Today's Adventures in Food and Thought
I tried to get up a little earlier this morning. I needed to wash my hair before work. I also wanted to try and eat breakfast before I left the house.
As I was standing in the shower washing my hair, my eyes locked on to the liquid shower soap. Our current shower scent is wild cherry blossoms. We had just changed it out a few days back. The old shower scent was cucumber melon. Of the three liquid soaps we still have under the sink, one is country apple. I also have body sprays that I occasionally use. Those scents are strawberries and cream, pears, and country apple.
When did most of the soaps and body sprays start smelling like fruit?
I know that there is some aroma therapy stuff out there with citrus, honey, and vanilla. There are tea scents, too, though most people would include jasmine more as a flower than a tea flavor. And, to the best of my knowledge, coconut has been used in tanning lotions since the late 60s and earl 70s.
Fruit and food scented candles have been around for ages. The reasoning has always seemed to be that it's good for your house to smell like food. A house full of delicious scents always feels more like a home. But when did the general population decided that it was good to walk around in a fruit-scented olfactory disguise?
And the other, more chilling thought ... are there companies wasting food for beauty products when people could be eating it?
With these ideas rattling around in my sleepy head, I realized that I was starting to run a little late for work. Breakfast at home was going to end up as another cherry turnover and Coke on the way into town. At least it was my last turnover, so the container would sit in the passenger seat and catch most of the crumbly bits that fell off. The Coke was all Old School, since it was in an uncovered container that rested in my cup holder. No sealed thermal mugs or refillable drinking cups with lids and plastic straws. Nope. Just an open stadium cup filled three-quarters full of ice and soda.
The lunch I packed (in my race to get out of the door) was the leftover hamburger sandwich from a couple of days ago, a small bottle of Strawberry Kiwi Gatorade, and a snack-sized cracker pack. Bing. Bang. Boom. Everything is packed up, ready to go, and getting tossed into trunks, put into cup holders, or sitting in passenger seats as the car backed out of the garage.
Munching my turnover at the Kerry Forrest stoplight, I started thinking about the inclusion of cup holders in automobiles. The American habit of eating in the car helped bring about the invention of moulded pieces of plastic that used to be hung on the car door so beverages were within easy reach. They were so wildly popular that car companies started including them as standard features in their cars. (And now they're found on baby carriages and riding lawn mowers.) Drive-ins and drive-thrus were invented so we wouldn't have to get out of our cars to get food.
My decision not to buy sodas out of the refrigerated cooler at work has already started causing me grief. Today was a very full day of work. I ended up having to give one of the gallery tours, too. I had struggled through the busy morning with only that small cup of Coke on the way in to work. That's when the caffeinated siren voices of the Pepsi bottles started calling out to me from two floors down. And we catered a lunch of 30 pizzas to a high school group of about 100 teens sucking down bottles of soda as they picked up their plates.
I was proud that I overcame my urge to suck down a convenient soda. But I was also shown that my idea of eating only food from the grocery store had a few flaws in it. Primarily, it would be nice to have a pizza once or twice in the next 39 days. The pizzas I make never have the kind of crusts that I like. I can't quite get the sauce right, either. I started thinking about making an amendment to my Lenten theme that will allow for a delivered pizza .... when it has been planned as part of the weekly menu. No dinking around and ordering because nothing was brought down for a meal. No late evening munchie attacks.
And this also reminded me that I've got a trip down to Baby Bro's in another week and a half. They eat out. A lot. On a normal weekend visit to Baby Bro's, there's at least one meal (sometimes two) at Beef O'Brady's. I usually arrive on a Friday night, so they've already eaten before I get there. I either need to pick up something on the road or grab a sandwich at the house. Saturday's breakfast is usually cereal with the Wee Nieces. Lunches are mostly for the Wee Nieces, with the adults fending for themselves or going out to eat. Dinner could be Beef's. Sunday breakfast could be cereal with the Wee Nieces again, Dunkin' Donuts, or picking up something on the road.
It's really a shame, too, because my brother is a pretty good cook. His specialties are breakfast, Cajun dishes, and Dagwood sandwiches. I'm hoping that as the girls get older, Baby Bro and Sis-in-Law will start letting them help with the food prep and easier kinds of cooking.
But these thoughts have drawn away from the Lunch and Dinner menu.
For lunch, I had the leftover half of a hamburger that M and I had made for dinner a couple nights back. We took a package of lean ground sirloin and divided it in half. The first half went into two hamburger patties for our dinner. The second half was designated for the spaghetti dinner that we had tonight.
Both halves were seasoned with freshly diced onion and Newman's Own Italian salad dressing. In a way, they were almost seasoned like meatloaf. The hamburgers were cooked up. We put fresh lettuce on both hamburgers. Mine also included slices of a vine-ripened tomato, a slice of Provolone cheese, and some ketchup. The buns were hamburger buns that we picked up at the Publix bakery. I could only eat half of my sandwich, so I saved it for my lunch today. Just in case I was exceptionally hungry, I tossed in a cracker packet that had everything but the Capri Sun drink.
I did have some problems re-heating the hamburger in the microwave. M and I stopped using a microwave 3 1/2 years ago when we moved into the current house. First, we did without because there wasn't any room on the kitchen counters with all the unpacking we had to do. Then, we got busy and just didn't bring it out. We started to notice that our food was tasting better, even with re-heating it with a conventional stove. We kept putting off the decision to unpack the microwave, and eventually decided that we didn't need one any more.
Microwaves aside, I ended up putting my hamburger in for 2 1/2 minutes and that sucker was hot -- and stayed hot for 30 minutes! I burnt my tongue on the second or third bite.
I ended up making it through the day without succumbing to the Pepsi urge or digging back in my lunchbox for the cracker pack that I left untouched from lunch. When I came home, M had most everything ready for our spaghetti dinner, though we still didn't eat for another hour or so.
The spaghetti meat had already been stored in the Newman's Own Sockaroni spaghetti sauce in the fridge. All we needed to do was heat up the sauce and boil the spaghetti noodles. M decided to use some more of the bakery hamburger buns, so he melted the Irish garlic-dill butter in a small skillet and toasted the buns. It was a very nice improvisation. Over dinner, we had another discussion about how food is used (we saw something recently about domesticated turkeys).
Tomorrow, I have a day off from work. We've already planned on having Mahi for dinner. It's going to be interesting to see how breakfast and lunch play out.
As I was standing in the shower washing my hair, my eyes locked on to the liquid shower soap. Our current shower scent is wild cherry blossoms. We had just changed it out a few days back. The old shower scent was cucumber melon. Of the three liquid soaps we still have under the sink, one is country apple. I also have body sprays that I occasionally use. Those scents are strawberries and cream, pears, and country apple.
When did most of the soaps and body sprays start smelling like fruit?
I know that there is some aroma therapy stuff out there with citrus, honey, and vanilla. There are tea scents, too, though most people would include jasmine more as a flower than a tea flavor. And, to the best of my knowledge, coconut has been used in tanning lotions since the late 60s and earl 70s.
Fruit and food scented candles have been around for ages. The reasoning has always seemed to be that it's good for your house to smell like food. A house full of delicious scents always feels more like a home. But when did the general population decided that it was good to walk around in a fruit-scented olfactory disguise?
And the other, more chilling thought ... are there companies wasting food for beauty products when people could be eating it?
With these ideas rattling around in my sleepy head, I realized that I was starting to run a little late for work. Breakfast at home was going to end up as another cherry turnover and Coke on the way into town. At least it was my last turnover, so the container would sit in the passenger seat and catch most of the crumbly bits that fell off. The Coke was all Old School, since it was in an uncovered container that rested in my cup holder. No sealed thermal mugs or refillable drinking cups with lids and plastic straws. Nope. Just an open stadium cup filled three-quarters full of ice and soda.
The lunch I packed (in my race to get out of the door) was the leftover hamburger sandwich from a couple of days ago, a small bottle of Strawberry Kiwi Gatorade, and a snack-sized cracker pack. Bing. Bang. Boom. Everything is packed up, ready to go, and getting tossed into trunks, put into cup holders, or sitting in passenger seats as the car backed out of the garage.
Munching my turnover at the Kerry Forrest stoplight, I started thinking about the inclusion of cup holders in automobiles. The American habit of eating in the car helped bring about the invention of moulded pieces of plastic that used to be hung on the car door so beverages were within easy reach. They were so wildly popular that car companies started including them as standard features in their cars. (And now they're found on baby carriages and riding lawn mowers.) Drive-ins and drive-thrus were invented so we wouldn't have to get out of our cars to get food.
My decision not to buy sodas out of the refrigerated cooler at work has already started causing me grief. Today was a very full day of work. I ended up having to give one of the gallery tours, too. I had struggled through the busy morning with only that small cup of Coke on the way in to work. That's when the caffeinated siren voices of the Pepsi bottles started calling out to me from two floors down. And we catered a lunch of 30 pizzas to a high school group of about 100 teens sucking down bottles of soda as they picked up their plates.
I was proud that I overcame my urge to suck down a convenient soda. But I was also shown that my idea of eating only food from the grocery store had a few flaws in it. Primarily, it would be nice to have a pizza once or twice in the next 39 days. The pizzas I make never have the kind of crusts that I like. I can't quite get the sauce right, either. I started thinking about making an amendment to my Lenten theme that will allow for a delivered pizza .... when it has been planned as part of the weekly menu. No dinking around and ordering because nothing was brought down for a meal. No late evening munchie attacks.
And this also reminded me that I've got a trip down to Baby Bro's in another week and a half. They eat out. A lot. On a normal weekend visit to Baby Bro's, there's at least one meal (sometimes two) at Beef O'Brady's. I usually arrive on a Friday night, so they've already eaten before I get there. I either need to pick up something on the road or grab a sandwich at the house. Saturday's breakfast is usually cereal with the Wee Nieces. Lunches are mostly for the Wee Nieces, with the adults fending for themselves or going out to eat. Dinner could be Beef's. Sunday breakfast could be cereal with the Wee Nieces again, Dunkin' Donuts, or picking up something on the road.
It's really a shame, too, because my brother is a pretty good cook. His specialties are breakfast, Cajun dishes, and Dagwood sandwiches. I'm hoping that as the girls get older, Baby Bro and Sis-in-Law will start letting them help with the food prep and easier kinds of cooking.
But these thoughts have drawn away from the Lunch and Dinner menu.
For lunch, I had the leftover half of a hamburger that M and I had made for dinner a couple nights back. We took a package of lean ground sirloin and divided it in half. The first half went into two hamburger patties for our dinner. The second half was designated for the spaghetti dinner that we had tonight.
Both halves were seasoned with freshly diced onion and Newman's Own Italian salad dressing. In a way, they were almost seasoned like meatloaf. The hamburgers were cooked up. We put fresh lettuce on both hamburgers. Mine also included slices of a vine-ripened tomato, a slice of Provolone cheese, and some ketchup. The buns were hamburger buns that we picked up at the Publix bakery. I could only eat half of my sandwich, so I saved it for my lunch today. Just in case I was exceptionally hungry, I tossed in a cracker packet that had everything but the Capri Sun drink.
I did have some problems re-heating the hamburger in the microwave. M and I stopped using a microwave 3 1/2 years ago when we moved into the current house. First, we did without because there wasn't any room on the kitchen counters with all the unpacking we had to do. Then, we got busy and just didn't bring it out. We started to notice that our food was tasting better, even with re-heating it with a conventional stove. We kept putting off the decision to unpack the microwave, and eventually decided that we didn't need one any more.
Microwaves aside, I ended up putting my hamburger in for 2 1/2 minutes and that sucker was hot -- and stayed hot for 30 minutes! I burnt my tongue on the second or third bite.
I ended up making it through the day without succumbing to the Pepsi urge or digging back in my lunchbox for the cracker pack that I left untouched from lunch. When I came home, M had most everything ready for our spaghetti dinner, though we still didn't eat for another hour or so.
The spaghetti meat had already been stored in the Newman's Own Sockaroni spaghetti sauce in the fridge. All we needed to do was heat up the sauce and boil the spaghetti noodles. M decided to use some more of the bakery hamburger buns, so he melted the Irish garlic-dill butter in a small skillet and toasted the buns. It was a very nice improvisation. Over dinner, we had another discussion about how food is used (we saw something recently about domesticated turkeys).
Tomorrow, I have a day off from work. We've already planned on having Mahi for dinner. It's going to be interesting to see how breakfast and lunch play out.