That time B was jealous of the dog’s dinner…
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For about a year, I was pretty hardcore into cooking healthy for the entire family. We tried no dairy to isolate allergies; we tried bento boxes for a healthy twist on brown bagging’; we focused on homegrown produce and local meats; we cut out MSG, certain yellow preservatives, and white sugar; we replaced soy with things like amino acid sauce…
I didn’t go nuts with it all, but if you had my brownies during this time, you better believe they had pumpkin puree in them and you had no idea.
This also means that I made all of the dog’s food from scratch, too. If you aren’t familiar with how spoiled this dog was before we adopted him, it’s worth a few tear-jerking moments here.
I fully recognize that this isn’t really the norm, but it’s what worked for us and I didn’t think much of it. It was simply part of the routine and what needed to be done in order to keep everyone healthy and happy, so it’s what I did.
Well… that is… until one day, the girls came home from school and B saw me mixing the weekly batch of dog food in the kitchen sink.
(Yes, you read that correctly, by the way. Using the sink is a whole lot easier to mix a large batch in than trying to find an appropriate mixing bowl that will happily slop it all over the counter or table while you’re mixing and scooping. Just toss it all in the sink, do your thing, and when you’re done, run some watch to clean up. Voila!)
Anyway, so they come in and B is clearly excited, “Is that supper?!?” To which I could only reply that no, no that is not their supper, and that the food she is so obviously drooling over is indeed the family pet’s dinner instead.
She was noticeably disappointed at that point and announced, “I wish I could eat Buddy’s dinner… ” which is the same point where I realized that I had unknowingly created jealousy over a dog’s food. Oops!
I made up for it immediately by changing our dinner plans to something extra yummy, but it was the first time I had ever seen someone wish s/he were eating an animal’s food instead. I’m not sure if that means the food I was feeding the dog was particularly delicious or if I was failing in the excitement factor for the human food being produced.
Either way, the dog was certainly being fed well, eh?12
Cheese, cheese, cheeeesssseeee – The ducks are quacking
Get up and get me some cheese, man!
It’s quite ironic, really. I’ve been working on this huge pre-move freezer stock-up plan and just days before deciding we are cutting out all dairy for a while, I had a hay day with cheese.
Like this much cheese:
Each of those is an 8 ounce block of cheese, so 30 blocks x 8 oz each / 16 oz in a pound = 16 pounds of cheese. Unfortunately, it’s cheapest for me to buy the small blocks than it is to go to another store for slightly larger blocks of cheese, so it kills me to go through that much packaging, but such is life.
Hole-y cheese!
So what did I do with all that cheese? I shred it, of course!
Okay, so not always perfect…
I love my Kitchen Aid mixer and all the attachments make it a huge time saver. It took longer to open all the packages than it did to turn it into all beautifully shredded cheesy goodness.
Each kind of cheese produced a huge bowl of cheese.
And then I sorted it all into lovely little sandwich bags. Each one contains about 2 or 2 1/2 cups of cheese, or roughly just under a block of cheese.
Then came the gallon sized freezer bags….
And the Sharpies…
As for the ducks quacking, it’s from an inside joke that no one else will find hilarious, but years later, every so often, someone will still blurt out “The ducks are quacking. I must melt cheese!” I’m repeating it for no other reason than to have it recorded somewhere so I don’t forget in 20 years. Here’s Mom’s explanation of how it started:
I was making mac and cheese. My pasta was boiling in one pan and in another one, I was melting cheese and putting in milk and such. One of them said, “Oh, cheese! Why are you melting cheese?” and I said “Because the ducks are quacking.” And that’s all there is to it. That’s it.
I don’t know which is more random….that she answered that way, or that the standard silly randomness carried over to being a common thing now. Hmm. Off to go melt cheese now…I can hear the ducks quacking….
Stuck in the garbage disposal? Tongs to the rescue!
We’ve had the garbage disposal for 8 months now without any major problems. Then twice in one week, this happened. Somehow, of all the dishes that were placed in the sink first, this one little plastic cup managed to slide right into the garbage disposal hole.
And this perfectly sized cup was also just tall enough that it couldn’t be pushed farther into the disposal so I could reach in, get a grip, and pull it out. It was also just short enough there was no lip I could grab onto it from this angle either. It was wedged as tight as can be without wanting to go up or down.
So tongs it was! It was still difficult to get the tongs wedged in and secure a grip, but once I did, it came right out. Well, and then right back in a few days later, but that’s beside the point…
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