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My Profile
She blinded him with whiteness - 2008-07-25
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8:50 a.m. - 2008-02-05
Wait a cotton pickin' minute…Chicken stroganoff? Yup. This mother's invention was a necessity, the chicken was the only thing that would thaw fast enough. Turned out delicious too! I figured you can't go wrong with stroganoff sauce, that with enough paprika and sour cream and you could pour it over boiled sweat socks and it'd taste good. Not that we've come to eating sweat socks yet, but my never-ending quest to tighten our food budget is leading me down some strange paths. For instance, did you ever wonder who buys that about-to-go-bad discounted meat? The packages with the bright yellow "Please, please, please buy this today! We'll spot you $4!" stickers on them? Wonder no more, kids. Of course I only buy if the bargain is good enough. Hardly makes good economic sense to buy a 'discounted' roast @ $20 when a $6 package of chuck chunks would do instead. Funnily enough though the marked down roasts usually turn out to be cheaper by the pound than the fresh stew meat anyhow. So then I get my choice of roasting it whole or hacking it into pieces to make fajitas or Pot Mess™. The discount meat goes straight into the freezer or is cooked that very night so spoilage isn't an issue. Mostly the mark-down is less about immanent spoilage than it is an aesthetic thing anyhow. The funky brown color is from lack of oxygen, expose the meat to air and it pinks back up again nicely. I'm glad last night's stroganoff was a success, the whole she-bang was less than $10. If that still sounds pricey for dinner for three, you gotta figure in Mr Mick who eats three times more than Wolf and I combined. Basically we're talking about dinner for five or six despite only setting three places at the table. Any meal coming in under $10 is a blessing. Mick will do the occasional meatless dinner, inevitably pasta since the man will NOT eat rice or beans. Whereas Wolf and I could live quite happily on rice. Dirty rice. Fried rice. Sticky rice with steamed broccoli. Same deal with beans. A pot of meatless chili and we're good. I will say one thing for Mick, he's willing to try new things. Or give things he thought he hated another go. Ever since I coaxed him into trying sushi and he loved it Mick has trusted me to lead him to gustatory treasures he'd have never tried on his own. Besides, he can hardly refuse to try something new in front of Wolf. My kid knows the house rule: 'Try three bites. If you still don't like it, okay.' For Mick to do less…um, no. Privately he's grumbled a bit about the step-dad = good example thing, mostly just to bitch. Mick digs knowing he's an influence on Wolf. Another new feature at dinnertime is postprandial Trouble. We loves us some POP-O-MATIC action! Mick and Wolf clear the table and I set up the board. I'd been hunting for a game for us to play as a family. One that was fun for kid and grown-ups alike, didn't rely too heavily on skill, and especially one that didn't take forever to finish. Trouble was just the ticket. Fun, fair, and reasonably fast. I'm still on the hunt for a decent Snakes and Ladders set. The only ones I've found so far are pre-school editions with stumpy little ladders and hardly any snakes. I want the kind with the truly evil snakes that put you back like 80 spaces. Game play might take longer than Trouble, but the game is still mostly luck and wicked fun to boot. I get a laugh sometimes thinking about how I am supposedly this awful enemy of virtue secular humanist tree hugging Yankee Liberal who is in direct odds with those 'wonderful' family values folks. A blight and a threat to everything moral and decent. Right. For a family of sinful scum things are pretty darn wholesome around here.
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