in so many words

We were in Sacramento last weekend, waiting for baby Elliott, and I had a craving for a Krispy Kreme donut. Unfortunately, and this is old news to Sacramento residents, there are no longer any Krispy Kreme donut shops in Sacramento. There used to be several stores, but apparently the Krispy Kreme company expanded too quickly and encountered some financial difficulties, and now all of the Sacramento stores have closed. Now some of you may think that this is not a bad thing, since eating a Krispy Kreme donut is a lot like eating raw heated sugar, and certainly would not help at all for someone like me who is trying to lose weight. But I thoroughly enjoy Krispy Kreme donuts, especially when they are fresh and warm right off the conveyor line… it’s one of my “guilty pleasures”. Well, honestly I really don’t feel very guilty at all when I eat them, so I guess it’s just a really nice pleasure. So last weekend I experienced some slight withdrawal symptoms… maybe this is some sort of divine intervention to help me lose weight.

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Coincidentally, back at home I recently was in the mood for a Strawberry and Banana Frozen Yogurt Shiver from TCBY. But there are no longer any TBCY stores in our town. There were two stores here for years, but within the last year both of them closed and were converted to locally-owned yogurt shops. The good news is that one of the new local shops makes Shivers that taste pretty close to the TCBY versions so I’m not doing totally without, unlike Krispy Kreme donuts. And it’s healthier, too.

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Oh, and one more thing… Happy 66th Birthday, Paul!

Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m…

A few Christmas’ ago our friend Erica gave homemade jam as presents. She gave us three small jars of jam - I think one was strawberry and one may have been boysenberry or something similar. I don’t remember those two exactly, but I remember the third flavor - pear jam. I had never had pear jam before, and although I like pears, I was skeptical that pears would be desirable in jam, so I cautiously tasted a small dab of it - hmm… not bad. So I spread a spoonful onto my buttered toast and took a bite… WOW! That was seriously about the best jam I have ever tasted. I was very impressed, and I suddenly was having toast and pear jam every day. I savored the rest of the jar, and when it was gone I told Erica how much I had enjoyed it and strongly hinted that I would love another jar, should in the future she ever find herself in the jam-making mood. Since then, Erica’s had at least two more kids in addition to her first daughter, and as a stay-at-home mom she probably doesn’t find a lot of spare time to make jam. So I’ve finally resorted to searching for pear jam online, and although I’ve often told Emily that “you can get anything online”, I’ve not been able to find a lot of online stores that offer pear jam for sale. There are plenty of web sites that sell jams and jelly, and even some that sell combinations like apple pear jam, but few that sell plain pear jam. So if you’re surfing the Internet and come across an online retailer selling pear jam, feel free to let me know about it.

Emily and I have found our new favorite food place - it’s a Mexican-food restaurant chain called Chipotle. They actually have a fairly small menu - just burritos and tacos with salads available - but they do a excellent job providing variety within their menu. You can order your burrito or taco choosing from four different types of meats (or have it vegetarian) and all of their food is made fresh. They get you through the line quickly, or you can order online to have your food ready when you get there. Chipotle advertises that they use ingredients like organic beans and open-range pork and beef, and they offer fresh salsa and the best guacamole I have ever tasted. And even better, their prices are reasonable - Emily and I split a shredded beef burrito and have chips, guacamole and drinks, and can eat for less than $12. Fast food prices and quick service, but their food is of such good quality that I’m hesitant to label Chipotle as “fast food” - it certainly doesn’t taste like it. We both work day jobs, so sometimes it’s nice to be able to eat out, get great food, and not spend a lot of money. In fact, it feels so nice, and the food is so good, that sometimes we eat at Chipotle more than once a week - yeah, we really like Chipotle.

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And while I’m on the subject of food, I really like a good cup of hot chocolate. I don’t drink coffee, so when I want a hot drink, it’s hot chocolate for me. But I’ve found, at least in my town, that most coffee shops don’t make good hot chocolate. Starbucks makes terrible hot chocolate, and even the locally-owned coffee shops, while usually doing better than Starbucks, still don’t make really good hot chocolate. Most just squirt some Hersey’s Chocolate Syrup into some warm milk, but so much of the time they don’t use enough syrup, and I usually end up with a warm cup of milk that has a slight chocolate flavor. Until I visited Maui Wowi. A new Maui Wowi shop opened here a few months ago, and I stopped by to check out their hot chocolate. Now I admit that Maui Wowi is just another franchise that is capitalizing on the boutique coffee fad started by Starbucks. Maui Wowi serves Kona Coffee, and according to Emily it is very good coffee. But I discovered that Maui Wowi uses a special hot chocolate mix made by the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. If you know anything about good chocolate, you know that Ghirardelli’s is a world-class maker of fine chocolate. And the hot chocolate mix used by Maui Wowi tastes excellent - they easily have the best hot chocolate in town. I’ve already filled up two punch cards (for two free hot chocolates) and I’ve almost finished my third card. It’s very good and highly recommended if you like good hot chocolate.

Here, we’ve only got one rule:  never ever let it cool!

Many people like vegetables. Emily really enjoys her vegetables. Our daughter Rachel has decided to stop eating most meat and just eat vegetables. There is even a Beach Boys song about vegetables:

I’m gonna be round my vegetables
I’m gonna chow down my vegetables
I love you most of all
My favorite vege-table

If you brought a big brown bag of them home
I’d jump up and down and hope you’d toss me a carrot

I’m gonna eat my, my vegetables
i’m gonna love my, my vegetables
I love you most of all
My favorite vege-table

Most people like vegetables, and some people really like them - my friend Suzanne makes elaborate dinners just out of vegetables. A few years ago she made me a breakfast omelet out of eggs and vegetables. It was very good - it tasted like it had sausage in it, but she did it with only vegetables. And every time I visited my friends Cy and Jane, I always knew that our meals would include vegetables. Cy once told me “We aren’t vegetarians - we just love vegetables”.

I don’t love vegetables. I don’t even like most vegetables. I do like tomatoes (which are technically fruits) and cucumbers, and lettuce and celery. And Emily has been feeding me spinach in my salads, which tastes alright when covered with tomatoes, cucumbers and celery. But I avoid most other vegetables. When they are served with a meal in a restaurant, I leave them to grow cold on the side of my plate, eventually carried away to their final rest by the server clearing our dishes. Sometimes Emily will have mercy on them and move them to her plate where they will be appreciated and enjoyed. Which is fine with me - more room on my plate for the meat. And now that I am well into my 5th decade, I really don’t see this changing - I guess I’ll be a veggie-hater for the remainder of my years.

Within the vegetable family, the worst for me is peas and carrots (Spanish Rice is just about as bad, but since this is a Vegetable post, I’ll hold off on the rice until another day). When I was a young lad, my mom served peas and carrots at dinners. She had grown up in western Kentucky and had been eating vegetables all her life, and apparently my dad didn’t mind (and he would always let us know when there was something that he did mind) so there was at least one meal each week that included peas and carrots. I still remember the disappointment I felt when I sat down for dinner and saw those nasty little green globes and orange squares on my dinner plate. It shouldn’t have been so bad that I didn’t like them - lots of kids don’t. But my dad was one of those parents that wouldn’t let his children leave the table until we had finished everything on our plates. So I spent some of my best young years sitting at the kitchen table, staring for hours at a dinner plate that, while stripped of every other morsel of edible food, contained now near-frozen organic remains. Sometimes, to get rid of them, I would scoop up a mouthful and quickly shovel it in, followed by about a quart of milk to wash it all down, swallowing as fast as I could so that none of the vile flavor would touch my sensitive taste buds. But my parents were insidious - they always made sure that the amount of peas and carrots on my plate was greater than the amount of milk in my glass (I think the usual serving of P&Cs weighted about 7.5 pounds). So I would sit there, not allowed to leave the table until my plate was clean, hour after hour, listening to the TV in the next room but denied the pleasure of seeing which amphibian Endora would turn Darrin into, or how Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin were going to handle THRUSH that evening.

Until finally, I discovered a solution. I started hiding the peas and carrots. After the rest of my family finished their meal and left the table, leaving me alone again with my herbaceous nemesis (a semi-nightly event in our family) I would gather up the veggies and hide them on the kitchen window sill behind the curtains. I tried to remember to clean off the sill the next day, and that worked OK for a while, but I wasn’t always able to get to it before school… eventually my mom discovered piles of dried-up peas and carrots on the window sill and she was pretty sure who to blame. So I had to re-adjust my strategy and find another hiding place. A few months later, my mom found it - while cleaning behind the refrigerator. Of course, I found other ways to dispose of unwanted food items - pushing the food through a window screen out into the dog pen worked for awhile - but eventually I got old enough to refuse to eat peas and carrots, or even to show up for dinner at all. Once I got my paper route and started making my own money, it was McDonald’s most every night for me. After all, you don’t have to worry about finding any asparagus or zucchini in a Big Mac.

You deserve a break today…