The Dollar Tree Hoax

Today I got my chiro adjustment, and after that I am supposed to take it easy, and so to relax I made a stop at Savers. I met my friends Tracy and Lizzie and Nike.

We were hanging around Office Supplies, having fun, and I selected with Nike's help a baggie of old Crayola crayons. That is another story for another day. For now I have to get to the shocker.

Lizzie and Nike told me that they had read in the paper this morning that Dollar Tree was closing!

What in the world??

Tracy and I immediately began to protest. Dollar Tree had just opened new stores. It was impossible. They always looked as if they were doing well. They --

"It's right here," Nike said, and she pointed at her phone.

No way! I was too upset to think properly. Shortly after that Nike and Lizzie left to go, you guessed it, to Dollar Tree. I did not want to go with them. I was too sad. Tracy and I wandered around buying this and that and mourning the loss.

I have written before about my great love for Dollar Tree, which ranks up there with my great love for Mozart, Leonard Pennario, and the Catholic Church. Where would I now buy Totally Awesome cleaning products? What about cheap Lime-A-Way toilet cleaner? About once a month you find a coupon in The Buffalo News and Dollar Tree takes coupons.

How about their writing implements? I love that brand name Jot. I just bought a cute Jot notebook a few weeks ago to keep track of my chapter revisions.

Cookbooks. Coloring books.

Wrapping paper. Gift bags. Nail polish. Wax paper. Bar ware. Made-in-USA glass candle holders. Hot sauce. Those 50-ounce drums of Totally Awesome dish soap. (They never did disappear.) My head was spinning.

And what about Tevive Tea? Just yesterday I enjoyed a cup of Peach Passion.

And oh, the holy frozen food!

Well.

Guess what, I get home and I look in the paper to see where this Dollar Tree story is, so I can put it on Twitter (where I am, under @MaryKunzGoldman), and post, "I am devastated."

I could not find that story anywhere!

Subsequently I did a search and sure enough.

Fake News!

I should have guessed. How could Dollar Tree close, with me keeping them in business? At first I was really mad at Nike and Lizzie for causing me this stress. But a second later, I was over it. Number one they love Dollar Tree as much as I do, and were as distraught as I was.

And secondly, who cares?

Dollar Tree lives!

I will appreciate it double from now on.

Frozen

I've been having fun these days shopping at Dollar Tree as part of my everyday errands. One thing I have done is explored Dollar Tree's freezer case.

And behold, good news! You can get great frozen vegetables at Dollar Tree. A whole pound of mixed veg, California Blend or Stir Fry, for $1. That beats what you spend other places. So I picked up a few. I bought the blends, plus a pound of broccoli. You are lucky, you know, to find broccoli for $1 a pound, and here it is for that price all neatly cut up for you.

And speaking of good news ... When I got home something made me look at the bags closely.

These are holy bags!

One of them said, beneath the cooking directions:

"God is strong and can keep you from falling. He can bring you before His glory without any wrong in you and give you great joy." -- Jude 1:24.

That was California Blend speaking. Broccoli Cuts had their own quote.

"Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." -- Isaiah 41:10.

It is like the Aldi eggs, where you open the carton and read a psalm! I am telling you, it is the little things like this that can make your day. The Lord speaks to you from unexpected places!

These veggies are from TJ Farms. Let us look them up. I get the idea it is just this generic brand under the umbrella of Flagship Food Group. There is no mention of Scripture.  And yet still, there it is.  Someone is having a little fun, somewhere.

These are the frozen vegetables the Lord has made.

Let us rejoice and be glad!

Tea of mystery

No matter how busy you are, no matter how many deadlines you face, your life could be coming apart at the seams, and still .... and still ...

You can always find the time to go to Dollar Tree!

I went today and came back with two boxes of tea called Tevive. I bought Tevive Chai Tea and Tevive Blueberry Tea. For a buck each, 20 sachets each.

When I get back and am supposed to be working, naturally I can't help Googling Tevive tea because the packaging is kind of slick and I wanted to see what kind of bargain I got. Respected brand names can be found at Dollar Tree at deep discount. For instance I also bought Contac cold medicine.

And guess what? There is no Tevive Tea!

I can find no evidence of it! Aside from this one YouTube review. This one Southern gal apparently does Dollar Tree reviews. And why am I not doing Dollar Tree reviews? Where did I make my wrong turn in life?



Haha... I love how she can't pronounce "Ceylon" or "sachets" and is unapologetic about it.

The Tevive box directs you to tevive.com but there is no such Web site.

However. There is a TeaVivre that seems to have a good reputation in the tea community. Maybe the idea was that you would Google it and wind up at TeaVivre.

While I worked on things Pennario I had a cup of the blueberry tea and then a cup of the Chai tea. I will have to thank Tevive in the acknowledgements if I go on the way I am going. The blueberry tea, not too bad. The Chai tea was good! I would buy another box of that.

I am a coffee person first and foremost but tea is great when you are at your desk and you just need something. But anyway. Back to our question.

Tevive!

What is it?

Margarita Night

Last night was Margarita Night! It is amazing, the pleasure you get from one margarita.

Here is my secret recipe.

2 tablespoons tequila (Howard and I favor the cheap stuff pictured at left)
3 tablespoons Triple Sec
1/3 cup lime juice (I used cheap bottled stuff from Dollar Tree, I think it was)
Ice

You shake it up in a cocktail shaker so it is cold and then strain it into a glass and add new ice cubes.

There is no sugar in my Margarita! A margarita recipe I found online called for powdered sugar. I had never heard of that! I like that tart taste. And the Triple Sec gives you some sweetness.

But I liked this recipe and based my recipe on it because it is for idiots. It has tablespoons, not ounces. Although now that I sanely think about it, 2 tablespoons must be an ounce, right? Because it is 1/8 cup and 1/4 cup is 4 ounces. Cups, ounces, these are measurements I love.

Piously I enjoyed one margarita with dinner. After that I went to bed and slept like a teen-ager and was up rested and early (5:30 a.m.) to continue my Pennario book push.

My sister Margie was visiting over the weekend and, nothing necessarily to do with her name, but she is a margarita person. We spent some quality time at Premier Liquor scouting ingredients. Margie says there is nowhere in New Jersey where she lives that can rival Premier.

I do plan at some point to visit my sister in New Jersey where we will lounge poolside and enjoy margaritas. That is how I will celebrate when my book is wrapped up.

I have a feeling this is going to be a Margarita summer!

The incredible shrinking everything

On Sunday I went to a bridal shower for my friend Jane who is getting married in May. It was a perfect shower with lots of conversation about food and shopping and other delights.

As we were all admiring the present of a baking pan, one girl began reciting what she said was a terrific recipe for brownies. There are few things I can concentrate on besides Leonard Pennario but baking is one of them, and I was interested. The woman got to the part where she said it needed a package of baking chocolate.

Then her face clouded.

"You used to use a package of it," she said. "Now the package is too small. They downsized it."

Then everyone began complaining about things that had been downsized.

I was in heaven! Usually this is a private gripe of mine. I am normally a solitary shopper so I can complain only to myself about 16 ounces becoming 15 ounces becoming 14 ounces. And the incredibly shrinking dish soap.(See the picture of Dawn-sizing, up above.) Even the stuff I use to clean my retainer is being downsized, I noticed last time I was at Dollar Tree.

It is annoying and boring and it never ends.

Coffee weights are all over the map. It is like taxes: You can no longer do the math yourself. The pound of pasta is a thing of the past. A can of tuna no longer goes very far. One thing that still annoys me, years after the fact, is yogurt. Eight ounces used to be breakfast. Six ounces is a snack. And four ounces is ...

... well, let's just say, Yo Mama, Yoplait!

The list is the one thing that is not being downsized. It gets longer and longer, son of a sea cook and fie. The downsizing can be more annoying than the price rising because it suggests that the manufacturer thinks you are stupid or that you will not notice.

Sigh.

Anyway, at the shower we had a fine time griping about all of this. I cannot remember when I so enjoyed an afternoon. I love to kvetch!

Even on Holy Thursday when I should be writing about pious things.

Anytime!

The chickpea chick

We had office cooking club and chickpeas came to my rescue.

It was a last-minute decision. Cooking club in general does not bring out the best in me. I can cook great dishes all week just for myself and/or Howard and our friends and whoever and then comes cooking club, where I am called on to show off my skills, and I tank. Well, it is not as if it is a disaster, not usually at least, but I often wind up thinking, I could do better.

This time around I did do better. I got off to a slow start the day before because although I knew I was making a soup or a stew, I could not make up my mind between chickpeas and black beans. And so, overnight, I cooked up a pound of both, in two crock pots.

I raise indecisiveness to a fine art!

The next day, Sunday we are talking, I was late in the game because I went to Mass and coffee hour and then there were the usual Leonard Pennario-related reasons. And then I went blithely to the Buffalo Philharmonic kids' concert, Jingle Bell Jam. That left me only an hour or so. Then I found this miracle recipe. It is Cinnamon Chicken Stew!

Perfect for the season, I thought. Cinnamon is such a wonderful flavor this time of year. The only thing I did was instead of the stick cinnamon I threw in a teaspoon or something or normal cinnamon. I had stick cinnamon, make no mistake. You can get it at Dollar Tree, a big jar, a great deal. But I did not think anyone wanted to bite into a big stick of cinnamon and the recipe said nothing about taking it out.

Anyway, end result as we say here in Buffalo, success!

For once!