Food stories

When it rains for forty days and forty nights, thoughts naturally turn to food.

I buy big chunks of good Parmesan cheese at Costco for under $20.  We all remember passing the Kraft can around the table and shaking crumbs on our spaghetti, but once you taste the real thing there's no going back.  I have one of those razor sharp micro-plane graters, and when the chunk gets finally down to knuckle-skinning stage, I use a vegetable peeler to shave every last bit off the rind. Even the rind is good for flavoring soup like bean or minestrone.

John would eat pasta five times a week; that might be genetic. I get tired of "noodles" and switch to polenta now and then which he doesn't like as much, but hey, I'm the cook.  I get those cheap rolls at Trader Joe which is pretty lazy, since there's nothing easier than cooking up a batch of more quality stuff.  I should try some of the fancy artisan varieties. 

Polenta, grits, masa-- all pretty much the same thing.  How you prepare it depends on your culture.  In Pennsylvania, we called it "corn meal mush" and ate it for breakfast with sugar and milk, like Cream of Wheat.  Mom poured the leftover mush in a loaf pan and then fried slices served with syrup and butter.  A second cheap and filling breakfast, even better than the first. We had never heard of "polenta" and never had it for dinner like this.

Speaking of shrink-wrapped food, I like those little pork loins.  They're lean and healthy and  especially good on the grill.

But how about this decadent impulse purchase?  All gussied up with bacon and marinated in a sweet sauce.  Sugar + Fat sure sets off those pleasure signals in the brain! Into the shopping cart it went.

We ate almost the whole thing last night, as the rain poured down outside on the temperate jungle.