HURLING INTO THE FUTURE

I noticed I have been having a hard time the last couple years remembering how old I am. Sure, 30 was pretty easy to remember at first but shortly after that 30-31-32 all blended together and I’m pretty sure that I have spent most of 32 (what I am now, and I just quickly did the math to double check) thinking I was 33. But really I will not be 33 until later this month. I have always had a hunch that something significant would happen to me when I was 33 and since I already got married, it's got to be something else, but probably not having a kid. [ASIDE: by the way, the question isn't: "When are you having kids?", the question is: "Are you planning on having a family?" and we will not be addressing that question in this newsletter.]

DOMESTIC PAM

I like to cook. I’m not especially talented but I still like it. One of my biggest problems is that I never read through the recipe until I’m actually doing it, which has caused me quite a bit of grief but failed to convince me to change my ways. Like I had these baby eggplants and I saw a recipe that called for baby eggplants and I quickly scanned the ingredients and saw that I had everything so I decided to make this dish. I came home from work and immediately began cooking and what do you know but this is a "stuffed" eggplant and I had to stuff those little things and tie a thread around them like that didn’t take forever. So it's about 9:30 and we've managed to keep ourselves awake so we can eat these fine eggplants and they weren’t even that good.

YUMMY COOKIES

One of our coolest wedding gifts was a box of Grange cookbooks from Bob’s Grandmother. Some of the cookbooks are quite old or contain old family recipes that say "hundred years old" But some of the recipes are kind scary especially if you are one of those people who doesn’t like to consume a lot of fat or sweeteners. Some of the recipes are like: 1 cup oil, 1 cup corn syrup, 2 cups sugar, 2 sticks of butter. You know whatever it ends up as will probably taste insanely good.

One of my favorite recipes is for

Mashed Potato Candy
2 medium potatoes, quartered
2 lb. (about) powdered sugar
Peanut Butter

Cook potatoes in water until done; drain, then mash. Beat in enough powdered sugar to make thick enough to roll like pie dough. Sprinkle board with powdered sugar; roll out. Spread with peanut butter; roll up and slice.

So scary you're tempted to try it, huh?

Another thing that cracks me up about the Grange cookbooks is that one of them has a section in the back with a "something different" section and it has like 2 recipes one of which is for tabouli. This is the same cookbook that had about 6 recipes for potato chip cookies. I guess we all have our own definition of something different.

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PHOTO: Pam and Bob get married. PHOTOGRAPHER: polaroid person.

Posted: 4.18.99
http://www.pamrentz.com/pampage/xmas/v6/p2.html