I finally came up with a recipe from Rachael Ray, which sounded tasty--it was chicken in an apricot sauce served with butternut squash risotto. I always try to make something I've never made before when it's my turn to cook for others (except for Walt, of course) and this looked to be pretty simple.
The risotto called for using frozen butternut squash, but they didn't have any, so I decided to go with fresh, which worked just as well.
However, the thing that got me was that I stood at one end of the frozen food aisle and took a photo:
A vast array of frozen foods, everything from frozen vegetables to entrees to desserts to breakfasts to frozen fruit, etc., etc., etc.
How much of this aisle do you suppose is devoted to frozen vegetables?
Exactly TWO of the doors open to just plain ol' veggies. There are vegetables in the third door here, too, but those are the ones that come buttered, creamed, or in some other way adulterated with unhealthy stuff.
Now, I am the very last person to complain about the preponderance of high fat, high carbohydrate, overly sweet, fake foods. I never met a carbohydrate or a calorie I didn't like, but when I looked at that long aisle and realized that the unadulterated frozen vegetables were tucked off in a corner like the black sheep in the family, to make room for frozen pizza, 50 different kinds of waffles, whipped topping, breaded whatevers, cream cheese stuffed peppers, etc., etc...well, it just seemed strange, given the epidemic of obesity in this country, especially among young people that we continue to have a proliferation of bad-for-you foods and continue to stock the shelves with all those things that I love and shouldn't eat.
Just an idle thought I had while wandering around the supermarket with a camera at my fingertips.
You may have picked up on the wording of the first sentence above, where I said "tomorrow was to have been Cousins Day." I had just about picked up all of the ingredients I needed for my Rachael Ray meal when my cell phone rang. It was Peach, saying that Kathy isn't feeling well and didn't think she could make it to Cousins Day. Peach and I had to make the decision about whether we were going to go anyway, or just change the date.
Well, that's a no brainer. We can't have Cousins Day without Kathy. So we are going to do a conference call tomorrow and see if we can find a new date.
The plan for the evening had been for Walt and I to go to the cemetery and then go out to dinner, but in all honesty, I really didn't feel like going out to dinner. My heart wasn't in it. It was partly disappointment about Cousins Day and partly because...well, because it was April 20.
So instead, I cooked my Cousins Day dinner for Walt and me. It wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be, so I will probably choose something different when we actually do have Cousins Day.
We did go out to the cemetery. This year I bought pink roses, because of Brianna and then I printed off Laurel's latest photo of her and stuck it in a plastic case and attached it to the bouquet of flowers.
Yeah, it was silly...did I expect them to know I'd done it? To rise up out of the grave and check the photo? Of course not, but somehow I just needed to do it. The two of them would have been so excited about their little niece.
And besides, anybody visiting the cemetery from now until they remove the flowers will notice it and I'm nothing if not one to wring every bit of drama I can from a situation.
It can't be 9 years. Wasn't it just yesterday....?
Oh...and if I didn't already e-mail it to you, you MUST go to Flickr and see the very best photo of Lizzie ever.
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