a chain saw on stand-by.

Bacon. Surely on the top of the "bad-for-you-food," list, followed closely by a mayonnaise sandwich--I have a cousin who says he loooves a good mayonnaise sandwich and a friend who said she does too, but she one up's him, she adds potato chips to hers. That girl knows how to par-tay.

But she has nothing on the creativity of Americans, bless their struggling artery clogged hearts. Here are some foods people actually eat:

Battered, deep fried Twinkies.


Bacon, cheddar cheeseburger sandwiched between two Krispy Kreme doughnuts. This actually has it's own name--a Luther Burger.



Chili cheese fries, topped with ranch dressing, just for fun.

Stuffed crust, double decker pizza with extra cheese and a variety of meats with nitrates. (Speaking of meats with nitrates we will NOT be mentioning J-Dawgs, no-sir-ee.)

Anything Guy Fieri--of "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives" on the Food Network, eats. I'm not kidding. The stuff he eats on that show would kill anyone. Today he ate a soup made of cow hooves and cow stomachs. Usually he eats concoctions of meat, cheese, cream, and gravy and it usually involves deep frying. Although I did see him eat a strawberry once. I have just a tiny little crush on him--don't tell. He's weird but he grows on you and he does so enjoy his deep fried, melty cheese, gravy covered food. I hope he doesn't die.

Soda followed by a drink that is even worse, diet soda.

Anything made with canola oil. Don't write me letters about this, I have my reasons.

Anything microwaved. Hey, did I say don't write me letters? Okay, you can write me letters. I love letters. I crave letters. Just don't say the words "canola oil" or "microwave oven" in them. Use words like, "cute" and "delightful" and "skinny." You don't have to be talking about me, just throw those words in as fillers.

So, today after the bacon-at-Applebee's-fiasco I was going to eat Kale and Bean Soup and a stack of carrots for dinner. Phil fixed leftovers for himself and then left for BYU to do some clerk stuff for the BYU Ward before Sunday. I was on the lawn swings, chatting with friends. When I came in to eat dinner there was only a tiny bit of soup left and Phil had left a hunk of leftover lasagna RIGHT OUT IN THE OPEN WHERE IT CALLED MY NAME. Disgusting, lasagna, calling my name like that. So, did I stick my fingers in my ears? No. I ate it. And many other things that were not on my list. And now I am sitting here with regrets.

Does that ever happen to you? Lasagna calls your name because the soup was all gone? There ought to be a law.

Wait. Did you hear that? It sounded like a chain saw and a flat bed truck, revving it's motor. Maybe if we're really, really quiet they won't know we're here.

KALE AND BEAN SOUP ON MY COOKBOOK SITE

A very tasty, easy, cheap soup. Click here. I made two double batches and froze the soup in 32 oz. yogurt containers. This winter, when the kale is frozen I can still have this tasty summer soup.

ACRONYMS AND BAD WORDS

I got a three word email from Surfer Girl today in answer to my previous email--I'm temporarily calling her Surfer Girl until I find the perfect title and it may even change from time to time. She's from California and even though she has a new baby she could be a surfer girl if she wanted to. This girl is so bright that she could do anything. She is married to a Rocket Scientist who really is a rocket scientist. He laughingly said that while he was getting his PhD in physics he felt stupid every day for three years.

Anyway, before Surfer Girl's three word email was the acronym "COL" which I had no clue about. "Chuckling out loud," the email said. I loved it even though acronyms usually leave me cold. This one fit. COL It may be the one I will actually use.

Well, except for the one SBD which I had to use this week. If you don't know what it means picture what would happen after eating a bowl--a huge bowl--of kale and bean soup. (I will put the recipe on my cookbook site in a day or so, it is simple and yet good.) And then picture eating another huge bowl later because it was so good and then later, looking at my middle and thinking wow, what did I eat today that I've gained ten pounds. I better not eat anything else today. And so, instead I ate just one more bowl of kale and bean soup. Later, the "Silent But Deadly's" showed up and my middle returned to normal size. So, there you have it, if you like acronyms, this may be a useful one.

I remember the time I got an acronym from an email friend--that I have never met and now have lost track of. Anyway, she wrote ROTFLMAO. I had no idea what that was and I must have spent twenty minutes trying to figure it out. I finally sent her an email and asked. Then I was embarrassed.

Not as embarrassed as my sister, Pat would have been. She couldn't abide bad words. One day Uncle Bliss was teaching Sunday School and he asked Pat to read from the scriptures. She read from John 12:15 "...behold, thy King cometh, sitting on a donkey's colt."

Uncle Bliss stopped her, "That's not what it said, Pat."

"I can't say that word, Uncle Bliss," she said.

"It just means donkey," he said.

"I know that, and if you want me to read, that's what you are going to get. A donkey."

And that's what he got.

How I miss my sister, Pat, who didn't like the word "butt" or "bum" but insisted that that part of the anatomy was a "bottom." She wasn't a prude. She had more fun than any two normal people and if you were around her for more than a few minutes you were laughing. Anytime a bad word was said in this house someone would raise an eyebrow and simply say the words, "Aunt Pat." Then the bad-word-say-er would back pedal. (Here's a post I wrote about her earlier this year.)

Her boys played on the high school basketball team and Matt told me that one night one of the players said a bad word during play. "I could hear my mother's indrawn breath clear down on the other end of the court," he said. And then he laughed and so did I because I knew it was true. He loved her and was proud of her integrity and so was I.

I think she would be okay with the acronym SBD and she might even COL.

THIS SOUP IS ON MY COOKBOOK SITE

I made this last night--it's totally vegan, as I am on a quest to avoid heart disease and stroke and am adding more veggie meals into our diet. We were vegan for six years so it seems it wouldn't be so hard to recreate, would it? Humm. Harder than I thought.

The soup was tasty. The recipe is here.

WHY OLD PEOPLE GET SICK AND DIE

Last night Phil--who was fixing leftovers for himself for dinner--said, "I know why old people get sick and die. They just eat soup and sandwiches." He paused. "And dog food."

Now, I don't cook as much as I used to, it's true. He does fix his own breakfast--I offer--sometimes--but he usually fixes a smoothie or sometimes will just eat fruit. He fixes his own lunch, that's true too. He often eats Ramen soup, the Oriental kind, which I like about twice a year. Maybe once. He loves the stuff. I offer to fix his lunch but no, he likes to fix his own.

Sometimes I'll cook dinner but when I ask him what he wants for dinner he'll often say, "I think I'll just eat apples." Honest, he does.

So...where does the dog food crack come from? Do you think it's a comment on the food I do fix? Do you think that's why he wants to eat apples for dinner?

Tonight I cooked. I didn't open a can of Alpo and simmer it on the stove.* He ate a lot. He liked it, I think. Maybe we will be long lived after all.

*I baked it in the oven. Hee hee. JK