Category: Foodie

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Pumpkin Decorated like Cinderella’s Coach

I found a photo of a pumpkin decorated like Cinderella’s coach and it gave me the idea to do this at home. I bought 3 pumpkins at Fred’s Discount store for only $2 each. I also found this little plastic Cinderella doll and the rhinestone crown in the toy section of K-Mart for only $3 for the doll and $6 for the crown. I can’t find the Prince Charming doll anywhere locally and I shopped all the different store toy sections looking for him. Maybe I will check Amazon and see if the Prince Charming is available there. I would not mind paying another $3 to have Prince Charming greeting Cinderella.

 

I’m going to embellish my pumpkin with bling and put it on my porch so the kids who come trick or treating can see the vignette and I won’t be too worried about teenagers vandalizing or smashing my pumpkin like they did last year when I had it closer to the road. I dare them to come up on my porch and try that shit!

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Going Shopping for my Pumpkins Tomorrow

September is almost over and the grocery stores have got their first deliveries of pumpkins for Halloween. The ones at Kroger are $10 for medium sized pumkins. That is not a bad price, but I am going to check WalMart’s prices before I buy anything. Most of the time I don’t shop at WalMart, but I want to buy three pumpkins this year. If the pumpkins at Kroger are $10 each, that’s $30. But if they are only $5 at WalMart, then I will be saving $15 so that might be worth it.

I’m going shopping for my Halloween pumpkins tomorrow. I’ll check the WalMart price, then I’ll drive by the church pumpkin patch and see how much money they are are charging. The last time I went to the church lot, the pumpkins were huge but very expensive. The cheapest one they had was $20, and I did buy one from them last year because I was trying to support the church youth group. But this year my budget is tighter and I want to buy as many pumpkins as I can get for $20 – not just one big one.

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Another Coffee Joke

Everyone knows how much I LOVE my coffee. And I love to see or hear coffee jokes.

I must have my coffee as soon as I wake up every morning. Most mornings I have my coffee maker set up and automatically turn on at 6:00 am. Unless it is the weekend or I’m on vacation. Then I usually don’t set it to start automatically – I press the start button as I stumbled past it on the kitchen counter.

On a regular work day, I head straight to the break room and get a cup of coffee to take to my desk. If I have been up late the night before, I might need a second cup of coffee before lunch. So that’s three cups before noon!

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What is Your Special Treat?

Every night, some time between dinner and bedtime, I get a craving a small treat. I don’t think it has to do with hunger or a diabetes type of sugar craving. It is probably more an emotional craving of just a little something to soothe the savage beast and get me to relax.

Most nights I just want one or two cookies, a thin slice of pie, or maybe a couple bites of chocolate along with a hot cup of tea. The hot tea is soothing to me and the caffeine in it does not seem to bother me with keeping me awake. For some reason the tea caffeine has no effect, but if I drink a cup of coffee at night I am wide awake for hours.

The sugar does not seem to boost my metabolism, either. I know chocolate has caffeine in it, but that does not bother me. I do need a cup of coffee in the morning. That wakes me up and gets me going. People tell me that I am not human until I have been awake long enough to drink a full cup of coffee. They say that smart people will leave me alone and not even talk to me until after I have had my coffee.

Lately my favorite treat at night has been a cup of hot tea and one or two Golden Oreo cookies. I usually take two of the cookies with me, but I break off small parts of the second one and share that with my dog. You cannot give chocolate to dogs, so the Golden Oreo is the perfect treat for both of us.

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Baking Up a Storm in the Kitchen

When the weather turns cold and rainy, it drives me into the kitchen and I start baking up a storm. I love to cook, and I especially love to bake. I think that cookies are my specialty, but I make a fantastic cake – from scratch! – and a pretty tasty fruit pie, too!

I am going to try some recipes today that call for buttermilk. I have not used buttermilk before, but you see it featured on a lot of boxes at the store as something special: buttermilk pancakes, buttermilk waffles, etc. So I am going to make some pancakes and then a recipe that I found calling for buttermilk and fresh berries.

If it is still cold and rainy tomorrow, I will be back in the kitchen working on some cookies. I have a few things in mind that I have not tried yet and if they turn out well then I can take a couple dozen to my vet’s office and share them. I love my vet and doing something nice like baking cookies is a great way to show your appreciation to the staff there!

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My Dog Loves Bacon!

There’s a long running commercial about a dog that loves bacon. He runs into the kitchen yelling, “Bacon! Bacon! Bacon!” but he gets fooled with a fake bacon dog treat that is supposed to be so good that dogs think it is bacon. My dog is too smart to fall for that. In fact, my dog loves bacon but hates those particular dog treats. When I opened the bag and gave the contents of the fake treats a big sniff, I expected to smell bacon but I sure didn’t. It smelled AWFUL and NOTHING like bacon.

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Run On Eggs at the Grocery

Easter is just a couple of days away and the eggs have disappeared from the grocery store. I always buy a dozen eggs when I do my regular grocery shopping, but I guess a whole lot of people are buying extra eggs so they can color them with those fun Easter egg dye kits or have Easter egg hunts. There were not any regular or extra large eggs left in the refrigerator case at my nearby Food Lion. I’ve never seen that before.

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Pointing Out the Obvious

So, years ago the Pillsbury company decided to make refreigerated biscuits in a can. They came in a roll of 8 biscuits, which meant that each person in a traditional family of two adults and two kids would have 2 biscuits each.

Then they decided to make Grands biscuits in a can. These were a lot bigger than the regular biscuits, and they came 6 to a can, so if you had a larger family, you could buy the Grands biscuits and everyone could have one biscuit. Because they were so much bigger than the regular biscuits, you didn’t need two of them.

So today I was grocery shopping and decided to buy a can of biscuits. I am not a fan of the Grands biscuits because I have been watching my weight and don’t want to eat that much bread. So I was going to get a can of regular biscuits.

EXCEPT – and get this! – the regular biscuits are now called, Mini-Grands.

What? Is that not actually redundant word play or something? They are not Grands, so they are mini Grands? What happened to REGULAR!?!?

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Yes, I’m Up Early

im up

Last night was not good for getting any sleep. I must have eaten something that upset my stomach because I have been feeling sick for hours. Now I have just given up on trying to get any sleep and decided to get up. I have my coffee pot working and I hope the coffee will get me awake quick.

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Mac and Cheese

Watched a demonstration of how to make baked macaroni and cheese. She runs a special restaurant downtown and is famous for her cookbooks. So I paid attention to her demonstration and actually learned a few things. She used some words that I am not familiar with – I hate that when a cooking show talks over your head. Would it kill you to use the words “cheese sauce” instead of béchamel?

The main thing I learned – and I tested it later, she was correct – is that a macaroni and cheese needs to use a strong cheese. I usually buy a mild cheddar at the grocery store, but for baked mac and cheese, you are better off getting a sharp cheddar.