Grocery Management and Shower Food

It Does a Body Good
For some reason, it's been all about food this week. A certain Volunteer fan asks if anybody has a trick to help single people not waste milk. You know--you need it for cereal, but then what? Nothing like that chalky white line and the crusties around the cap to destroy my appetite for a nice cold glass a week later. To Vols Fan: maybe buy the pints?

This Is My Daily Bread... Dilemma
Food talk continues as readers write in about my half-loaf bread dilemma. Bookfan/fireman shares his secret of freezing the unused loaf before it can go bad and assures me the thawed loaf will still taste fine--even better for the freezing. But this brings up another predicament involving a little area of the kitchen otherwise known as the icebox. To the embarrassment of my roomates, I have to confess that there is no room in the inn. The top of our refrigerator is jammed with several of my half-eaten ice cream boxes and treats, shrimp I still haven't gotten around to frying, and various forms of pre-cooked chicken patties/nuggets/strips. But at least I now have clean-up motivation, right? Let the search and rescue mission begin.

Shower Food
So I went to a baby shower last night and hob-nobbed with Ninetyandnine's LA Storm team. It was lots of fun and I met some wonderful readers. The thing about showers is the party food. It's the best. There are small portions so you can do a test run first and then come back and load up on the things you liked. And those grapes coated in fruit dip? To die for. I almost feel guilty eating though. It should be all about the happy couple and here I am obsessed with the buffet line. Perhaps there's a line on how much I should enjoy the food. Definitely no more than two trips or I look greedy--not to mention gluttonous (is that a word?). Maybe the amount of food you're allowed at showers is inversely proportional to the quality of your gift? But you have to factor in the quality of the buffet line at the shower. In this case the food was excellent, so I should be even more conservative on my buffet visit so as to not take more from the food then I gave with the gift. But what can I say, those grapes are exciting.

Cooking in the Future

My new favorite spice is garlic salt. That’s right, garlic salt. I am proclaiming it the spice of the week. It’s like salt, but with garlic. I know that’s deep, but try to grasp the complexity of that statement.

As you may have guessed, I was able to do a little cooking last night. Yes, I managed to escape the beckoning clutches of fast food and actually cook real food: chicken patties and green beans. Cuz taught me this great trick of putting bacon bits in the beans, so with that and half an onion, things were looking up. But something was missing. And that’s where the garlic salt came in. So I’m thinking I’ll start using it in all my cooking, which means I won’t be using it very often.

I wonder now as I ruminate on my self-made meal (thanks to the canned green beans and the pre-cooked chicken patties), how life would work if we didn’t have instant everything? Perhaps some of you reading this can relate to shelling purple hull peas, picking okra, and killing a hog for your meals. Sadly those days for me are just a distant memory from some very special times as a kid with my grandparents in the country. Mealtime now means thawing out shrink-wrapped hamburger meat or stirring up a casserole-in-a-bag.

Do you ever wonder how food preparation changes over time? With increasing urbanization, can we expect even more changes down the line? I’m suddenly reminded of a futuristic movie (gasp) where the character in the future puts a capsule in the microwave for a few seconds and then takes out a full-blown pizza. Maybe in the future we will not even need to cook? Maybe we can take a vitamin supplement and we’ll eliminate our favorite foods. You know how your taste buds change over time? Maybe we’ll grow out of the taste of food. Oh well, you’ll never convince me that anything tastes better than fresh purple hull peas and fried okra. But now I did enjoy those green beans with the not-so-secret-ingredient (garlic salt, pass it on).

Popeye's Fried Chicken and Christian Time Management

It’s Tuesday night, so you know what that means: time for a solo trip to Waffle House! Alas, in a stroke of bad luck / ill fate / unfortunate events, the counter at WH is semi-full. I’m not in a “let’s meet new people at WH” mood, so I suffer the huge let-down bravely and head elsewhere. Although I’m not a big fried chicken fan, elsewhere turns into Popeye’s since I’ve had so many hamburgers in the last couple of weeks I’m on the verge of becoming a McWhopperStack. I assume you’re familiar with Popeye’s, a fried chicken chain that originated by the famous Al Copeland of New Orleans. My ambitious plans for a double waffle vanish as I order the 2 piece meal. In yet another of a string of letdowns, my new friend on the other side of the drive-thru informs me they only have spicy left. This is a problem for me because even though I’m a native, Popeye’s ain’t playing when it comes to spicy chicken. I order a large water. Oinker that I am, I also get a side of red beans and rice. So I’m now parked at Seale’s Funeral Home at 10:56 p.m. about to rip into my supper.

I’m basically accomplishing two things at once—getting a little grub and waiting on the church to empty. We just finished praise team practice for the midweek youth service. It was after Christmas musical practice, so all things considered, it was after 10:30 before we left. Yipes. I’m really bad about settling for a “good enough” approach. Who cares about all those suspended minor diminished chords. Just hit the 1, 4, and 5 and let’s call it a night. But fortunately for our church, we are blessed with talented people who are dedicated to quality. So I think we got our songs down and they will hopefully be a blessing tomorrow night. I’m now waiting on the last of the musicians to leave so I can have a little devotion time in the old sanctuary.

At this rate I’m clearly not going to get around to e-mail for the 795th day in a row. But with the tasks I’m doing at work right now, I really need my 6 hours of sleep. Neighbor to the North asked awhile back about time management. Like him, I’d love to know if there is a secret. I basically have taken to praying that God multiply my rest. I hear that my parent’s generation did that back in the days of the multi-night revivals. That concept of revival seems so foreign to me. To me a long revival is adding a Saturday night service to the regular weekend schedule. Does anyone still do extended service revivals? I can’t imagine that right now seeing as how it’s everything I can seem to do just to tread water between work, family/friends, church, and everything else (not particularly in that order). Ah, c’est la vie.

I am really tired of fast food though. Having time to cook would be nice for my taste buds and my pocket book. I buy groceries, but I leave the house at 7:30 in the morning and don’t get home till (in tonight’s case) midnight-thirty. Groceries go bad before I can get to them. I hesitate to share this brilliant idea, but since I obviously don’t have time to market it anyway, here goes: Somebody is going to make a trazillion thousand dollars one day by coming out with a half-loaf of bread. Think about it. I can never possibly use an entire loaf of bread before it gets stale. As much as I’d love to, I never get to fish, so it’s pointless to save it for that. And we’ve covered the fact I don’t have time to cook, so I definitely can’t put it to good use in a bread pudding, if that is in fact how that works. Being the “recycle sticky notes because I hate to waste anything” person that I am, I’d actually pay more for half of a loaf just so I wouldn’t have to throw away a half-full loaf of stale bread. It’s something to think about.

Meanwhile if anybody has any suggestions on how to add an extra couple of hours to the day or how to get by on less sleep, clue me in.

A Passion for Your Vocation?

Around ten-ish Sunday night as Cuz and I trudged up the stairs to the cozy little nook known as home (well, really more like home away from home, since home will always be the folks' house), we bemoaned the coming Monday morning. And I asked, "Does anyone look forward to Monday morning?"

There's all the talk about the Monday morning blues, etc. But all that aside, the larger issue is do we (humans/Americans/Apostolics/young people/young Apostolics) hate working? My curiosity won't let this one go.

Today I'm still investigating: does anyone actually enjoy what they do for a living? Are there people out there who wake up every morning excited about rushing off to their job? Or is it always "work"--the dreaded evil--for everyone, regardless of what you do. Just thought I'd ask as I count down my days to retirement.

Ninetyandnine News

The new issue of Ninetyandnine.com will be up tonight. Pardon the delay, and be sure to check back.

Blind Dates and the SEC

Car Talk
There’s a new Camaro on the block. It’s a far cry from “Skittle,” the Camaro I had during the college days. This one’s 700 horsepower. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds exciting. It’s really funny that I ever had a Camaro. In fact, for some reason people laughed when I got it. I guess I don't seem like the Camaro type. But it was fast and had pipes—which meant fun at the time. The ironic part is that I was never ticketed in it, and now that I have “Snowflake,” the "I have grown up" Camry, well… can’t say the same for the no tickets part.

Dating
A recent article offers 10 tips for blind dates. Are you a blind dater? In our new global community, are blind dates getting more or less popular? Well, my recommendation to the writer of the article is to lose the “go for drinks” tip and add a “Discuss your mutual love for duct tape to establish compatibility” tip.

The Bible and Archaeology
News came in Friday that a shard of pottery with the name Goliath was discovered, giving archaeological credence to the Biblical story.

Sports
There’s no conference like the SEC. Big weekend in college football--the only sports I care to track. Auburn beat Georgia in what I hear was a stemwinder. Spurrier proved he is still a mastermind and South Carolina is still a contender. And, of course, my Tigers beat Bama, providing confidence that the SEC championship is in sight. Does this feel like 2003? But I’ll leave the real reporting to The Benchwarmer(s) while I’m secretly jealous of Bradley Mac for getting to make the trip to Tuscaloosa to see the action live.