I love church potlucks. I don’t have any food allergies or standard health problems (like diabetes… yet) that preclude my eating whatever I like, or whatever looks adventurous. So I enjoy myself hugely at these get-togethers. Last week was Missions Conference at church — one of my favorite weeks of the year. We heard from international workers in eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. And we ate a lot of food. For the Sunday night poluck — a pretty standard affair — I made some crabmeat casserole. It’s my favorite casserole, but it makes a full-size 8”x11” pan, or a good 2-quart casserole dish. (Or something like that. It was a big casserole dish anyway.) If I made it for myself, I’d be eating it for about two weeks. That is reason #2 I love church potlucks. I can make my favorite casserole and only eat as much as I need for one meal; my friends take care of the rest. Sure enough, the casserole dish was cleaned out by the end. Monday night was soup night. The church I attend here ...

Sometimes I imagine that bread grows on trees in bunches, like bananas. Complete with the plastic baggie it’s sold in. My aunt gave me a bread machine the other day, but it didn’t come with instructions. Not really, anyway; the instruction booklet stopped right before the recipes began. What good is that? So I spent Martin Luther King day with my aunt and uncle at my cousin’s new apartment. My cousin, a 25-year-old bachelor, is very good at baking bread. (Go figure.) He’s got about 7 years of experience using a bread machine, too, so he spent part of the afternoon showing me how it’s done. Start with the wet ingredients, he said. I scribbled this important information into my notebook. Then add the dry ingredients, he said. Scribble. Set the bread machine to “dough” and go watch a movie, he said. Scribble, scribble. While the dough baked, the family introduced me to a very silly movie called Private Eyes (if I remember correctly). It starred Tim Conway and Don Knotts. Yes, it was a...

I wonder who the first primitive chef was that decided, “hey! I’ll whack an avocado until I get Martian mush! And maybe I’ll dump in a little lemon juice so it stays Martian green! Hmm, I wonder what it would taste like?” and dipped a stale tortilla into it. It makes me question the sanity of the human race. So I discovered a few weeks ago that my local Aldi’s sells packets of real guacamole, made from real avocados. (Hopefully not made by a primitive chef.) It’s most likely my favorite chip dip, so I was quite ecstatic to find that. And I bought some. In fact, I believe I had guacamole and chips twice for supper. Not after. For. After a while, it dawns on me that chips and guacamole probably don’t make the healthiest meal. But I love guacamole. And I have about half a packet getting kind of brown. You know how apples turn brown if you leave them in the air? That’s what the guacamole was doing. Only the brown on the green looked worse than a browning apple. Still tasted good, th...

I'm so unimaginative when it comes to food. (Except if guacamole is involved. I shall write that story later this week.) Every day for lunch for the first three weeks at my new job, I packed... a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, an apple, and a handful of baby carrots. I think I may have substituted applesauce ONE day for the apple, but only because I ran out of apples. So I finally decided to switch it up this week. I made tuna salad with my cousin for supper Saturday night and sealed the leftovers in some plastic container which I'm pretty sure isn't Tupperware. I love tuna almost as much as I love peanut butter and jelly (almost, not quite equally), so I figured it would make a good week's worth of sandwiches. Yeah, I'm still stuck in sandwich mode. But at least it's not peanut butter. I'm sure I must have eaten peanut butter for 60% of my lifetime lunches. If not more. The only thing with tuna is that it's drippy. I opened the tuna on Monday...

You know what living by myself means? I can make supper at whatever time I feel like. A very bachelor(ette)-esque thing to say, I know, but when I’m trying to work around a crazy journalistic schedule it’s something I’m highly grateful for! Another great supper-related perk is that I can make whatever I want. Even if it’s an experimental dish…. A few days ago I decided to try out my new(-to-me) crock pot (or slow cooker, for the brand-conscious among us). In order to do this, I opened up my fancy-schmancy new (really, new, this time) crock pot recipe book. It’s chock-full of taste-tested recipes and one of them caught my eye: Chicken with Applesauce. Reason 1: It’s chicken. Reason 2: It’s applesauce. Reason 3: It has very few other ingredients. Reason 4: It’s chicken. (This cannot be stressed enough.) Therefore, I spent most of my lunch break that day preparing the recipe—browning the chicken, slicing it up into smaller pieces, and dumping together the applesauce, barbecue sauce...

I made banana bread last night. The two bananas left in the bunch I bought most recently were beginning to drip juice. A little got on my stamps, too, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to salvage the stamps. No, I don’t know why I stored bananas and postage stamps in the same bowl. Chalk it up to eccentricity. It’s really easy to make a batch of banana bread, in the tiniest loaf pans I own, and slowly, or not so slowly, eat the dessert-like bread over the succeeding days. Last night’s batch is half gone already, possibly because I added cashews to two of the mini-loaves and got addicted to the banana-nut bread during the movie last night. So I don’t have to worry too much about having leftover banana bread become a science experiment in the refrigerator, even though I make the recipe in the usual amount, instead of halving it or something. Casseroles are another story. The reasons? One, the very mention of casserole conjures up an image of a church potluck with dozens of people and a ...

Yes, here it is, the third (and final, I think) installment of the freezer saga, posted early because I was in a writing mood and had a little time. (Parts one and two previously.) So, there I was, happily pulling spices and rye flour from the tub on the kitchen floor and loading them into a plastic basket to be put into the chest freezer in the garage. *Sniff* something smells strange… … very strange. Turns out, Mom accidentally left a cow tongue out of the kitchen freezer. A cow tongue, you see, which was now very stinky, smelly, gross, and unappetizing. (Not that it was ever meant to be appetizing in the first place. The cow tongue was an AWANA Council Time illustration piece that my mom has used for years—ever since I was in AWANA, I think, so nigh on eight years now. For those who don’t know, AWANA Council Time is like a short children’s Sunday School meeting.) Back to the cow tongue. To make things even ickier (is that a word?) this cow tongue had leaked… some type of f...

So, you may now read the rest of the freezer story …. We left the freezer on the driveway for a couple days to completely thaw out, defrost, and otherwise be rid of the layers and layers of ice coating the entire inside. We even tossed out some large ice pieces partway through the defrosting process. And then came cleaning. Which involved turning the freezer on its side, thereby dumping the goop (and gross bit of meat that had been embedded in the ice), and aiming the garden hose into it. I got all wet. Not comfortable. Anyhow. Once the gunk and grossness was generally removed from the freezer, it needed a thorough scrubbing. I had to go to work, so Mom took over from there. I returned to find a shiny white freezer sitting upright, drying, in the driveway. Very nice. It sat that way for a while. Not so nice. We finally got to move it back into the garage, where it belonged, after it had sat out for a couple days drying from the thorough cleaning. Of course, we picked the one day...

I never would have thought to combine the words "papaya" and "dog." As in, a fruity hot dog or something. But somebody had a demented enough mind to do so....