Dinners This Week

The other day, I saw a headline that said something like, “People Living in [My State] Should Expect to See Higher Food Prices in 2023.” That was a head scratcher because we have been seeing higher food prices for quite a while thanks. Can’t wait for the grocery bills to climb more steeply, I guess.

(The container of honey we have is leaking. But it’s doing so in a way I cannot figure out. I have tried having it rest on its top and on its bottom, and both ways seem to leak, but not in any discernible way, i.e. the top isn’t swimming honey. But I am constantly scrubbing honey off our spice cabinet which is not my favorite. Anyway, my husband discovered the honey leakage yesterday and after hearing my explanation his solution was to throw the entire jar of honey away. Um, no???? It is 3/4 full???? And honey costs a million dollars $4.99 on sale???? I will scrub honey off the shelf every day if it means I can delay paying eight dollars for honey by even a couple weeks.) 

That’s all I have in the way of preamble this week, so let’s get to the dinners.

Dinners for the Week of January 9-15

• Brussels Sprouts Tacos: This is a very specific craving I’m having lately, based on the memory of the amazing spicy Brussels Sprouts tacos I ate with a friend at a local restaurant this summer. I like the sound of the one I linked in the headline, but I also think this smoky version with black beans, sweet potatoes, and crema sounds amazing.
• Thai Larb: Last week, my husband and I tried the Lemongrass BBQ from the sampler of Southeast Asian sauces he got me for Christmas; it was delicious. I want to try the Thai Larb this week.
• Beef with Snow Peas: This is one of the simplest stir fries in our rotation, but it is so delicious. And all the peas make it super crunchy and green, two characteristics I find very appealing.  
• Creamy Chicken and Orzo Soup: Yum, this sounds so good and hearty and nourishing.
• Soy Ginger Salmon Rice Bowl: I could probably swap out the salmon for chicken on behalf of my husband. I am just not in the mood for chicken lately, plus if there is an egg shortage a chicken shortage must not be far behind, right?

What are you eating this week?

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Halloween, Dinners This Week

Alert! Alert! It is the last day of October! 

Usually, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. It’s so low-obligation, plus there’s candy, plus you get to see adorable kids and their semi-embarrassed parents marching around the sidewalks. It’s a lovely holiday. 

This year, I didn’t even put up my bats. My bats are my FAVORITE decoration of all the decorations I own, and I just couldn’t summon enough energy to put them up (or to contemplate the inevitability of taking them down). I (Carla) finally put up our yard ghosties, and we bought some pumpkins, so I feel like I made SOME effort even if it was wildly late.

This ghost is as aghast as I am that tomorrow is NOVEMBER. What the what.

Carla insisted on carving our pumpkins yesterday. I have managed to avoid jack-o-lanterning since… 2019, maybe? I can’t remember. But it has been several years. I have to admit that I didn’t miss it. It’s so messy and I don’t like the feeling of pumpkin innards, and I hate how strenuous an activity it is, to remove said innards. Plus, pumpkin juice leaves my hands feeling weirdly mask-like, even after thorough washing. But Carla was insistent, so I was game; I am at the point in her childhood where I am wondering, “How many more [fill in the magical childhood event of your choice] will we have left?” and I’m trying desperately to Cherish. So I cherished some pumpkin-juicy hands and pumpkin guts all over my floor. But! The best part! CARLA DID ALL THE CARVING. All I did was remove one pumpkin lid (my husband did the other one) and scrape at some of the most recalcitrant innards. She did everything else, from planning the design to doing the actual carving. She even cleaned up (most of) the mess! And rinsed and strained the pumpkin seeds that she’d lovingly saved from the fate of the guts! It was wonderful. Nine is a stellar age, I’m telling you.

This cat-o-lantern has ears AND a bow-tie!

Carla is excited to go trick-or-treating (although she is overly worried, in my opinion, about this rumor/conspiracy theory that’s going around about drugs disguised as brightly colored candy; I think it’s bunk and that anyone who spends money on drugs or makes money from drugs would not just HAND THEM OUT to children, who – in addition to having no idea where they got said drug-candy – have no financial means to continue to BUY drugs, but she is hearing this from FAMILY and also from FRIENDS AT SCHOOL OMG, so I guess I understand why she is edgy) (we know all our neighbors and we inspect all her candy anyway) and I am excited to watch her traipse around to the neighbors’ houses, where many of them have secreted special full-size candy or little candy bags just for her. 

We have the best neighborhood for trick-or-treating. Our houses are fairly close together, we know nearly all of our neighbors, there are tons of kids. When the weather is nice, some of the neighbors set up tables and chairs on their driveways so they can really get involved in the trick-or-treating process. It’s wonderful. 

I am making tacos tonight, because they are easy and Carla likes them enough that she might actually eat some before she goes out on her candy-procurement mission. The rest of the week, well… I think I’ll make a pot of butternut squash soupto have on nights when my husband and I eat separately (he eats a ham sandwich, though maybe I’ll surprise him with turkey! I am so fun.) instead of black bean tacos. For the other nights, I’m feeling more adventurous than I have in awhile. We’ll see how long that lasts, won’t we.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve done a grocery store report. In large part because things seems to have stabilized somewhat (except for prices HOLY CAULIFLOWER it is more than $100 every time I set foot in the grocery store), or at least I’ve grown to roll with the occasional random shortages. However, my grocery shopping experience today was a little distressing — the vegetable situation was GRIM. We’re talking two red bell peppers and five stunted zucchini (zucchinis? zucchinii?) and NO ICEBERG LETTUCE level grim. But I circled around to the produce section a few times, and finally there was a big pile of iceberg lettuce heads (this is Carla’s preferred lettuce for tacos, hence the urgency), and, even better, they were on sale at 2-for-$5 rather than “on sale” for 2-for-$7 which is what they’ve been going for lately. I think I’d just hit the store too early, before things were restocked from the weekend.

(Small aside: Our grocery store staff is extremely kind and helpful, and I have often approached a staff member in the produce section and asked whether there is something available in the back, and sometimes there IS. I was going to try this approach this morning, especially because a staff member was a) wheeling out a big cartload of bagged lettuce varieties and b) she’d already brought something out for another customer. But then after she handed over the spinach to the person who’d asked for it, the staff member heaved a huge sigh and groaned “oy vey” under her breath in a manner far too world-weary for nine in the morning, so I moved along without bothering her.

I did buy a bottle of non-Huy Fong sriracha in my store’s house brand. I haven’t gotten up the nerve to try it yet. But I fear that the chili pepper / sriracha shortage is going to outlast my small stockpile, and I need to find an alternative.

I also bought two cartons of yogurt that expired yesterday, so that was annoying. But that’s on me, I guess, for only doing a quick check of the expiration date of one yogurt and assuming that all flavors would expire on the same date. They do NOT; the expiries vary wildly from yesterday to December 5. Let that be a warning to you.

Dinners for the Week of October 31-November 6

• Ground Beef Tacos
• Garlic Balsamic Crusted Pork Tenderloin: This sounds yummy and I haven’t made it in AGES. I think I’ll throw some root veggies into the oven to roast alongside the pork. 
• One Pan Pesto Chicken: This is a new one for me, but it sounds good (sans tomato, of course) and fairly easy, maybe?
• Sheet Pan Crispy Salmon and Potatoes: This sounds good and I have some salmon filets ready to go in the freezer. Now I just need to find some good looking asparagus that isn’t mind-blowingly expensive. 
• Butternut Squash Soup: This is so easy, even if it does involve chopping an onion. I just use cubed frozen butternut squash and it’s fine. The last time I made it, it was a teeny bit watery, so I am going to add a third bag of squash to the mix without adjusting any of the other elements of the recipe. I also bought a loaf of sourdough from the grocery store bakery and I have Big Plans [Confidential to those of you who hate mushrooms: LOOK AWAY] about sautéing some mushrooms with a little butter and garlic, and spreading the mushrooms on some Swiss cheese on top of a buttered slice of the sourdough and cooking it, grilled cheese style. That would make a delicious side to my soup, wouldn’t it now. 

Now I need to go find a bowl big enough for all the candy I plan to dole out to our trick-or-treaters.

Happy Halloween, Internet! I hope your night is full of treats! 

Carla was eager to buy a yellow pumpkin this year, and now I’m wondering why we don’t buy yellow pumpkins every year?! Wishing you a purrrr-fect Halloween.

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Pandemic Update; Memorial Day Weekend Meals

I am sad and my foot hurts and I have too many things to do but instead I keep bouncing back and forth between reading awful news articles and researching gun control legislation, so I am going to distract myself by blogging for a few minutes. 

Today as I was putting away the groceries (this is the THIRD trip to the grocery store I have made this week, which is a testament to how important it is to MEAL PLAN in advance because I did not do that this week and now here we are), I came across a giant five-pound bag of sugar that I bought in 2020 during the height of the sugar/flour shortage. I remember spotting it at Costco, alongside enormous industrial sized bags of flour and snapping it up with glee and relief. It has remained in my basement lo these many years. 

Well, my sugar container is looking a bit wan, so I will use the five-pound bag to refill it. My sugar container does not hold five pounds of sugar, though, so… I’m not really sure what to do with the remainder. That’s what gallon-size Ziploc storage bags are for, I suppose.

(The reason I need to refill the sugar container is because I am making cupcakes. They were supposed to do double duty: 1. They were to be dessert for an evening with friends, who were scheduled to come for dinner this weekend. 2. They were to be a special birthday surprise for our neighbor, who has become one of Carla’s favorite people on the planet; when Carla found out it was the neighbor’s birthday, she insisted that we make cupcakes. Anyway, the friends are no longer coming but the neighbor is still having a birthday, so I am still making cupcakes.) 

Pulling out the five-pound bag of sugar did jolt me back, a bit, into those dark days of the early pandemic. Not that the days have gotten a whole lot brighter, in many senses, pandemic and otherwise. But things are different. We no longer buy two jars of pickles a week, for one thing. I still note that we are getting low on paper towels or toilet paper, but I don’t fret. I raised my eyebrows when I saw that cream cheese was in very low supply (and zero of the Philadelphia brand was available), but I didn’t grab more boxes than I need for the cupcake recipe. The peanut butter shelves were near-empty, but that’s because of the Jif recall, not because peanut butter is no longer available. (Our giant two-pack of Jif was in the affected batch; we’d already eaten one entire jar but the other was unopened.) I have been gradually and purposefully whittling down our supply of frozen meat, rather than rushing out to refill it. 

I know things are still far from pre-pandemic “normal.” The note about “only four packages of baby formula per person” at my Target is a glaring example of that fact. But I do worry less. 

On the illness front: I have given Carla a Covid test before school every day this week. She keeps waking up with a sore throat or sniffles (that do seem to magically disappear by the time we leave for school), and I just don’t want to take a chance. Plus, Covid is rampant in her grade, with four and five cases per class as of last week (except in Carla’s class, so far). We are five days out from the end of the school year, and it would be amazing if she could make it the whole way… but that seems increasingly unlikely. 

My family continues to wear masks in public, indoor spaces. I am accustomed to wearing one that I don’t really notice anymore how many people are or aren’t wearing masks. I haven’t been hassled. My husband thinks that our road trip later this summer will take us through a lot of areas where masking will be non-existent, and I wonder if we’ll be hassled then; we’ll see. Carla’s school went mask-optional a long time ago, and we allowed Carla to make her own choice about whether to wear one or not. She enthusiastically chose NOT. We have been urging her, as cases at school and in her grade have crept up, to reconsider, and I think she IS wearing a mask at least some of the time. But it’s hard to know. When you are eight, it is extremely difficult to understand abstract non-immediate consequences. 

We are in the very, very privileged position of not having any underlying health issues ourselves, and not having any immunocompromised people in our household or classroom/work situation to worry about so we are more relaxed than some. I don’t know much about Long Covid, so that does worry me a little. We are of course willing and happy to take stronger measures if necessary – like I am always happy to throw on a mask if a friend is wearing one, and I don’t insist on going out for coffee when it is perfectly acceptable to have coffee at my house. But I feel like we have reached a level of comfort and regularity with how we protect ourselves. More than ever, it feels like contracting Covid is inevitable. We have been so lucky not to have it (or to have had such mild cases it went through us undetected); that luck is bound to run out.  

We are looking at a nice long weekend ahead of us. I finally got some flowers into the flowerpots in my front and back yard, and that makes me feel much better about things. They were looking so dejected and depressed; now they have little bright spots of color. (Except for the pot that has been designated as Carla’s. She went with me to pick out the flowers, and she fell in love with some black petunias. She would have had all our pots full of black flowers if it were up to her. Instead, I bought her a black petunia and gave her her own pot. And then filled up the other flower pots with purple and yellow and pink.)

I am very disappointed that our friends are no longer coming. We haven’t seen them since February, and they are the kind of people whose social calendars fill up months in advance so the next time they can work us in is August. (In fact, we’d originally been scheduled to have them over for dinner in April, but they accidentally double-booked us and had to back out of that; late May was the first available option way back in March when they realized the issue.) So I am disappointed and cranky about that. Especially because I already bought – literally – ten Roma tomatoes so I can make salsa and five avocados so I can make guacamole. I guess my little family will be feasting on salsa and guacamole all weekend. Perhaps I can coax our neighbor to come over for a little birthday fiesta? 

In my planning for the dinner party, I totally forgot about the long weekend. So this morning I planned out our meals on the fly, mid-produce section. In addition to chips, salsa, guacamole, and strawberry cupcakes, here’s what we will be eating:

• Ground Beef Tacos: Carla squealed with delight when I told her we will be having tacos. Same, Carla. Same.
• Spinach Salad with Strawberries, Chicken, and Goat Cheese: I will be using regular strawberries this time, not pineberries. Also, I like to use a mix of spinach and arugula because I dislike spinach. Also also, I am going to make my favorite balsamic dressing instead of the raspberry vinaigrette. 
• Steak Kebabs: This may end up being steaks and veggies instead because my husband has a very interesting aversion to cooking shish kebabs. Even if I am the one who threads the food onto the skewers AND grills the skewers, he is very… hesitant about it. I am choosing to see this quirk as cute.
• Crispy Slow Cooker Carnitas: This is what I planned to make for our friends. It’s fairly keto-friendly and always delicious.
• Greek Chicken Chopped Salad: Unfortunately, I could not find any fresh oregano so I will need to go to the grocery store YET AGAIN. I will use that opportunity to buy more berries; I cannot get enough strawberries right now.

Salads and tacos. Sounds pretty great to me.

What are you up to this weekend? If you live in the U.S., are you doing anything special for Memorial Day?

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Wednesday Evening Randomosity

Listen, I endured the drab wet drag of April purely because of the promise of May flowers and May has brought NOTHING BUT RAIN so far. Okay, also, I had no choice. But mainly the May flowers thing. Today, in particular, has been miserable. A persistent seething mist that is somehow much more dismal and spirit-breaking than actual rain, and everything is so water-logged and sloppy, and there’s no relief in sight. The weather mirrors, in so many ways, the news. 

So I am in the mood for some good ol’ mental diversionary tactics. Join me for some randomosity, will you?

I went back to the grocery store today. My husband has a work meeting tonight which I am using as a handy excuse to buy some prepared food that I merely have to heat rather than making an actual meal. I don’t love going to the grocery store multiple times in one week, but doing so meant that I could check out the produce situation on a mid-Wednesday rather than first thing Monday. The produce section was fully-stocked (asparagus! broccoli! iceberg lettuce aplenty!), so I feel fairly confident that the bare spots from Monday were a simple matter of timing rather than supply chain issues or shortages. 

Going to the grocery store today also meant that I could collect photographic evidence of the artisan baby iceberg lettuces. What do you think the other customers think, when I pulled out my phone and began taking baby-iceberg glamour shots?

I don’t know if you can see it on that sign, but these are “personal sized iceberg lettuce about the size of a softball!” A softball-sized lettuce is not worth $1.50, even if you claim it is “artisan.” Which… how? Doesn’t “artisan” mean crafted or made by hand??? Man, these marketers are really working hard for their money.

Here is the baby lettuce next to the actual heads of iceberg. There is no way that two baby lettuces equal one regular one. No way.

The tonic aisle was still full of holes, although I was able to get a bottle of diet tonic. My gin will be delighted. 

Speaking of gin: I bought this particular bottle because of a grocery store loophole. The grocery store in question is not my regular place. It’s a bigger, less nice supermarket that has a liquor store tacked onto one side. It’s very close to Carla’s school, so sometimes I pop in there if I need something quickly. The big problem with this grocery store is that it is chronically understaffed. This has always been an issue, and you can imagine that it has become even more significant with the staffing shortages that everyone is facing right now. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than two cash registers in operation at a time. And there are self-checkouts, but the lines at those are always enormous. This store has a loophole, though. Which is that you can buy groceries (as long as you don’t need any produce to be weighed) in the attached liquor store. Carla and I were there very late, because I’d been busy with the volunteer event I was chairing, and the lines were soooo long, and we only had a few items (including a frozen pizza for me because I can handle a twelve-hour day of volunteering but I cannot handle anything more complicated than heating up a frozen pizza on top of that), so I grabbed a bottle of gin and we paid in twenty seconds. The cashier, bless her, asked for my ID, and I said, “You need my ID? Can’t you see the many decades of exhaustion etched on my face?” and then Carla said to the cashier, “Do you also sell ginantonic?” and perhaps I need to reserve my gin-and-tonic hours for after she goes to bed. 

I had a Very Stressful dream last night. I was supposed to read a poem at a friend’s wedding. When I showed up – wearing the navy dress that all the bridesmaids were wearing – my friend was aghast; I was supposed to be wearing a DIFFERENT navy dress! I wondered if I had time to run home and change into the dress I bought and did not wear for Passover, but in the dream logic, I didn’t make any effort to figure out how much time I did or did not have. Instead, I spent the remainder of the VERY LENGTHY dream trying in vain to find the poem I was supposed to read in my email or online. At some point, I turned the dress I was wearing inside out, so at least it was a different color than the bridesmaids’, but the bride refused to talk to me. What the hell is this dream trying to tell me? What particular stress am I manifesting?

It feels like people all around me are getting Covid. A friend yesterday told me her husband tested positive; her kid tested positive this morning. A second friend’s husband tested positive today. This is not a new phenomenon, but it hasn’t happened in a while. I am not a fan. 

I have a credit card that I don’t use very often, and when I went to use it recently I discovered it had expired. Except that I had never received a replacement. So I went online and checked to make sure no one was running up charges (not yet at least) and then emailed the company, saying, “Hi, my card expired, but I never got a new one.” The response I got was, “Hey! Our records show we sent you a card in December. If you have not received your new card, let us know by calling us!” Um. Did you READ my previous email? In which I said that I never got my new card? Sigh. So much for dealing with this issue quickly and easily via email. Now I have to CALL SOMEONE.  

In other mildly unsettling credit card news, my husband recently got an email that he’d been approved for the credit card he’d signed up for! A card that he had NOT signed up for. He was able to cancel the card, but marveled at the fact that the person who had tried to steal his identity for nefarious credit-card obtaining purposes had used his email address. Why? Then yesterday we got the card itself in the mail. It was sent to our actual address. What? What is wrong with this identity thief? Is this some identity theft testing process? A credit card company that tries to get you to accept their card by pretending you signed up for it? Very odd indeed. 

Usually at this time of year, I find myself feeling pre-resentful and grumpy about Mother’s Day. This year I am feeling very at peace with whatever happens. I haven’t made any plans for myself, nor asked for anything, and I am not grumpy one whit. I mean, there’s still time to feel resentful and grumpy, but I’m enjoying the absolute not-caring that I feel at this moment. It’s very freeing. 

Here is a random photo of blue skies and flowering trees which is the OPPOSITE of what it looks like outside right now.

Someone made a Serious Error several years ago that resulted in the Tooth Fairy leaving personalized notes to my daughter each time she loses a tooth. Because of this really thoughtless oversight on someone’s part, my daughter has been corresponding with the Tooth Fairy – asking questions, requesting fairy dust, wanting to know the Tooth Fairy’s name. And then today, I made a Serious Error by saying, before I had fully awakened, that the Muffin Fairy had left an extra blueberry muffin on my daughter’s breakfast plate. She latched onto that wording immediately. I told her that I was the Muffin Fairy and that there was no real Muffin Fairy and she squinted at me and said, “If you are the Muffin Fairy,” – which again I had literally just invented five seconds ago – “then are you the Tooth Fairy, too?” 

I try very hard to never lie to my child. And by that I mean never lie to her face while still trying to preserve the magical fabrications that I remember bringing so much joy to my own childhood. So I adopted an expression of exaggerated skepticism and said, “Why would you think that? Do I look like a fairy?” and her squint deepened and I said, “And what would I do with teeth? And how would I possibly go around to the houses of everyone who lost a tooth?” And she said, “No, silly, you wouldn’t go to everyone’s house. Only your own kid.” And then I went into the pantry and changed the subject. But a few minutes later, she directed me to write something on a piece of paper so she could compare it to the Tooth Fairy’s handwriting. WHO, may I ask, overlooked the fact that she has been keeping her correspondence with the Tooth Fairy?

Did I tell you that Carla bought a jumpsuit? Is that the right word for it? We went to Carter’s the other day and she found this truly adorable one-piece pants outfit and immediately wanted it. I mean, I wanted it also, it was so chic and lovely. I would look terrible in it, especially considering it only came in child sizes. The problem with it was that it had a button at the back of the neck. A child’s jumpsuit. Had a button. At the back of the neck. I have never understood buttons on the back of children’s clothing EVER. But how – HOW, I ask you – does it make any iota of sense to have a button closure on the back of a CHILD’S JUMPSUIT? How is a CHILD supposed to navigate that when addressing normal and not-infrequent necessities of life presumably whilst at school?

She found a different jumpsuit, also cute, with NO BUTTONS ANYWHERE. She tried it on and demonstrated to me how she would remove it for bathroom break purposes. She wore it to school today and looked very adorable indeed. And by “adorable” I mean, of course, “stylish and grown-up” because Carla has reached an age where “cute” is now code for “babyish.” I cannot refer to her as “cute” anymore or she reacts with disgust.

Apparently I am now on a Carla Stories Kick. Yesterday, we had such a lovely time together after school. We have been looking for Jeff the Great Blue Heron every time we drive past his pond and have only seen him ONCE. So Carla asked if we could walk over to his pond after school. The rain stopped just for this purpose. It was so nice. We didn’t see Jeff, but we did see many Canada geese couples and their fluffy yellow babies. We also saw some goldfinches and some killdeer and some mallards, and Carla described at length how killdeer have a very distinctive call and asked me if I was aware that there was such a thing as a GREEN heron, and then talked a bit about an imaginary bird journal that she would like to keep. She held my hand while we crossed the street and then kept holding my hand and I just kept grinning at her and thinking, My God, I am so grateful for this child. It may sound mundane and silly and it was but it is also an afternoon I never, ever want to forget. 

This is not the most flattering angle of Jeff, but it is very difficult to photograph a subject as reluctant as he is. He is much more magnificent and graceful in person.

I may have zero sunshine but I did pick up some more May flowers for myself: a bunch of hot pink Gerber daisies to add to my yellow tulips from Monday.

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Grocery Store Report; Dinners This Week

I am NOT in the mood to think about dinner, not one bit, but I did go to grocery store and go through all the motions of buying food that could potentially be put together in a variety of combinations on one’s plate. 

The grocery store has, of late, been… well, not worrisome, exactly. But every time I go there, I feel the parallel lines between my eyebrows deepening just a little in watchful pre-concern. Today, the produce section looked like it had been looted by a colony of ravenous hares. (Please note that a group of rabbits is also known as a fluffle, which is just too adorable for words, and which, sadly, does not have the right tone for my current level of grocery store apprehension.)  There was no asparagus at all (I found some later in the prepared foods section), a single bunch of broccoli – even the section of more-expensive broccoli crowns was meager, and the crowns themselves looked like they were old – and the bell peppers were nearly non-existent. The boxed/bagged lettuce seemed plentiful, at least. But there were only TWO heads of iceberg lettuce at all. Except – and please share if your grocery store is doing this same kind of lettuce mind game – there were several two-packs of “artisan miniature iceberg lettuce” or however it is that they are trying to disguise the heads of lettuce that are too small to be sold as regular heads of lettuce. Every time I see these stunted, tiny twin packs I roll my eyes, but I have never taken a photo. I will try to remember to do so next time so we can all scoff at them together. 

The berries were moderately plentiful, but the limes and lemons looked picked through and the only other available fruits were grapefruits, a few oranges, and some pears. I did get some kiwis, I suppose, which is good because Carla is in a kiwi kick. I suppose there was, in reality, an abundance of produce in a wide variety. But it felt like very low-stock, with lots of empty spaces. And perhaps that was due to it being first thing Monday morning, but I just don’t know. 

The rest of the store seemed… sparse in odd ways. Like… the tonic section looked very picked over, with lots of holes on the shelves (the hole that most affected me personally was the one where the diet tonic should have been grumble grumble), but really there was a lot of tonic to be had. The same with the yogurt: holes and empty shelves, but in and among LOTS of yogurt. I was irritated to find that the peach Two Good yogurt had expired back on April 23, but there were enough other options to get plenty for the week. Cream cheese seemed very lacking – the foil-wrapped rectangles were not in evidence, nor were the tubs of whipped cream cheese Carla likes. I still have a couple of boxes from the false-alarm cream cheese shortage of last fall though (possibly expired), so I merely squinted at the empty cream cheese section and moved on. 

Frozen pancakes were not only available, they were on SALE. I had promised my husband – who is joining me on Keto! – that I would get him some frozen egg bites, but they were missing from the shelves. 

My grocery store has rearranged the meat section so I find it hard to evaluate whether it truly seems bare (there were three pork tenderloins total, and only a few packages of pork chops) or whether it’s just unfamiliar. 

Things seem VERY expensive. I hesitate to admit that I am in a position where I buy things from a list, and rarely make note of the price unless it is wildly shocking (like the 2-for-$7 iceberg lettuce of last fall). But I am pretty sure that pints of raspberries and blackberries would normally, at this time of year, be $2 a package rather than $3.50. And containers of strawberries would typically be going for $2.50 a package rather than $4.99. 

The biggest price escalation I spotted today was goat cheese. I am 99% certain that I could get a 4-ounce log of goat cheese for $3.99 in the past; today it was $5.29, and that was for a brand I’ve never heard of before. The kind I usually get was $5.49. That is a BIG jump. Cheese in general seems to have really gone up in price – unfortunate considering that we eat a LOT of cheese, especially when doing keto. 

I also bought wheat germ for the first time, because I made a loaf of banana chocolate chip bread on Carla’s request; she’d tasted it at a friend’s house, and I got the recipe from the friend’s mother and it calls for equal parts flour, whole wheat flour, and wheat germ. For anyone who has also never before purchased wheat germ, and suddenly finds themselves needing it, it was in the cereal aisle, NOT the baking aisle like I thought it would be. I also scoured the aisle that has all the hemp hearts and chia seeds and whey protein and collagen powder before finally asking an employee. 

Carla has asked me to FREEZE the banana chip bread once it is made, which… I am not going to do until after she has tasted it fresh.

I bought some cheery yellow tulips as well, on sale for $6.99 a bunch; there used to be a section of flowers that were 3 for $15, but several weeks ago that changed to 3 for $18, so I understand that flowers are no exception to inflation. These tulips were one of a handful of bunches that looked remotely acceptable; the others looked like they had already spent several long days preening for the customers and were now haggard and limp. Perhaps it is the persistent rain of this particular spring that is causing the lackluster flowers; perhaps there will be an influx later in the week in time for Mother’s Day.

Okay. I have dawdled long enough. Now it is time to figure out what to eat this week.

Dinners for the Week of May 2 to May8

• Balsamic Chicken and Mushrooms with Everyday Salad: I wonder if I can substitute a pork chop or some salmon for the chicken?
• Honey-Dijon Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Asparagus: I am hopeful we have a pork tenderloin in the freezer. 
• Tacos
• Beef and Snow Pea Stir Fry: I didn’t get beef or snow peas at the store, so this may be difficult to achieve. 
• Sheet Pan Parmesan Salmon with Broccoli: I did manage to find some broccoli, after circling back through the produce section. Perhaps I will make a chicken breast for my salmon-averse husband.

What are you eating this week, the FIRST WEEK OF MAY OMG?

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Cake Update Already, Grocery Store Report

Well, you bolstered my spirits SO MUCH after yesterday’s cake talk (please continue to share your cake dreams; it is a delightful distraction) that I felt totally pumped up and ready to make my cake call. I fished out the business card the baker had given me, phone in hand, ready to dial… and noticed that she has a website. 

Listen, I KNEW that she had a website – I’d looked at it before Carla and I went to the event she hosted. My recollection was that the site listed some of the cookies and baked goods she normally offers at the farmer’s market, and that it mentioned cakes on the menu, but that the only thing it said about cakes was that they are custom. 

But I wanted to research as much as possible, without doing SO MUCH research that I would lose my phone call determination, so I quickly visited her site. Turns out I was wrong: she has a page on her site devoted to cakes. Not only did it list the price per cake (THIRTY DOLLARS), it had an ONLINE FORM that I could fill out with all of my details!!! 

You will understand that the clouds parted and the sun shone down on me and the air filled with the gentle chorus of angels singing, “Ahhhh!” in harmonious unison.

I included as much detail as I could (and the form was nice and long), and left my name, phone number, and email address in case I left out critical details, or in case she refuses to work with lemon curd on principle, I don’t know; I will angst about literally anything. And then I paid VIA PAYPAL (the angels’ song crescendos). THIRTY DOLLARS. I thought for sure I was looking at least $75, if not $100-$150. But no. Thirty. Dollars. 

Then, it DID turn out I had left out important information. But I learned this because she emailed me because she is clearly my cake soul mate. (She wanted to know how many people would be eating the cake, if I had a color scheme, and if I wanted any decorations/words.) Then we figured out where to meet to pick it up, and voila! Done! 

I am very pleased. And honestly, even if the cake is so-so, the purchase experience was SUCH a good experience on its own I will definitely patronize her again. 

By the way, I told Carla when I picked her up from school that I’d ordered my birthday cake! Soothed by everyone’s comments, I was completely unfazed by having done it myself: it is not a big deal, and lo, it was not. But Carla did not get the memo. She was AGHAST. “WHY did you do that, Mommy?” she exclaimed. “You’re NOT supposed to do that!” And I said, “If I don’t do it, who will?” “DADDY!” She was further scandalized when I said she and I were going to pick up the cake after school on my birthday. “You can’t LOOK at it, Mommy!” she said, eyes wide. “DON’T LOOK.” 

On to the grocery store report, which I am adding here simply because I like reading other people’s grocery store reports. 

I went this morning, which is not my usual morning. Also, we are expecting around a foot of snow overnight, so people are panicking. (Is that why I went to the grocery store when I’d already stopped there Monday afternoon? PERHAPS.) So either of those variables could be responsible for the store being much more crowded than usual. 

There was an elderly couple who was on the same route that I follow. I swear I have seen them or their couple-twin before, because they are a) darling and b) incapable of standing in a way that does not occupy 75% of the aisle. I am constantly saying “Excuse me!” “Ope! Sorry! Can I squeeze by?” to these people. They also deliberate long and hard about every item they buy. Seriously. I stood beside them in front of the lettuce and they stared at the romaine for what felt like many minutes. I could NOT get away from them. They were even in the cracker aisle, where I had to replenish our Triscuit supply. Carla is very into Triscuits lately. 

Anyway: As usual, our store was fairly well-stocked, although I felt a little… wary, as I made my way around. 

First, there is yet another reorganization of the produce section happening. It seems to me like they have added black trays/bins to the normal shelves, and for all I know, it’s to enhance cleanliness and make washing/removing/refilling the trays quicker and easier. But what it LOOKED LIKE is that they are finding ways to make less produce look as abundant as ever.

And it is still abundant! I had a rainbow of bell peppers to choose from! When I was a kid, we were lucky to find a single wrinkled green pepper at the grocery store in the middle of winter, let alone a pile of not only green peppers but red and orange and yellow ones.

Lettuce was bountiful.

Berries were back in stock, although the berry section was rather small. That’s probably just the time of year, though. Or they are winnowing the blue-, black-, and raspberries to make room for an influx of Valentine’s Day strawberries. 

The banana and onion sections were full. There was NO CELERY, which was worrying for a moment… but when I circled back around to get more mushrooms (I was adding new items to my meal plan as I went; see yesterday’s post for an updated list), the celery had been restocked. 

The cereal aisle had some worrying holes – no Rice Krispies. But I did snag a box of Wheat Chex – not that we need Wheat Chex. My thought process was something like, “If we run out of power and have to dip into pantry food, we can all eat Wheat Chex” which is nonsensical, but the anxious brain has its own sense of inarguable logic.

Pasta was well stocked, except that rigatoni was missing. This is my husband’s preferred pasta shape (I am penne 4 life), so it was notable. I got him some campanelli; he can be soothed occasionally by the ruffles. 

The freezer section still had pancakes, and I just bought pancakes Monday so I walked right past. I know! I am the epitome of restraint! Still no French toast sticks. 

The chicken nugget section was VERY thin. Probably six or seven bags of various breaded chicken options total. Since we just emptied a bag, leaving me with one bag in the freezer, I picked up another bag. Since the pandemic, I have been fully indoctrinated into the Cult of the Backup. As Nicole said the other day, “I always have backups in the pantry of household staple. If the backup comes into use, then I buy another backup. It gives me an enormous amount of comfort to know that if we run out of an item on the main floor, there is a backup in the pantry downstairs.” YES. This is the one true way. Someday I will convert my husband to our movement. What’s not to like? We always have cookies. 

The ground beef section was VERY low. Once again, the prepared foods counter was closed. But it was open when I popped in Monday afternoon – it must simply have shorter hours these days, probably due to staffing issues. 

Lunchables were available. My daughter’s favorite muffins were not, but her second favorite muffins were, so I grabbed some of those. Bread was plentiful. 

The one thing I regret not grabbing was a package of tulips, on sale for $6.99 a bunch. (That’s… a lot. But I have been eyeing the tulips my past few trips, and I think it was running $8.99 before. Two dollars off is a good savings.)

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Dinners This Week; Grocery Store Report

Ugh ugh ugh – dinner planning, AGAIN? What is this repetitive nonsense? I know exactly how Sisyphus feels, pushing that shopping cart up the hill, full of veggies and enthusiasm, only to find himself, a week later, back at the bottom of the hill, shopping cart once again empty but for a few limpening Brussels sprouts and some wilted Romaine. 

Okay, it has been many hours since I wrote that paragraph. And I haven’t found a SINGLE RECIPE that sounds appealing. Not even tacos. Well, I have been ogling a bunch of focaccia-making videos on Instagram. But that seems like a bit more carbs-and-trouble than I feel up to.

In this case, the best recourse is to fill the shopping cart with all-purpose foods. The khaki trousers of the produce section: zucchini and broccoli. The sensible cardigan of the dairy aisle: yogurt and shredded cheddar. And some sturdy dress-up-or-down-able meats, like pork chops and chicken breasts. Maybe, we can accessorize with some berries, if they look nice. Or a pile of gaudy green beans. The rest we’ll just make up as we go along. 

Okay, many more hours have passed. I enlisted the help of my husband, who is usually good for a meal suggestion or two. He really came through, and now I have some actual meals to prepare. Doesn’t mean they sound good, or I am eager to prepare them. But if they sound good to HIM, then that helps immensely. It’s always easier to prepare something that a family member is enthusiastically anticipating than to think of some random thing that both of us will probably choke down.

Dinners for the Week of January 25-30

• Crockpot BBQ Pork: My husband likes to eat his pork on little Hawaiian sweet rolls, with coleslaw. I like to eat it alongside a baked potato. 
• Reverse-Seared Steak: My husband wanted steak, and left the vegetable side up to me. So I got some pre-prepped asparagus with herb butter from my grocery store’s much-reduced prepared foods section.
• Red Curry: This one is so much work (because I like lots of veggies), but I do love it. 
• Crockpot Short Ribs with Steamed Broccoli: Again with the short ribs. I am not going to make the mascarpone polenta as a side. 
• Something else, with the all-purpose ingredients I mentioned above.

Are you stuck in the meal planning doldrums as I am? I feel like I say, “Can we have cheese and crackers?” more nights than not, these days.

Onto the grocery store report.

The produce section seemed fine-ish. All the varieties of onions were back in stock. Lettuce seemed abundant. Broccoli was SIX (6) U.S. dollars per two very small stalks of broccoli, which seemed outrageous. Bananas were back in full force.

The other aisles seemed fairly fine, with just a couple of bare spots here and there that could be attributed to anything. The bread aisle had a couple of holes, but the English muffins my husband likes were back in stock. The freezer section had several boxes of frozen pancakes, though it was by no means FULL of pancakes; waffles are still proving pandemic-proof; still no French toast sticks. Frozen chicken nuggets were readily available. Pastas and beans and taco shells and rice/grains seemed fairly well stocked. The only aisle that was really concerning was the fruit drink aisle, which was nearly empty. I’ve been aware of the Gatorade shortage, but it was startling to see it represented so powerfully. 

I did notice that ALL meat was VERY EXPENSIVE. I bought a package of chicken, a package of pork chops, and a package of ground beef, and each package was very close to $10. And we’re not talking about multiple pounds of meat, here. We’re talking maybe 1.3 to 1.5 pounds. I do not buy the fancy organic meat, either. My eyebrows were very high.

My grocery store typically has a bountiful prepared-foods section, manned by a staff person. The last two times I’ve been in the store, the section has been entirely empty and dark. Perhaps this is because I am there so early; perhaps they have discontinued it. There is still a refrigerated case that has some prepared foods, but I miss the variety and the staff person (who shows me photos of her dog and asks after Carla). 

My store did have a big notice on the front door saying that they are reducing hours due to a staff shortage, which is concerning. (However, the “reduced” hours are the hours that I thought were normal for this store, so… not sure what they are reducing from.) 

I saw a new primary care doctor (I love her), and she was telling me all about this low-carb yogurt that I HAVE to try, so I got the lemon flavor. If it’s good, I will let you know. 

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Grocery Store Report; Dinners This Week

We got about a foot of snow overnight, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, I didn’t take a ruler outside with me because that would be weird. For me. No disrespect to your ruler. I love snow, so I don’t mind too terribly much. Carla – off from school today AND tomorrow – LOVES the snow, so she has made snow angels, tried to make snowballs (the snow is currently too dry for packing), helped our neighbor shovel her driveway, and eaten a large bowl of snow. She went sledding with friends. She has enjoyed cocoa with a jumbo marshmallow in it.

Before all the snow fun, Carla and I ventured out to the grocery store this morning, and I am not exaggerating when I say that we were the ONLY CUSTOMERS in the building when we arrived. Toward the end of our visit, there were maybe 5 to 10 more customers going up and down the aisles as well, but for awhile it was just us. Very eerie. 

The produce section has been making me feel a little watchful lately. First, the store has moved some things around and re-arranged some of the display cases… which I am SURE is because they do this periodically and NOT to disguise the fact that there is less produce than before. 

It seems like the outages are rolling though. A few weeks ago: NO POTATOES or red onions. Then last week and this week, both of those things are back in stock, but Spanish onions were missing from the shelves. Today, there were no white onions, no Spanish onions, and no sweet onions – at least, not in the normal/large size. There were a handful of red onions, and plenty of the smallish yellow onions in a bag, so I bought a bag of the smallish onions. The onions were all arranged so that it looked like only the sweet onions were out of stock. But NO. There is usually a big selection of THREE ADDITIONAL ONION VARIETIES in that section that are simply missing. 

There were very few bananas. 

There were no blueberries. 

Jalapenos were abundant today, as were bell peppers of most colors. Wait a second – I wasn’t looking for green bell peppers today, but now I realize that there weren’t ANY green bell peppers. 

The lettuce area was a little thin, both in the bagged/boxed lettuce area and the heads-of-fresh lettuce area. But not barren. There was still lettuce if you needed lettuce. 

I didn’t notice any major issues throughout the rest of the store. Everything we buy seemed to be either well-stocked, or not completely empty. Like… the milk we buy had two containers in the 2%, and more containers of whole milk and skim milk. The specific type of pretzels my husband eats was out of stock, but other types of pretzels were abundant… and had been arranged so as to fill in the gap that my husband’s preferred pretzels would have occupied. 

Last week, the waffles/pancakes freezer had pretty much zero waffles or pancakes; I am accustomed to the lack of pancakes, but not the lack of waffles. There were no French toast sticks, either. Instead, the entire freezer case was FILLED with hashbrowns and breakfast potatoes. Today, waffles were back, French toast (but not French toast sticks) was back, and one variety of pancakes was available. And there were very few hashbrowns. 

The chicken nugget/chicken tender area was not full by any means, but there were several bags of each. 

I totally forgot to look at pasta today. Last week, the egg noodles aisle was almost completely wiped out. (I changed one of our meals to chicken paprikas, which requires egg noodles.) I had to buy a brand of noodles that I am unfamiliar with (and won’t be buying again). 

The beans/taco shells/Asian/Mexican food aisle seemed just fine; last week, the soft taco shell section had been very depleted. 

Lunchables were available. We already have Hormel pepperoni at home, so I didn’t even look to see if it was in stock. 

Last week, I also went into my local Trader Joe’s. (They have fresh English peas that my kid loves.) I was prepared to be shocked by the experience; I’d been reading that Trader Joe’ses all over the country have been having trouble keeping things in stock. I expected empty shelves and harried workers.

It looked… the same. Produce was abundant. I had no trouble finding the things I wanted. I didn’t see a single empty shelf. 

When I checked out, I asked the two cheery, friendly people who were checking me out about it. “I heard that Trader Joe’s is having so many supply chain issues,” I said. “But this one seems like everything is fine!”

The smiles dropped from both their faces. They said very grimly that it has been ROUGH. That they are out of a lot of things, but have been rearranging things so it doesn’t look like it. They said that one day, a truck just never showed up, and they had nothing… and then the next day, two trucks showed up at once and they were jam-packed with things. One of the checkers said that weird things are delaying the supply chain. She mentioned that there was a problem sourcing glass jars for a while. And then sometimes there will be a certain lid that they can’t get, which means the product can’t be packaged or shipped or put on the shelves. The change in their demeanor was enough to demonstrate how tough this must be. 

It is all making me feel a little tiny bit edgy. Like… it’s clear there are issues. But they don’t seem to be widespread, and they don’t seem to last too long, and – as Swistle pointed out – there is still PLENTY of food. So much food. No one is going hungry. So while remain very interested in the grocery store stuff, I am not quite to the point of adding an extra XYZ item to my cart every time I’m in the store.

On to the actual meals. 

We only made two of the meals I planned for last week, so I am (rather reluctantly) putting the ones we didn’t eat back on the list. 

Dinners for the Week of January 17-January 23

• Roasted Garlic Balsamic Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Balsamic Brussels Sprouts: This sounds unappealing to me today. But we do have all those Brussels sprouts in the fridge. I don’t want to waste them. Maybe I will find a different protein. 
• Spicy Fish Taco Bowls: This doesn’t sound particularly appealing this week, but I have a mango to use up. The fish is frozen, so maybe I will make a pork tenderloin with mango salsa instead.

• Air Fryer Parmesan Chicken with Broccoli and Hasselback Sweet Potatoes: I didn’t make this last week because there were ZERO sweet potatoes at the grocery store. Today, there were plenty, so I snagged a couple. 
• Chicken Tortilla Soup: This is my favorite soup, but it requires a LOT of work and I am not sure I’m up to it. So. We’ll see. All the ingredients (except the cilantro) will keep if I decide not to make this.
• Oven Roasted Chicken Shawarma: I have some green beans leftover from last week that we can eat with this. This is honestly the only meal on the list that sounds remotely appetizing.
• Chickpea Bowls: I like to add green and red bell peppers to these bowls, but I feel like red peppers start to taste odd in the winter. Like… they develop the bell pepper equivalent of B.O. I don’t know what it is, or why it affects only the red ones, but it makes me a little reluctant to cook with them. The only reason I even have this on the list is because I have to find a way to use up the red peppers!

Tell me all your meal plans for this week, and what’s going on with your grocery situation. 

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Grocery Store Report; Pancakes Detour; Coffee Update; Thanksgiving Memory Erasure; Dinners This Week

The grocery store was a madhouse this morning. Not unexpected, I suppose, considering it is the week of Thanksgiving here in the U.S. But still… I guess I hoped that it wouldn’t be too wild at 8:00 am. Oh well. I emerged unscathed (except for my checking account; hot turkey leg food is EXPENSIVE).

Iceberg lettuce, I am sure you will be relieved to hear, was on sale for $2.50 a head. (Sarcasm font.) Pancakes, of any size, are still completely absent from the frozen section – I need to see an in-depth investigative report on WHY frozen pancakes are a) so much hotter a commodity these days than in The Time Before, and b) so difficult to replenish/keep on the shelves. I read somewhere – oh yes; I googled what in the sizzling griddle is going on with pancakes, and found a tweet by some other miffed mother wanting some pancake clarity. The Eggo twitter account responded, which is kind of cool… but their response was both vague and unsatisfying:

Seriously. WHAT IS GOING ON WITH FROZEN PANCAKES. My grocery store doesn’t even have space for pancakes anymore. It’s not like there is a big gaping pancake hole indicating where the few boxes of pancakes had been before they were snatched immediately off the shelves by lucky pancake hunters… Instead, the waffle selection has swollen to disproportionate sizes, making it seem as though there were never any pancakes at all. When things like lunchables and pasta and flour were hard to come by, there was still space for them on the shelves. So I feel like there just are no pancakes. (I suppose my grocery store could just have gotten really adept at filling shelf gaps, to create the illusion of well-stocked shelves… but there was NO MAPLE SYRUP today, and where they should have been on the shelf was just a gaping nothingness, so…) I am assuming, based on absolutely no data at all, that pancake machinery is being used to support some other in-demand food stuff… but I can’t for the life of me think what it is. Or maybe Big Waffle is trying to eradicate pancakes from the planet. Whatever is going on, the pancake supply chain seems to have completely collapsed, at least in my area.

You may have surmised, based on the frenetic tone of the above, that I am still in the midst of my coffee experiment. Even though I am a regular drinker of both black tea and caffeinated soda, and even though I never notice an appreciable difference in personal caffeination (although if I skip my tea, I do get a headache, so obviously the caffeine is doing something), I feel like coffee is different. It’s like an injection of liquid energy, except not the kind of energy I can direct toward productive things like exercise or work; it’s more like squirrel energy, where my movements become rapid and jerky and I get easily distracted by acorns.

My husband, a legit coffee connoisseur, made me some of his good coffee this morning. He did so yesterday as well. (Saturday, and there is no reason for me to tell you this, but, squirrel, he slept in because he was coming off 12 straight days of work plus he was recovering from his Covid booster, so I drank my regular tea.) He grinds his own beans and has some sort of special drip coffee maker and I am supposed to believe that these things make the coffee much smoother. It is certainly much less bitter/nauseating than the pre-ground pumpkin coffee I drank last week when I began this experiment, but I am still suspicious. Coffee is coffee, right? I do find that I absolutely need to eat something before/during the coffee drinking, otherwise I feel very queasy indeed. This morning, I had a slice of apple cider donut blondie that my husband and daughter made yesterday. It is very tasty, but I have to warn you: it tastes NOTHING of apple cider. Which is deeply disappointing, because my husband had to reduce the apple cider by half and it took close to an hour to do so. Apple cider appearance or no, these blondies are soft and crumbly on the inside and crunchy around the edges and go very nicely with coffee. However, this may prove to be too much sugar for my stomach to handle in tandem with the squirrel surge of caffeine.

I apparently drink coffee much darker than I do tea.

Hey! This week is Thanksgiving, at least at my house, and I am looking forward to a very low-key day with just the three of us. I am making a turkey breast (America’s Test Kitchen recipe) (although I bought a couple of wing pieces to help enhance the drippings for the gravy), and my mother’s goat-cheese-garlic-mashed potatoes, and mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows for my daughter, and cranberry sauce, and apple crisp. It still sounds like a lot of food and cooking, but I don’t have to make dressing (my husband agreed to let me buy it, pre-made, from Whole Foods, where we are getting our turkey breast), and we can sit around in our pajamas all day if we want and I feel like this is going to be a nice break before the crush of the Christmas holiday.

(By the way, in searching for my Thanksgiving recipes, I came across last year’s post about Thanksgiving. And I have ZERO RECOLLECTION OF ANY OF IT. Apparently we didn’t do cranberry sauce or dressing last year, either? Apparently we did a family Zoom? Apparently we made something called an apple sharlotka? NO MEMORY OF ANY OF IT.)

Hanukkah begins the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I am dithering over whether to make sufganiyot again. I really liked them, and it was fun to share them with our neighbor. But they really are best when fresh out of the fryer, so I don’t know if it’s worth doing again. Carla expressed interest in making some cookies, so maybe I will look into that. And maybe we will save a Hanukkah baking project for the end of Hanukkah instead of the beginning.

Dinners for the Week of November 22-November 28

• Chicken Tortilla Soup
• Asian Chicken Salad (which I didn’t make last week)
• Oven Baked Pork Chops with a Side Salad
• Turkey Day Food!
• Leftovers
• Takeout (something opposite to the bland, carb-heavy Thanksgiving fare, like Indian or Thai or Cuban food)
• Salmon and Leek One Pot Wonder with Trader Joe’s Latkes

What are you most looking forward to eating this week? If you celebrate Thanksgiving, what will your celebration look like this year? And do YOU remember last year’s Thanksgiving? Why has it been erased so thoroughly from my brain? Is there some sort of insidious black hole that is devouring pancakes and memories?

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Grocery Store Report; Doubly Awkward Encounter; Dinners This Week

I don’t have any new shortages to report, although Lunchables, which seemed to recover briefly, are once again non-existent and frozen pancakes remain highly elusive. But I had to rush here immediately to alert you that iceberg lettuce at my grocery store is currently selling for $3.50. That’s U.S. dollars. THREE DOLLARS FIFTY CENTS. Iceberg lettuce. 

I am well aware that prices of many items are creeping ever upward, but this seems like a GIANT LEAP. Usually, a head of iceberg lettuce is somewhere between $0.99 and $1.50. So the increase feels rather dramatic. 

It wasn’t even a particularly large head of lettuce, either. Smaller than usual. 

I find it so curious that the label says “2 for $7” instead of “$3.50 apiece.” Does 2 for $7 sound BETTER? Because it doesn’t sound better to ME. When did ICEBERG LETTUCE become such a hot commodity?!?!

Well. The other types of lettuce seem to be holding steady at their normal egregious pricing, so I’ll just forego my beloved iceberg for something more nutritious and less delightfully crunchy, like romaine. 

I was so gobsmacked that I mentioned the price increase to the checker. He commiserated and said that the shock waves of the pandemic were causing very strange cracks in the system. Even though I haven’t noticed a big difference in staffing – I see the regular staff members I’ve come to know over the past decade – he said they are really struggling with understaffing issues. 

He was the only checker open – which didn’t strike me as too strange; it was eight in the morning after all. But there was a guy behind me with two items to my full cart, so I let him go ahead of me. Then a woman got in line behind me, also with two items. What was I to do in that situation? Let her go ahead of me, too? It would have taken five seconds but then what if the next person showed up and only had two items? Or five items? I told myself that I had done the nice thing, letting the one person jump ahead of me in line, and that I didn’t have to do it again. But she had SEEN him go ahead of me, and I didn’t want her to think I was a jerk. So I told her I thought that the customer service desk would check her out, since she had so few items. She thanked me and headed off to buy her muffin and juice at the customer service desk. 

The whole interaction was super awkward already, but then it became doubly so when I realized she was my old hairdresser. 

I swear to you that I blogged about breaking up with this hairdresser, but I rummaged around in my archives a bit and couldn’t find the post, so you will get a small recap: I went to this hairdresser for several years and liked her. But then she started outsourcing things to others so she could work on other clients. Not just the shampooing. But like… “Oh, I’m going to send you over to Dean to do your color while I cut this other person’s hair.” Or… “Kelly’s going to trim your ends and then I’ll be back to do your color.” I did not care for this. First, it was a salon that charges more based on your stylist’s level of expertise, so I felt a little miffed that I was paying for HER level but getting half of my hair done by Dean or Kelly, and who knows WHAT level they were… plus, I wanted to see HER because a hairdresser/hair-haver relationship is very intimate and based largely on trust. So after this happened a few times, I went elsewhere for my haircare needs. 

It’s so AWKWARD, though, to dump a service provider. I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine having an end-of-relationship conversation with a hairdresser. “It’s not you, it’s me” sounds even more insincere when it’s directed at your stylist, right? So I just… ghosted her. (I did the same to the next hairdresser, too, which is even MORE awkward because she remains my husband’s hairdresser.) (Then my next hairdresser ghosted me, but that was because she didn’t return to work after the pandemic and who can blame her.) I have seen the old hairdresser out in the wild a couple of times, but on those occasions I spotted her from a distance and I think I was able to slip away before she saw me. Or if she saw me, it was as I walked speedily away, head down, eyes averted. Yes, I am very mature.  

But this was the first time I have seen her face to face. Not only that, but I SPOKE to her. I was wearing a mask and glasses, and I am several years older by now. Sure, I remember her name and her daughter’s name, and the type of books she likes to read, but I was one of many clients that she’s had over the years. So I’m hoping she didn’t recognize or remember me. 

There’s nothing to be DONE about this very small, very fleetingly awkward interaction. Even if she did recognize me. Even if she did think, “Wow, there’s that person who ghosted me half a decade ago.” Even if she reacted with anger or hurt feelings. I can’t change any of it. It will likely be years before I run into her again in public. And yet I AM STILL THINKING ABOUT IT, and may continue to do so for hours/days, twirling and twirling the interaction around itself, trying to reshape it or make it less awkward by perseverating on it. Why is being a human so rife with these little inescapable twinges and pains? 

Let us now change subjects abruptly to meal planning.

I went to the grocery store with one meal in mind, and while I was there I came up with several possibilities. So now I have a full fridge and a nice list of dinners to make for my family this week.

Dinners for the Week of November 15 to November 22

WAIT A SECOND IS THANKSGIVING NEXT WEEK WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TIME WHERE HAS IT GONE?

• Fire Fry: We haven’t had this in a long while, and I am craving crunchy veggies in a fiery sauce. My husband made me promise to drastically reduce the amount of spices I add to the yogurt though. He is no fun at all. 
• Chicken Paprikas: Another meal we haven’t had in far too long. And I have a bunch of cooked, shredded rotisserie chicken in the freezer just waiting to be added to a rich, creamy, potato laced sauce and poured over noodles. 
• Asian Chicken Salad: I think my husband will appreciate this meal, as it is neither tacos nor chicken/zucchini stir fry, both of which he is tired of. I will probably make some teriyaki dressing as well since I don’t care for the peanut dressing listed in the recipe.
• Chicken/Zucchini Stir Fry: Oh yes, I love this stir fry. It’s so easy and so tasty and all the zucchini makes me feel so virtuous. And despite my husband feeling like we have it all the time, we do NOT and it has been many weeks since we’ve eaten it and it is time once again. 
• Thai Red Chicken Curry: Am I in a stir fry mood or what? 
• Red Wine Braised Short Ribs with Polenta: Why yes, this has been a recurring bullet on my dinner posts since October 25. I STILL have not made this meal, but the short ribs are in the freezer waiting to be immersed in red wine until they collapse in drunken ecstasy and the polenta is very calmly waiting on the shelf and I have a nice package of inexpensive-compared-to-iceberg-lettuce romaine waiting in the crisper, so perhaps THIS is the week it will all come together.

What are you eating this week, the last week before THANKSGIVING, which is somehow nearly upon us?

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