Menus - Food - warning: way too much to read in Secrets from myself

Prologue - It's almost six am and I am at my mother's kitchen table - mine now of course - in my dark red fleece LLBean robe.

I finally took a bath last night and blew my hair dry afterward. I won the hair dryer playing bingo at the first company picnic at my old old job in the late seventies. The last century's late seventies, not my late seventies. It still works though my husband replaced the cord at some point. I don't use it much, just if I'm going to bed with wet hair and would rather not.

My hair is now in a home-made Chris Rumph cut - a slightly above the shoulders bob with layered bangs. She looked good in it and I fancy that I do too.

I'm drinking coffee from my First Nations cup. I drank wine out of it yesterday and there was still a little in the bottom so I'm having wine coffee. Not sure Starbucks will be offering it soon.

I'm really enjoying my morning ritual of oatmeal and coffee. I have the ritual almost every morning. It makes me feel like Hemingway only less alcoholic and possibly less suicidal.

My new Christmas gift 4-cup, 5 to the spout - Mr. Coffee is delightful. It has a mesh basket in its basket and I don't have to use filters. I'm on my second container of coffee and I'm thinking if we go to the big grocery store in the city today I might get a third container. I'm thinking I might just get different coffee every time. Life is so full of choices. I love that about life. I like limiting my choices and then exercising them.

That's what I'm doing giving up sugar and wheat. I am limiting my choices and then exercising them. There are wonderful foods everywhere - in stores, in restaurants - we are so blessed with abundance. By giving up a few possibly questionable categories, the others come into sharper focus. Anyway that's how it seems to me.

End of prologue.

Beginning of main body of work -

I've been trying to do a little more cooking lately. I have a number of constraints. I will list them:

• my own dietary preferences - the aforesaid no sugar (or substitutes), no wheat,
• my son's dietary quirks (note that mine are preferences, his are quirks) - there are a lot of things he won't eat. Since I"m his mother, it's my fault, and I accept the blame. There are a lot of fruits and vegetables he won't eat. He has the common male suspicion of 'mixed up' foods. It that coconut? Are those mushrooms? You get the idea.
• I want to cook and eat 'healthful' foods - no, or very little, processed foods, the fewer ingredients on on the container the better. My beloved Quaker Old Fashioned Oatmeal says Ingredients: Rolled Oats. Plus it comes from Cedar Rapids and my husband used to haul farm trucks of freshly harvested oats to the plant.
• I am cheap.
• I am lazy.
• I am cheap and lazy. I have only two pans - a covered stainless steel copper bottom sauce pan my sisterinlaw gave me almost thirty years ago and a large steel frying pan with a glass lid that I bought at the Dollar Store after my old pan's handle fell off. The microwave gave up last summer and we now use it as cat-proof storage. My free for pickup little gas range that I've had for decades functions well. I am a snob about gas ranges. ha ha ha ha
• Our local grocery store - Fareway - has a wonderful meat counter manned by real people who serve your wishes. I was there on a Saturday afternoon not long ago and there were six guys working there - all of them busy. I am not terribly into meat but after giving up wheat and sugar I felt I could indulge the carnivore in me, and they have really good stuff. I don't go for high end stuff, I'm sure you weren't expecting that, but I buy brats and lean ground beef and boneless skinless chicken breasts and bulk italian sausage and butterfly pork chops. I also buy a chunk of precooked ham from time to time. I've stopped buying sandwich meat and slice off the ham for sandwiches and also fry it in the Dollar Store frying pan. I eat it myself as it comes off the chunk.
• I don't buy eggs. I think they are good food but I don't like the feel of them when I crack them and I tend to leave them in the fridge for a long long time and then wonder if they are still good. Since I gave up baking (the wheat/sugar thing) I have not bought any eggs. I'll have an omelet at Fayze's - they can deal with the egg responsibilities.
• I use butter and olive oil for grease needs. I use olive oil and cider vinegar for salad dressing. I keep the bottles on the ledge at the back of the free gas range and I feel very cosmopolitan. Since I use olive oil often it doesn't get stale. I plan to branch into other vinegars but I haven't done it yet.
• Jim air pops a lot of popcorn - and melts butter on the free gas range in another little pan that I didn't count since it only holds a couple tablespoons.
• I generally prefer romaine lettuce. I believe in washing it and putting it in ice cream buckets to stay crisp and be used. That is a lot of work and I am lazy. Last week Fareway had three hearts of romaine in a plastic bag. I bought them and sliced them as they were into the salad bowl and added OO and CV and made maybe half a dozen salads. Jim eats his on a plate and I mix in whatever else we are having for a meal into the salad bowl. Warm bratwurst sliced into romaine with OO and CV is divine. (For some reason I am suspicious of bagged ready to eat salad greens - they don't seem sanitary to me - but I guess in the name of convenience I might get some of them - it sure was easy using the romaine hearts and they tasted good.) The secret of any kind of lettuce or salad greens is to eat them as soon as possible. Throwing them out when they reach slime is not economical or environmentally sound.
• I eat a lot of fruit. I love apples. Galas are good. Honeycrisp are too expensive. Well taken care of - meaning crisp and juicy Delicious are good. I get defensive when people put them down - they were discovered in Iowa you know? I am happy with a banana in my oatmeal. I buy pears but usually eat them before they get ripe. I love grapes and can eat half a six dollar bag in the car on the way home from the store and the rest before I go to bed that night. That is not cost effective or probably even good for me. I like oranges and grapefruits but peeling them is so much work. I take apples or oranges to work for lunch with a fair sized chunk of sharp cheddar.
• I buy one percent milk. Jim drinks most of it. I have it with my oatmeal. I like to buy fairly inexpensive sharp cheddar at the Woodman's in Lacrosse. I try to buy enough to last me between trips - last time I got three chunks of it.
• Since I gave up sugar and since grandson Will is allergic to dairy I've stopped buying ice cream. Another simplification. Another freezer case to go by.
• I do buy frozen french fries and horror of horrors 'high-quality' fish sticks or frozen fillets. Jim likes them - he has to have tarter sauce - it's a school lunch throw back - and they are an easy meal.
• I also buy frozen pizzas. For Jim again. He cooks them. He shares with Gracie. We also buy 'town' pizzas from various local vendors. (I just counted the tabs from the boxes from Casey pizzas and found we have ten and have 'earned' a free pizza!) I eat toppings from town pizzas and give Gracie the bottoms. I ignore frozen pizzas. Although right now in the freezer are two pizzas that Jim won't eat. One has carmelized onions on it, the other has peppers and onions, so I suppose one of these days Gracie and I are going to have to bite the bullet and eat them. Maybe we'll have them when the kids visit, though since Will can't have cheese, the pizza options that way are limited too.

I titled this entry Menus so maybe I should give you some. Here's what we've had the last week:

• brats and romaine salad
• italian sausage, corn and salad
• hamburgers, pork and beans and salad
• fish and chips
• chicken breast and potatoes
• hot ham slices and salad

Not exactly gourmet but it tasted pretty good.

Disclaimer: I realize the brats and ham and pork and beans probably had sugar in them but they are foods Jim eats and so it's a compromise without really giving up my principles.

Also I didn't look at the ingredients in the fish fillets breading and suppose they include wheat products - again it might not be letter of the law but it's close.

Here is Fareway's website: http://www.fareway.com/

And Woodman's: http://www.woodmans-food.com/

The indestructible pinata came from Woodman's.