Junk Food -&- Making An Offer You May Refuse

I have never regretted anything I didn't buy. NJC

That is especially for every student leaving home and with a student loan which looks so large in September . . . and so small by February.




Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. Ernest Hemingway

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible. Bertram Russell



Fast Food as % of Total US Food Budget: 1970 vs 2005

1970: 30% or $6-billion

2005: 50% or $110-billion

Is this supposed to indicate prosperity? Do you ever eat something and it just doesn't taste as good as it used to? Or the way it should? Do you buy "home made" and find that it is the right colour but lacks the mouth feel and flavour of what your mother used to make? Store-bought "Home-made" bread? It looks great but . . . Have you ever bought a bag of potatoes, peeled them and weighed the result, cut some for French fries, weighed the amount that you would get at a restaurant, then figured out how much that amount of potatoes actually costs? It puts the price of fries into perspective. Try it with a bag of chips. Have you ever cut the meat off deep fried chicken, weighed it and then weighed the rest to see what you are getting, before you even consider the deep fried aspect? What kind of family dinner together is an order of fast food?



An Offer You May Refuse

This is the month when students get ready to go back to school or to university. Does your child going away from home for the first time know how to prepare basic meals? Not just to save money, but to be adequately nourished and ready to learn? I have seen too many students living on pizza or the junk food equivalent.

In self-defense, students should learn to cook -- not fancy stuff, simply food that will get them through the day without having to spend money at a restaurant or cafeteria. I have compiled a lazy cook's small set of recipes for survival. They will not make any student a gourmet cook; they are simple and designed for people who have something better to do -- such as study . . . or socialize . . . or romance a girlfriend / boyfriend . . . For the soups, there is emphasis on getting together with a friend and peeling / cutting up vegetables while watching whatever students would be watching on TV anyway. If anyone is interested, email ds323232@msn.com and they will be forwarded.

There is even a recipe via Oprah's cook Rosie and modified--since I modify recipes constantly--for non-deep fried 'French fries'. Everyone likes them -- spicy and painless to make. No expertise in the kitchen needed; in fact, that is the point. Students do not have to eat junk; they can at least make their own for less money, which, come to think of it, leaves more money for important things . . . like beer.

There is also a home-made Cape Breton Brown Bread or spoon bread recipe, which is really simple, tasty, includes oatmeal and bran along with the flour, but does not require that the cook get covered with flour or know how to knead bread. Use metal coffee cans to bake it so there is no need to buy bread pans. There isn't a man who has tasted it who hasn't asked for more. No-one would mistake me for a gourmet cook but the recipes come from good cooks and they're simple. The bread recipe comes from a small-town Maritime housewife, whose husband raved over her bread, so she wrote the recipe for me. NJC


Warning: Pickling Bottles

Yesterday, I prepared 14 quarts of dill pickles. When I poured hot pickling liquid over the pickles, two bottles split. Either they had hairline cracks which I didn't see or they were defective. It is a good idea to do this when the bottles of cukes are sitting in a sink or something like a metal roasting pan so hot liquid doesn't pour onto your feet, especially if you work alone. It is the first time in my life this has happened. They carry a brand name recognizable by anyone who preserves food.

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