The Aldi Princess

I love Aldi, you know me. And so does Jeoffry, as you can tell from the above photo of him enjoying an Aldi bag.

Now Aldi and I have taken our relationship to a new level. Ever since Covid made me aware that you could order your groceries, I have not been able to kick the habit. I have become an Aldi princess!

You order online, and poof, the stuff shows up faster than it would if I had gone to Aldi myself.

However you know me, I always find a way to complicate the game. With me the rule is: What you get is what you get.

There is no arguing!

There is no going over the bill and making a fuss over anything. 

It makes things more exciting! Plus I do not want to do anything to upset this Aldi apple cart. This is a tremendous service they are offering. And the shoppers, I admire the shoppers for being up for this job. I do not want to make their lives difficult. I do not want to jeopardize this arrangement in any way. You screw up my order, I will eat it.

I mean literally, I will eat it!

Today was a great adventure.

Instead of one bag of red onions I was brought three.

Instead of one bunch of bananas for Howard, I was given two.

The cat litter also multiplied. One became two.

Last time I remember I received two cabbages, not one. So I am learning that this is typical. Make no mistake, I am paying for all this doubling and tripling.  But still.

Who cares, you know?

It is not as if I will not use the stuff.

OK, there was one exception. One thing I got today I will not use. The delivery included -- doh! -- DOUGH --

-- a loaf of gak bread!

That was what my parents called this white bread, gak bread. I no longer eat any bread, let alone gak bread. I have not eaten bread for two years now. Howard even has knocked it off as well.

So what do I do with this Aldi gak bread?

Something for church coffee hour?

A picnic with friends?

I will figure something out!

Back to the Broadway Market

Today at long last I went shopping at the Broadway Market and the Clinton Bailey Market. And I made a decision:

Hereafter I am never shopping anywhere else!

The prices were great. The food was great. That and, I had fun. I did two drawings. One is up above, a quick ink sketch of some houses on Gibson Street. It is in ink so it can count for Inktober! I will finish it up tomorrow. Meanwhile ...

I cannot believe I ever left and started shopping at other places. 

It was kind of an accident that I wound up going back to my old ways. What happened was, today Howard wanted me to go looking for chestnuts. And so I thought, as used to think: Broadway Market! Clinton-Bailey Market!

I did not find any chestnuts, let us get that out of the way.

However! I did buy: a quart or so of Steuben grapes; four eggplants, a Savoy cabbage; a red cabbage; a basket of dent-and-scratch red and yellow bell peppers; a basket of use-them-or-lose-them summer squash; Cortland apples; Crispin apples; three small pumpkins and a big one; and a big bag of red onions, some of which I have already caramelized with bourbon and enjoyed with T-bone steaks.

The T-bone steaks came from the Broadway Market. They were something like $6 a pound. 

The market had a new façade I had never seen. It shows how long it had been since I had been there. Inside, however, it was the same as it always was -- minus, unfortunately, the vegetable stands, although I hold out hope. I do not know if they are gone for good or what. Perhaps they are not.

 You could shoot a cannon through the place.

That did not upset me because it was business as usual. I purchased a lamb roast; the steaks; and a pound of bacon at Camellia. I enjoyed the meat counter, with things like Hog's Maws and Pig's Feet.

The prices for everything were way less than I was used to paying. I celebrated my savings by splurging on wasabi olive oil. There is an olive oil stand at the market that I love. It is next to the spice stand. I have to take inventory before I shop at the spice stand. One thing is for certain, though, I will be shopping at that spice stand.

I will be back next week.

And every week!

My Thanksgiving turkey and me

Yesterday my Thanksgiving was, like many others, extremely limited. It is in style here in Buffalo to defy the rules but everyone in my family was not all on the same page. End result, as we say here in Buffalo, it was just the three of us, Howard and me and Jeoffry.

With not much at stake I felt free to branch out. And one thing I did was try a new way or roasting turkey. Come Thanksgiving, I like to cook out of cookbooks by old dead people. And this recipe was from Bert Greene, this cookbook author who was in my parents' generation and whom I adore.

His cookbooks are just so funny! But that is a topic for another day.

For now, we are talking turkey. Maestro Greene said to put three strips of bacon over it and cut enough cheesecloth to cover the whole thing.

Then you pour a third of a cup of dry white whine and soak the cheesecloth in it and then put the cheesecloth over the turkey. Every half an hour you baste the turkey with this stock you make "meanwhile" from the giblets and such. Do not you love that word, "meanwhile"? It is as if the work gets done by magic.

"The Joy of Cooking," which I consulted first, had something similar. But they wanted you to soak the cheesecloth in oil. That just sounded yuchy to me. Just the idea of this oily cloth -- I said out loud in my kitchen, "I can't do that."

Somehow the Bert Greene, that sounded more like something I could do. And so I did it.

Here is my turkey with the bacon covering it.

That is a pretty big turkey! Back when I got it I did not know if I would be cooking for a crowd or not.

Here is the cheesecloth soaking in the wine. I did not have white wine around so I used dry vermouth.

Next time I will not do it like that. Next time I will just put the cheesecloth over the turkey and pour the wine over that. Because when I fished the cloth out of the vermouth, it was a bear untangling it. It had twisted itself into a thin rope and I almost threw it out. But I did not throw it out, and I untangled it, and it did end up where God intended it to be, over the turkey.

 

The turkey did turn out pretty darned good, I have to say. I stuffed it with Rice Dressing, from "The Joy of Cooking." I did that Rice Dressing a long time ago, and I liked it a lot, but everyone else in my family insists on bread dressing. Which, to be honest, I do not do all that well. They were not here this year and so I went back to the rice dressing.

It was delicious but today being Friday I could not eat it and so I could not refresh my memory. That big turkey in the fridge and I could not touch it. Penance. Penance! I had to quit it, cold turkey!

Tomorrow will be a different story.

I hope tomorrow lives up to the memories!

Roux-ing the day

It is funny considering how long I have been cooking, but today I made my first roux.


At least I think it was. I do not think I ever made a roux before. It is noux to me!

I was getting ready to make dinner, and I had a recipe planned out of the new Eating Well magazine. But all of a sudden I found this recipe for Gumbo Zeb in this vegetarian cookbook I had, by the hippie cookbook writer Crescent Dragonwagon. And I had to make it.

These things are unplanned, you know? It looked so onerous, this roux, and this spice blend, and this vegetable saute, and the rice, and what else? It seems there was one more thing. Oh, right, the pot of greens. There is that too. It was amazingly onerous and yet all of a sudden you are into it.

And it came together. I think it is coming together anyway.

It is still simmering on the stove. On three different burners.

I will have to report!

I am not exactly vegetarian so at the end of the recipe I am going to add shrimp. And maybe some sausage.I am not sure yet.

I do like trying different things. Last night I did an Eating Well recipe with roasted broccoli over pasta. I took liberties. I added roasted cauliflower to the broccoli because I did not have quite enough broccoli. I added anchovies because Howard and I both love them.

But at the end, I loved it. It reminded me of how I used to eat. Before I was married I made a lot of these slapdash vegetarian dishes. You get a husband, all of a sudden you have to add bacon to everything. Before that you do not.

Now, as long as all goes as planned, I will know how to make gumbo with roux. As opposed to gumbo with okra, the way I always made it.

It all made me remember fondly Bill Wharton, the Sauce Boss. That is a poster of him up above! He used to come to the Lafayette Tap Room and my friends and I would go.

The Sauce Boss would make a huge pot of gumbo on stage and at the end of the night you would eat it. Meanwhile you would assist in the preparation of it. It was a tremendous gimmick and my hope is that it is going on till this day.

You would get up on stage with your friends looking on and you would stir the gumbo with great pomp and circumstance, as the band played. Then you would hop down and resume drinking your beer.

Such fun!

The gumbo would be served at about 2 a.m. if memory serves me. And it was good!

I wonder if mine will be as good tonight.

I can only hope!!

The new Aldi

There is a glitch with the system tonight and it would not let me upload the pictures I wanted to upload. The only thing I could get to work was "Upload pictures from blog." So I did that and I saw the picture up above and I posted it.

On account of you cannot have a blog post without a picture!

What I wanted to report on was, our new Albrecht Discount reopened after its remodeling. And I went to it!

It is still a work in progress. It still managed to be a bit woebegone even with its remodeling. I think it needs to fill out a bit more. I have been to Aldis in worse neighborhoods than mine and they have looked better.

Also I could not find what I was looking for. It took me forever to find coffee and when I did, they were out of the Beaumont brand, the cheap brand, that I always buy. I had to settle for the 100 Percent Colombian. Which, I do not mind trying it, because I might like it. But still.

There were no good markdowns.

The checkout was slow. Lots of people in line. O look! The blog is letting me post a picture I took.

What other pictures can I post?

I guess I was not in a big enough hurry to catch these limited-time specials.

The view across the store. You see what I mean? It still looks kind of lackluster.

Another picture I took. Photography is sure easier than sketching!

I should have taken more pictures. But once in Price-Rite I was reprimanded for taking pictures. That was funny because I was taking admiring pictures of their spice department. I love their spice department and I wanted to tell the world. Plus, how can a store tell you not to take pictures? You are allowed to take pictures.

Ever since then I err on the side of caution. I do not like conflict.

But next time I go to this Aldi I will be bold and I will take more pictures. Perhaps it will have changed!

Perhaps the Limited Time Better Hurry case will be better stocked. Either that or perhaps I will be earlier.

Perhaps the Beaumont Coffee will be in stock.

Perhaps the checkout lines will be shorter.

I cannot wait to find out!

The not-so-secret garden

This morning I went with my friend Lauren to explore the new Dash's Market. We walked over there and later I thought it was funny, how little I am using my auto these days. I biked to church yesterday and today we walked to the greengrocer.

Greengrocer! That is a term we should use more often.

All I bought was green things!

For the record -- I bought leeks, zucchini, Savoy cabbage and .... what else? There was one more thing. It was green. Oh! Cucumber.

After shopping we sat in the upstairs Dash Cafe, or whatever they call it. It is spacious and lovely and because it was early in the morning not a lot of people were there and we scored a seat on the patio where we ate muffins and Lauren fed a snack to her baby daughter. I did a sketch of the street below.

When I got home I worked like a fieldhand on my garden. But first..

What got me going on the garden was seeing Lauren's garden. She and her husband bought this beautiful house in Parkside. It is the perfect house. It has no lawn in front. The front steps go right down to the sidewalk! So, no lawn mowing! Plus ... it has a garden in back. I mean a real garden, with huge raised beds and -- get this! -- a gate. A garden gate!

It is like The Secret Garden! As in the picture up above, by the great Tasha Tudor.

I could not get over it. I can tell that Lauren and her garden are going to be an inspiration for me all summer long.

I said, "Lauren, I am so glad you live in the city."

Is there anything better? We may walk to each other's houses and to the greengrocer.

And everything we need is right here. That is another thing to think about.

In contrast to Lauren I do not have a secret garden. I have a public garden! My garden is my front lawn on a busy street full of motorcycles and boom cars.

But you know what, I love it. I was out there today pulling up bishop's weed -- I love bishop's weed, but I have a huge patch of it that I am not going to touch. The bishop's weed in the front has to go to make room for other things.

Son of a sea cook, I am going to be seeing bishop's weed in my sleep, I pulled up so much of it. I also brutally pruned the rose bushes. I am sorry to say brutally but there is no other word for it.

I was scratched but not bleeding. Eventually I was bleeding but it took a long time to get to that point. By then I had been working for hours. I declared victory, cleaned myself up, and went to Home Depot for tomato plants.

I bought eight, for $20. That is going to be the only money I spend on my garden. But it will be beautiful.

For weeks now I have been writing as one of my goals, "I have a gorgeous garden."

It has begun!

My experience with Aldi delivery

Anyone who knows me or has ever read this Web log knows of my love for Albrecht Discount, affectionately known as Aldi. I adore Aldi.

I wish I could charter it the way my mother told me that the Queen of England charters Harrod's! When the Queen goes Christmas shopping, so my mother said to me, Harrod's would be blocked off just for her.

Unfortunately that is not the case with Aldi and the one I go to is small and overdue for a makeover and expansion, which thank heavens it is getting. It is getting cramped and one aisle is even so narrow now that I cannot get down it comfortably even with the 10 pounds I lost over Lent. And it is super-crowded.

So.

Today I tried Aldi delivery!

No more chatting, here is the report. It was easy to do the online shopping. The menu of items is easy to navigate and I happily shopped away. You cannot buy markdowns online but you know what, there have been a million times I went to Aldi and did not find any markdowns I wanted.

Placing the order was easy and there is this promo code on the delivery site which gives you $10 off. That made up for the nickels and dimes that turn up added to the prices online. However, 89 cents for a dozen of those fine Goldhen eggs, who can argue with that?

I shopped my way up to about $50 and then placed my order. After that Instacart got really chatty, texting me to tell me that my order was placed, that it had been delayed, that it would be there soon, and then -- ta da! -- that my shopper was in my driveway!

End result, as we say here in Buffalo: Two items out of the 15 or so I ordered were wrong. I ordered the 1-pound clamshell of the organic spring mix. I am not an organic fanatic but I do like organic lettuce. Instead the shopper gave me the, ahem, Artisan Lettuce ...

...  that smaller clamshell with four heads of lettuce. I felt I had to kvetch about that seeing that the price was very different.

Then I had to call about a discrepancy with the chicken, too.

The cauliflower had spots and would not have been the one I would have selected.

Everything else looked pretty good. The cabbage looked dandy and the eggs were unbroken, no problem there.

It took a while for me to figure out how to address my grievances. That surprised me, because I am good with computers. It just was not intuitive. Eventually, I managed to find a phone number, and so I called.

They refunded me the money for my organic greens. The chicken was actually a trade-up -- I had ordered a normal chicken, and they had given me some kind of snobby free-range bird that would have cost more. So I was the winner there, and we let that be.

I did go ahead and mention the spotted cauliflower, just because I wanted to give Instacart honest feedback on how they were doing. To tell you the truth I do not see this situation improving. People can't read. You can put one item on your list and they will bring you another. Also, nobody knows anything about vegetables. I am sure my shopper could not tell one cauli from another. So if you get delivery you have to brace yourself for some problems.

It did not help that Instacart promises you the moon. In the days leading up to this they had been strutting their stuff sending me emails with things in the subject line like, "Mary, prepare to be amazed!" Honest, that was one. I am quoting it exactly.

Now here is where things get psychological.

I realized I felt bad after making the phone call. I hated being seen as a crabby complainer. Also, on the Web site, the only way you can report an "issue" with your order is to give your delivery person a "bad" rating. There seems to be no other way. It is weird.

I did not want to say that my shopper had been bad or that the experience had been bad. It was not exactly bad. Also I think as a Catholic I should be patient and kind and I did not want to have to be a pain, you know?

 And then there was the matter of the tip. I had not realized the tipping is electronic. They add in 5 percent and if you want to give more you can do that after you get your order, add it in the way I think people do on Uber.

I actually like this feature, but they were not clear about it, and so I had given the shopper and her friend $5 cash. Then I saw that online I had already given them $2.50 or something so I canceled that. I thought: I gave them twice that amount, and they screwed up my order. I'm not going to give them, like, $7.50. Then I felt bad, as you do in these situations. Would Instacart be angry with them when they saw the tip was canceled? God knows I have had my share of lowdown jobs, I mean back in the day, and I sympathize, and I do not want to make a blot on anyone's record. Could I have handled that differently? I should have read things more carefully. I should have --

Finally I stopped and said, oh, for Pete's sake!

Why am I feeling as if this is somehow my fault?

If the shopper had only brought me what I asked for, I would not be going over and over and over all this!

Why am I worrying about these people? They are not worrying about me!

Get it together, Instacart! You told me, "Mary, prepare to be amazed!" Well, I am amazed. I am amazed at how I can order grocery delivery and it can still eat my day.

Anyway.

Will I try this again? Yes, because the promo code gives you $10 off three different orders and I have two to go. Also I am credited $4 something for the lettuce. I will say this for Instacart, they have good customer service. The trick is to figure out how to report an issue but once you do that, they are very nice.

The only thing is, you do not want it to shoot your day. That is what you are trying to avoid by getting the delivery. I had all this work to do, plus I had to go to church at 5 p.m. for Gregorian chant practice. I did not feel I could budget all the time to go to Aldi and back.

The work went well, is the good news. So, worth it. I'll try this again, and report.

But one thing, could Aldi please start carrying wine?

You kind of need it, after all this!

Hamming it up with Betty Crocker

Yesterday I made my first Chiffon Cake, for church coffee hour. It was the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake out of the classic Betty Crocker Guide to Easy Entertaining!

It is a rule I have for coffee hour: Every week I make at least one thing that is new. It keeps things exciting.

Above is a picture of the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake going into the oven. And here it is coming out:

Beautiful as the cake is, I could not help laughing about the chapter the recipe came from. It was going piously to church, yet it came from the chapter titled Stag Parties.

How many cookbooks these days will you find with a chapter called Stag Parties?

It is funny because sex is everywhere, much more than it was several decades ago, but oh, you cannot mention stag parties. But anyway.

"Most men have a weakness for chocolate cake," Betty Crocker writes in this cookbook.

And sure enough!

The guys at St. Anthony's, they loved this cake! Well, the ladies did, too. And the children. But I am not about to contradict Betty Crocker. She was right!

You know me, I am always behind, and I was making the frosting at literally the last minute -- i.e., this morning before church. So I made a frosting that Betty recommended called Chocolate Fluff. You took two cups of heavy cream and whipped it up with a cup of powdered sugar and a half cup of cocoa. The result was amazing. Like ice cream. Addictive. Amazing.

You had to sit the cake in the fridge until it was time to serve it. And so during Mass the cake sat in the fridge in the St. Anthony's social hall. It tastes good cold, I discovered. There is something very satisfying about this sweet, chilled cake.

But next time I will make the other icing Betty recommended.

It is White Mountain Icing!

My Facebook friend Janice is a professional pastry chef and she was urging me to try it. She said it was old school but it will be so worth it! Plus, what I love about it is you get to use -- shhhhh -- corn syrup.

It is just a little more complicated than I had time for this morning. In addition I should get a candy thermometer. Why does someone like me not have a candy thermometer? Yet I do not.

The cake shared the buffet with another St. Anthony's novelty -- ham.

We got a couple of hams at Albrecht Discount and heated them up in the oven! This was another first for me. We were doing this because it was the Octave of Easter. Lou, one of the gentlemen of St. Anthony's, had to help me.

We hit a snag when I realized there were no roasting pans in the kitchen. What to do? What to do??? But miraculously in a cupboard we found a beat-up cookie sheet. Wait, it was my cookie sheet! I had been wondering what had happened to it. Here it was. And right when and where I needed it!

And so we roasted the hams -- in foil pans, set on the cookie sheet. Lou said they would be done by the time we got out of Mass and sure enough.

Lou being a prince among men also made the glaze in a saucepan he found God knows where.

I slipped out during the sermon to apply the glaze to the ham.

End result, as we say here in Buffalo, there was much rejoicing.

Ham. Is there anything better?

And 99 cents a pound at Aldi.

We will be doing this again!

Vegan before 6

My sister was on Mark Bittman's Vegan Before 6 diet and so of course I had to do it too. There are these 10 pounds I want to lose. I have lost 10 and I need to lose 10 more.

I had heard of VB6 before. Except when I last heard of it I was working pretty much 9 to 5 and it is difficult to be vegan before 6 o'clock under those circumstances. You do not have time to plan perfectly and if you get hungry you are in trouble. You cannot just go to the kitchen to chow down a few more cubes of tofu.

I do the no-meat-on-Friday thing year-round and I was never able to plan well as far as packing my Friday lunch for work. And on Fridays when my stomach was growling, that was when my mind would go to Mark Bittman and VB6.

"Yeah, right," I would say to myself. That is a condescending phrase I picked up from Leonard Pennario.

However, now things are different!

My schedule is more flexible and so this diet is no big deal. It actually reminds me of how I used to eat a long time ago, before I got married and there was this other person in my house who insists on meat. May I add I weighed less then, too. I know it is very possible to eat meat responsibly but still.

Vegan Before 6 is also very similar to this traditional Catholic fast I did during Lent a few years ago. I did get through that OK, now that I think about it, despite office hours.

However as I discovered then, you do have to plan.

I enjoy a game, and I do spend too much time thinking about this because there is nothing like a new diet, so full of promise. I made veggie burgers out of pinto beans from a Moosewood recipe. Ah, here it is!

These beanie burgers are golden. Add some ketchup and ballpark mustard and your mind accepts them as the real thing. It is like what I have read about Mock Apple Pie. I have not had that but I guess what happens is, you use zucchini instead of apples and as long as you add the appropriate spices, nobody knows the difference.

Well, at church they would probably know the difference. At our after-Mass coffee hour I announced I was on the diet.

"Vegan before 6," I said brightly.

And these smart-mouth guys in our congregation are laughing at me.

""So you can eat meat now," one of them told me. "Vegan before 6 a.m."

Hahahahaa!

Why didn't I think of that?

The infamous Christmas feast

That picture looks wild but it is just something I snapped out the window on our way to see my sister Katie last night for Christmas dinner.

They live in East Aurora, aka the Snow Belt. They got snow. We did not.

It was exotic to me and so I took another picture.

At my sister's house disaster hit. I could not stop eating!

I started with split pea soup my brother George brought in a Crock Pot. He set the Crock Pot down on the floor near the Christmas tree and you had to go help yourself there.

Then we sat down at table and the food just kept arriving!

My sister's husband, David, is a hunter, and there was venison. Venison like fine steak, pink in the middle and sliced really thin and enjoyed, at least in my case, with horseradish.

There were mushrooms that David foraged. And Katie made some kind of dish involving what I believed to be roasted pears and onions -- delicious.

A platter of turkey showed up. And David is also a fisherman and served the most delicious steelhead trout. Howard thought the trout was the most delicious thing there and that was saying a mouthful.

Speaking of mouthfuls we also had a huge bowl of mashed potatoes, yummy with the mushrooms. A beautiful big salad with pomegranate and blackberry vinaigrette. I cannot remember what else. The thing is, dishes just kept showing up, one after another.

After dessert, which I will not even get into, I was so stuffed I could not move!

I asked my sister if I could help wash the dishes just because I wanted to get on my feet and move. She said no and then brought some cranberry liqueur a friend had made. And we had that.

There was also a great Crock Pot full of Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice, our favorite. That was the only thing I consumed that had no calories.

As Neil Young sang, ohhhh, the damage done!

Today all I wanted to do was be on my feet. So it being Boxing Day I boxed up tons of things I did not like any more and that were getting under foot and I took them to Amvets. I managed to get out of Amvets without buying anything to take home to replace the stuff I had delivered, which is what I usually do. I parked way across the parking lot so I would have a hike.

Later I thought: Uh, Mary, you could just go to the gym, you know?

Gym? What's a gym?

It is the Second Day of Christmas.

Fa la la la la la la la la.

A poisonous prompt for #Inktober

Today we went for another family picnic. This is in the grove we went to when we were kids at Emery Park. It was a beautiful day! I took the above picture while we were playing croquet.

Every time we go for a picnic we get a little bit better at it. Today we were more in order with our dishes and our tablecloths. The food was great. My sister made a salad with all kinds of good stuff and I made a red cabbage salad with walnuts and cheese and my brother George grilled pork loin and hot dogs. I brought Fuji apples I had scavenged and my sister Katie and brother-in-law David brought mushrooms they had scavenged. They are great at mushroom foraging and brought wonderful mushrooms that we threw on the grill.

I told David about these alarming orange mushrooms I saw in Delaware Park this morning.

I asked him if they were poisonous and sure enough, my instincts were right. Those are Jack-O-Lantern mushrooms, David said, and they are deadly!

Cornell says they are poisonous but symptoms pass in a day or two. But still.

That settles it. I will have to ink a picture of them. The first #Inktober prompt was "Poisonous." I have not been going with the prompts because -- well, because of that first prompt. I could not quite come up with a good picture to go with it. I had planned to head over to Hertel Avenue to draw a picture of 5 Venoms, a tattoo shop. But it rained and I could not go.

I do believe I took a picture.

But it was out of my car because it was raining. And I have a rule to draw my pictures in person as opposed to from a photograph. I have to impose rules because I am German. One rule I have imposed is that one. Another is that I cannot draw the picture in pencil first. I must wing it.

My third rule for #Inktober was to take as my theme "Look in your own back yard." Everything I have drawn so far has been in my immediate neighborhood.

But today I might have to cheat because I was away at the picnic. I did a picture at Emery Park and I will have to use that. Perhaps I can amend that rule. I can draw something in the course of my normal life. I happened to be in Emery Park so I drew a picture there.

Tomorrow perhaps I will return to those orange mushrooms and give them a shot. It is not too late to catch up with a few of the prompts. 

Here is a hilarious article about a legend that says the Jack-O-Lantern mushrooms glow in the dark. That totally settles it. 

They must be sketched.

For #Inktober!

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!

Calorie city

Yikes, all I am doing this summer is eating!

The conventional wisdom is that you put on weight during the winter and take it off during the summer. But A friend and I were talking the other day and we agreed that we fly in the face of that convention. We eat more in the summer than the winter!

I have to say this, I have not exactly put on weight. However the plan was to take off 10 pounds starting last winter and I got to five pounds and then screeched to a halt.

It has been like hand-to-hand fighting in the streets not to put those five pounds back on! We are talking many, many desperate prayers not to mention trips to the gym.

The truth is, Buffalo is heaven in the summer. There are outdoor concerts and plays, attended while lying on the grass, eating grapes, cheese and crackers and drinking wine and ale. There are ice cream parlors and ice cream machines. There are amazing food trucks, and entire evenings that celebrate them. There are big community picnics and also picnics that you just throw together yourself. There is the Erie County Fair. There is no end to it!

Howard took that picture above at Shakespeare in Delaware Park last night. It gives you an idea of the seductive beauty that is Buffalo. I was too busy opening a bottle of wine to take pictures. This was my second time seeing the play, mind you. The first time was for the picnicking.

Howard also took this beautiful picture of our friend the great actor Dave Lundy who commanded the stage as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in "Twelfth Night." Hence this most recent diet bomb. Thanks a lot, Sir Dave Lundy!

Today I got together with my brother and my little niece and nephew and we went out for ice cream. Pennario is surely smiling down on me because he loved his ice cream. But I have a feeling that I will not be smiling, if I go on like this.

I am going to be one of the many people who need those roomy new seats at Kleinhans Music Hall.

I am going to have to sue all the parties involved!

I owe Ioway

At the gym working the elliptical machine I saw TV footage of Donald Trump landing his helicopter outside the Iowa State Fair. And of Hillary Clinton making jokes about emails and Snapchat.

What fun that all must be, you know? If this were a swing state we would be able to get these people to the Erie County Fair! However they would have a tough time topping that majestic blueberry shortcake pictured above which was one of the things I ate the other day while I was there, hence the gym visit.

By the way The Buffalo News' gallery of all of us at the fair eating and Tweeting is like an exhibit from the Guggenheim, monumental. There is a glory in that food and we in Buffalo recognize that. Reading other newspapers' coverage of the Iowa State Fair I got impatient with the writers' horror at the food and all the frying and calories. It's the fair, it has been this way forever. Get over it. Eat the food and then go the the gym, which is what I did. You will be fine.

OK, do not eat the quite the quantity that I did. I was on that elliptical for some time!

Eventually I disembarked and, ahem, pumped some iron, while I listened to Pennario playing Chopin preludes. But now there is only one thing running through my head and it is this other song from "State Fair." I can't believe I forgot to mention it yesterday.

Here it is in all its 1945 glory. From the comments I learned that the song was left out of the 1962 movie because the 1962 movie was set in Texas. Too bad for that! One person writes, "My favorite song from the whole movie."



What fun! You may thank me later.

After you have been humming this for three days!

The danger of the Erie County Fair

This week I got to go to the Erie County Fair. My friend Ryan went with me and pointed out items of interest I might have otherwise overlooked. Such as the potato pictured above! It is part of Ryan's favorite fair category, Non-Traditional Vegetables.

Here is a snarl of carrots from that category. It is now my favorite too!

However there is a danger to the Erie County Fair and that is that you cannot get the songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "State Fair" out of your head.



Wow, that song makes me nostalgic! I remember watching the 1945 movie on TV with my family when I was little. Television, I should say. My father always called it television.

And there is this classic.



The whole movie is on YouTube. That will be dandy gym watching!

Meanwhile one more "State Fair," classic. This is one of those marvelous Richard Rodgers waltzes. Bernadette Peters sang it at Kleinhans Music Hall, I remember, with the Buffalo Philharmonic. I liked Bernadette Peters for recognizing the song's greatness.



Hahaha... I love when he is complimented on his singing and says, "I'm an old Glee Club boy."

All these memories, because of the Erie County Fair! And yes, I know you were wondering, the great pianist Leonard Pennario loved this musical. His tastes were a lot like my dad's, I would find myself thinking that. They were born in the same year and the same city so maybe that says something.

OK, somehow I have to buckle down and get work done today.

It won't easy!

Jarhead

As I have confided, I love to play the game of packing lunch. You have to eat anyway, you know? You may as well have fun with it.

I have discovered packing lunches in canning jars. This is a fad that is all over the place and I have seen it before but somehow I never thought about trying it out. Perhaps it was the Bosch dischwascher that made me want to try it. The Bosch gets the jars all sparkly with minimal effort on my part.

It will only be about 1,000 lunches before the Bosch pays for itself!

But meanwhile I am having fun. There is a science to doing salads in Mason jars. You start with the dressing in the bottom of a quart jar. Then you add the hard vegetables that will not soak up the dressing. Cut-up carrots, cucumbers and celery are good at this point.

After that you may add rice or beans and chickpeas. And after that, chicken or tuna or tofu. And after that you pack in all this lettuce and then maybe one other thing on top of that -- toasted walnuts mayhap -- and then you screw on that lid after packing in as much lettuce as you can.

Then at lunch time you pour it all out into a big bowl. And the lettuce is on the bottom and everything else tossed in nicely with the dressing on top. Genius!

And it is pretty like '70s sand art. I started out with a salad of carrots, cucumber, then brown rice, red grapes, chicken, greens and toasted walnuts. I made one for Howard too and it took me about five minutes. And looked mighty fancy!

The next day was Friday and we switched to tuna. I created an, ahem, Tuscan tuna salad with radishes and white beans and strawberries. I think I topped this with crumbled blue cheese.

I am the Leonard Pennario of jar salad creators, expanding my repertoire daily and drawing from a variety of cultures. Today I created a masterpiece, a Food and Wine tuna, chickpea, and orange salad in a jar. Well, I subbed celery for fennel. You know me and fennel. That is the salad at the top of this post. I am an artist!

And the great thing is, these salads fill you up. For some reason last week I was packing too little food for myself and I was running around hungry and eating chocolate and doughnuts when they were offered me.

No more! Now I am fed.

And entertained!

The forbidden picture

Today is a gray and damp Saturday but I am enjoying myself. I went this morning to Zumba and then to Price-Rite. At Price-Rite I followed my mother's advice of always go food shopping when you are hungry because that is when it is the most fun.

I did have fun. The carts there are huge and there are all these traffic jams, leading to all these opportunities to laugh and joke around with your fellow customers. Also I have this new appreciation of all this international stuff you can find, for cheap, at Price-Rite. They have half an aisle of Italian things, olive oils and artichoke hearts and such. And Latino vegetables, things like yucca and yams.

You find yourself wanting to look at everything. For instance one bin held cottage-cheese-sized cartons of ... I picked it up to take a look .... raw brown sugar. In another aisle I heard someone calling to someone else to look at the raw sugar cane. That sounds as if you could make your own rum! A possibility that must be explored.

Price-Rite does not get enough credit for all this stuff. With which, I finally took out my camera in the spice department. I wanted to photograph the mother lode of MSG ...

.

... and then I wanted to give an idea of the cornucopia of spices.

"Excuse me, miss!" A staffer was calling to me. "We don't allow pictures in here."

I stood there red-handed, astonished.

"You don't?" was all I could think of to say.

"No pictures of the spices," he said.

"Oh," I said. Then I said I was sorry, it was just for my personal web log, whatever. He was very nice so, no problem there. He said it was the manager's rule, not his. But that is astonishing, you know? No pictures in Price-Rite. How strange! And how do you forbid customers from taking pictures, anyway? No wonder nobody knows what goodies may be had in Price-Rite.

After that all I wanted to do was take pictures. I kept thinking about it! Because it was forbidden to me. It is like wanting to publish a picture of Leonard Pennario that belongs to some newspaper and not to me. I wanted forbidden photos of Price-Rite!

Anyway, here it is, the forbidden picture.

The one I took the instant the staffer was telling me to cease and desist!

It should be part of some exhibit, perhaps at the Albright-Knox, of banned art.

It is masterful!

The hunger game

Remember my bento lunch box?

And my subsequent second lunch box? Hahaa... reading back on what I wrote, I started laughing about the idea of a Leonard Pennario lunch. I do appreciate my own humor, tailored specifically to me.

Anyway, good things come in threes and now I have a third lunch box. It was a Savers score and cost me $4. It looked spiffy and new and sure enough, when I got it home and investigated it more closely, its papers were still inside it. Probably it was a present. Or else someone bought it intending to pack lunch and gave up on the idea. Hardly anyone packs lunch, in my experience. That is a pity. It is a game that is fun to play. If you have to work today, which is Martin Luther King Day, you are not losing a day off. You are gaining an opportunity to pack lunch!

This new lunch box is, ahem, designed by Black and Blum, a British team. You have to watch that word "designed." Meaning, it is probably made in China. Oh well, I bought it second-hand.

Up above is a picture I found of it on Pinterest. Here is another picture. Mine is this color, lime green.

Here it is dissected.

It seems to retail at between $20 and $37, a rather wide range.

The whole lunch box is on the small side which cost it some criticism on sites where they review such things. I am not the only one who likes to eat a lot! But it has potential. I intend to find that potential.

No matter how many calories it takes!

Oooh, that's good eatin'!

Son of a yam-eating sea cook, the temperature plunged today!

When I went out at lunch time with my friend Melinda to take the air, it was lovely and fragrant. There was the Cheerios aroma.

Early this morning I heard the symphony of the birds. I believe the robins are first. Then you hear a chickadee kick in. Then the mourning dove. While I reviewed some Pennario papers the window was open and the bird calls drifted in.

After all those summer pleasures I could not believe when I came out of work and it felt like 40 degrees. Perhaps it was not in fact 40 degrees but it felt like it. And it was raining.

There is only one thing to do in a situation like that and that is to go home and roast sweet potatoes.

Haha, they look plain, like piglets! I do not get fancy with them. ...

... at least not tonight I did not. I just stuck them in the oven. Perhaps when I am through with my Pennario project I will make sweet potato dishes like the one up above.

Meanwhile if you just stick a sweet potato in the oven it will reward you so richly. After an hour at 400 degrees, these sweet potatoes had caramelized and were just waiting for you to dig into them with butter.

A few years ago I had a discussion about sweet potatoes with the gentleman who was then in charge of the nearby group home. I always remember that was how he said to eat them. He said, as I listened rapt, simply to roast them and then break open the skin and put in a pat of butter.

Then he said: "Oooh, that's good eatin'."

Indeed it is! Howard, when he came home ...

... thought so too.

Good eatin'!

Especially on such a cold, rainy night as this.

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!