I would like to be adopted by some of you! 😁

Oh, I wasn't speaking to you at all! I was just speaking to how the smaller fridge, for me, has been a bit of accountability to make sure things get used in a timely matter. That's all. No judgement. This was my issue. I literally came to adulthood with no talent for food management whatsoever!

See, grilling is the only way I use them. Shishkabob is my thing. Stick a couple small wedges on the skewer with a portabella mushroom or two, a pearl onion, and bell pepper wedge, and a couple baby red potatoes, sprinkle with salt, garlic, and black pepper, squeeze a lemon wedge around, and pop those babies on a bed of coals. Yummy! This is the acceptable use of zucchini. 😁 The steroid addicted, body-building, goliath fruit of the standard zucchini plant does not good grilling make! 😂 😉 Y'all, we are supposed to get freezing rain tonight and tomorrow. My yard just began to thaw. 😭😭😭

I am so sorry, Mercy! Hugs

Yes, this.

I think pizza is also something, when homemade, that can be very healthy. Ours is a thinner crust since gf doughs do not puff up and do the big crust/deep dish thing. Mozzarella is naturally low fat as is feta and parmesan. Keep it to a reasonable amount but then be generous with sauce and veggies, and it can be a very healthy meal that isn't expensive. For my son in law with so many allergies, my daughter makes a cashew cheese that melts nicely and has a reminiscent mozzarella consistency and flavor. He can't have tomatoes (nightshades), so she brushes his dough with garlic infused olive oil, and then he puts a little bit of ground chicken, and then has onions and olives with basil leaves or a little spinach. Sometimes she fries up some tofu with a lot of herbs in olive oil for him to have as his "meat" on top. He really enjoys it. When we are together as a group, we make all of the dough GF, and the Alabama kitchen is kept GF so we have no worries for him. Thankfully his nightshade allergy is not intense so we can keep tomato products, peppers, and potatoes in the house when we are visiting. I know people tend to be against the concept of pizza as healthy, and I get it, especially when we are taking about commercially made drowning in grease and meats. But for homemade, it doesn't have to be that way and can be cost effective per serving. Make the kids take a piece of fruit or have a little salad on the side, and I think it is great. For those not allergic to nightshades, I still think a large baked potato with stir fry vegetables, and a little cheese or sour cream for protein/fat is good. Thankfully, all our kids loved baked potatoes so when times were tight, I could stretch things with that. Potatoes have C A, and B vitamins, phosphorous, magnesium, and even a little iron. They are starchy, but I think the key to eating them is healthy fat and a big salad or serving of veggies to go along. Of course, some diabetic folks can't have them at all.

Ya. I never used the count off method in order to arrange my choirs or band sections. 😂😂😂

Our "favorite" experience with teacher/administrative dumb was our child being suspended for a week from preschool because he drew a banana (which he colored yellow and wrote the letter B next to), but another preschooler thought that it looked kind of like a gun, and the school policy was no pictures of weapons, zero tolerance. They were shocked when we never took him back. Shocked. and they tried to bill us for the rest of the month. I refused to pay it.

Seriously, children are not cattle. They just aren't. Standing line! 🙄 Pretty certain they can learn that waiting in line to buy movie tickets, or waiting for their seat at the school band concert, or to pay for groceries at Wal-Mart or whatever. It isn't the end of the universe to say to a child, "go stand in line". Sheesh. It is very concerning when the people charged with education are unable to think at all critically.

I agree with you, and especially the carpet square. 😂 As for the slide, I have seen nature cure children of that. The ones that often insist upon climbing up the slide get plowed into by children at the top who are not willing to wait any longer for their chance to go down. Not to mention that even if a child arrived at 1st grade without having practiced the infamous hand raising, they catch on quickly because it isn't rocket science! Good grief. If I were making a case for kindergarten, it would not be any of these points.

I used to be rather bad at it. But now I am better. Our refrigerator, only five years old (Samsung 21 cubic feet) bellied up last November. We had a long discussion about what to do, and decided not to make an investment in a large refrigerator. We are only here for four years, and our youngest graduates college this spring, and by fall will move out to live near his first posts college job. It is just the two of us. There is a massive fridge in our Alabama house which is becoming our new gathering place, and due to this Michigan area becoming stagnant and more people leaving than moving here (by a startling margin), this house lost value. Any appliance we leave behind, any improvement we make to the property is an utter loss. Several remodeling projects that we started and then stalled for lack of capital while paying college bills will remain unfinished. We also read that small fridges tend to have very long life spans compared to large ones, and we wanted a small one eventually for the Alabama house which has a lovely walk out basement which we are converting to a little living space so our son with the permanent disabilities from our car accident can live with us and have privacy. He may not need it, but we want the option available. So we bought an 11 cubic foot refrigerator. It will go with us when we move. This small fridge means I have to carefully plan what goes in it, and use that up because there isn't space for anything new. It has been surprisingly good for me in the food planning department. So while I don't say such and such is absolutely going to be eaten on a specific day, I will plan 5-7 evening dinners, and 7 days later all of the ingredients for those dinners have been used. I also can't really lose track of what is in there where previously I had a terrible "out of sight, out of mind" thing going on. I do though have a nice chest freezer in the basement here so I can take advantage of meat sales, and freeze produce, avail myself of frozen veggies from the supermarket, etc. It would be a lot tougher for me to manage without the freezer. I can attest to the life of small refrigerators. The camping size fridge my parents owned, 5 cubic ft, had a 30 year life. We bought similar size units, used, for our sons for their college dorms, and those things are like the energized bunnies of appliances. One was already 20 years old when we got it for $20 eight years ago. It shows no sign of stopping.

Public service announcement. If you plant zucchini, be realistic. You don't need five plants. Five plants is enough to overrun a county and make all the not fans of zucchini run for their lives. Just say no! The spectacle every summer of bedraggled, forlorn, desperate zucchini growers peddling the offspring of wildly too many plants On street corners across the land is a blight upon the community. And also, if your zucchini is over 24" long and weighs ten lbs, it isn't food. It is past its prime like old spinster Aunt Cruella. Use it for firewood, don't offer that to the food pantry! Two zucchini plants per 20 square miles is sufficient to provide for the needs of all of the zucchini people. 😁😁😁

Many of them are processed mechanically in facilities that also process wheat/barley. The machines are not cleaned between the processes and in order to be safe would need the kind of cleaning no company cam be trusted to provide so when they process say barley pearls one day, they process dry beans the next, and the result is wheat in the beans. Washing does not necessarily help because in the process of mechanical processing the shell of the bean is scored/pitted which you may not see with the naked eye and deposits of gluten take up residence in the scratch. Gluten molecules are "sticky" so to speak so they don't just respond to being rinsed or soaked with just water. It is why wheat makes such great bread because that stickiness holds the structure together allowing it to rise and get fluffy without deflating easily. When a wheat allergy or celiac sufferer allows other members of the household to keep gluten substances in the house, they have to thoroughly clean with more than just water. I have spray vinegar and water in a bottle with a few drops of Mrs. Meyers dish soap. I spray my counters and allow to sit for 15 minutes to make sure gluten molecules are loosened before wiping and then rinsing the counters. I have a very sensitive wheat allergy and still occasionally have a bad reaction to cross contamination. But, I am still at the place that I can load up on Benadryl and come through it okay. My sister, otoh, is a celiac sufferer. Her kitchen is strict, strict, strict gluten free because she cannot handle any exposure. If her food is even the tiniest bit cross contaminated, she is sick for 5-7 days. She eats no grains of any kind because in the country she lives in, it is impossible to buy quinoa, corn meal, or rice that isn't cross contaminated. She can't have lentils either. I do think she has one brand of chick peas, canned that she can safely eat. The celiac wrecked her body by the time it was diagnosed.

Yes, some people really do have it just this light. And Omicron is not as notorious for lost sense of taste and smell. I am so sorry!

Well, the details have grown fuzzy to me over the years. But it had to do with leaving beef out for a really really long time to thaw in an apartment that had faulty heating so it was either always freezing or surface of the sun hot. That day it was surface of the sun hot, and I was in class and the practice rooms all day from sun up until 5 pm. Mark was working late, and I got it in my head that I was going to make him beef stroganoff. Now, I had no idea HOW to make beef stroganoff and no recipe, but my mother made it and it was good, and I had vague recollections of seeing her in the kitchen making it. 1. The beef didn't look all that great, and apparently I missed the smell due to my allergies flaring and being stuffed up. 2. I had no idea how long beef needed to cook and at what temp to get to an internal temp that will kill bacteria so let's say that the beef was not steak tar tar, but it wasn't medium either! And even if I had known it should have been checked internally, I didn't have a meat thermometer. 3. So I made something that looked like beef stroganoff. Since we saved money on dog food for our Border terrier by supplementing with scraps, I gave little pooch a tiny bowl of the stuff. Smokey sniffed it, whimpered, and went and laid down in another room. Would not touch the stuff even though she was the kind of dog that would eat any trash. I took that as a sign that maybe it wasn't going to taste good. 4. Mark walked through the door, I told him all about it, and said I didn't think we should eat it because of Smokey, that it must be one more of my terrible cooking disasters. He said he didn't want to waste food, and it was probably just fine (to this day my husband will eat the most iffy things and then wonder why he doesn't feel well 🙄). He chewed and swallowed three or four bites and some noodles (which apparently were bizarrely overcooked, who knew? 😁), declared it didn't taste too good, sat down on the couch, and a few minutes later threw up a WHOLE bunch. Thankfully, if wasn't any worse than that. A couple months later father in law appeared all the way from Florida (we were living in Ohio) just out of the blue with grocery money, and wanted to know if I would like to learn how to make some of their family recipes. So I set aside my evening practice sessions, put off a little homework, and cooked with him. He was very kind about it. For a long time after that though, Mark cooked or he cooked WITH me. 😂 We left the stroganoff in the garbage and our dog who never met a trash can it wouldn't root through never touched it! A few months later one of my dimwit professors decided that all of us (he did participate in this) should take turns bringing pastries or desserts to class. Our budget did not allow for me to buy donuts or tarts or anything from the bakery, so since there was some baking supplies left from fil's visit, I decided to bake. Bake without supervision. Fortunately, the college library had cookbooks. I picked up a Betty Crocker one, and decided, why.I.will.never.know., to make chocolate donuts. They required unsweetened cocoa. I forgot the sugar. According to Mark who looked them over AFTER I had attempted to feed them to my classmates and the person who held the power of the grade over me, said the donuts themselves were the right consistency and texture. I was never asked to bring food to class again. Now people LOVE my food. I am a popular cook! So humble beginnings and all....

My dad was a real forager. He used to get morel mushrooms, wild scallions, wild strawberries, wild carrots, fiddle head ferns, and the winter green berries in the spring and early summer, then blueberries in July, and blackberries in August. I am the biggest fan of morel mushrooms with just about anything. If you cook them with a little butter and a splash of cognac you just can't go wrong! Now that said, don't go shrooming without taking an extension office seminar first and downloading the shroom guide so can avoid a psychedelic death experience. It is far too dry on our property to ever get Morels to grow. 😢

If you stuff the berries and the leaves into a pint jar and cover with whiskey, the infused whiskey makes nice flavoring for Christmas cookies. Don't be impressed that I know this. It comes from the Celtic side of my mother's family. We pick winter green berries on state land in the spring along with fiddle head ferns which if picked young cook up tender and are reminiscent of asparagus.

I am going to haul a couple of tubs of pine needles to dd for the blueberries. Heaven knows my blue spruce and scotch pine produce enough!

Lentils here are also processed in the same factories as barley pretty often so you have to be super careful.

What are tortilla pockets? Dh loves Thai! He makes Thai eggplant curry. It is not my thing but he always makes hot and sour mushroom soup and rice to go with it, so I happily have soup.

That is just awful! 💓 Half of income for housing? And then people have to pay for transportation and utilities. It just doesn't leave much left for food. Of course we have a similar issue here in that without universal healthcare and high thresholds for getting Medicaid, I know people who have hospital bills that consume 1/3 of their income alone, and another 1/6-1/3 for prescriptions so they go without their medicine. We, as a world, need to stop waging war everywhere and start taking care of people!

Ouch! I am sooooo sorry!

I think this is great. Frozen broccoli florets Rice Vegetable broth Herbs you like Parmesan Optional - chicken thighs For what it is worth, here is a cheap and easy but healthy one that I used to do when the kids were little and they didn't like cooked broccoli. I would first dole up a serving of raw broccoli for each person plus just a little extra and then fine chop, I mean pulverize it practically. Then I took vegetable broth and herbed it up to taste for us which meant a lot of garlic. I cooked the broccoli with the rice in the herbed broth, and then transferred it to a glass baking dish and topped with parmesan, and baked until the parmesan had melted. The kids really liked it, and ate it up. My daughter now does this with her crew because her five year old doesn't do steamed veggies very well. He will eat a large serving of this. As a general rule, parmesan is cheap because you don't need a lot of it to flavor the rice and broccoli. Since our son in law has a dairy allergy, she actually makes a serving on the side for him without parmesan and he puts a dollop of coconut milk plain yogurt on top. She adds onion (I have to be careful with onion because I have horrible indigestion from it) so that is different from mine. When my eldest boy was little he thought the "green stuff" was herbs! 😂 When money was tight, I would often serve this with just the meat of two chicken thighs roasted, pulled and shredded, and mixed in. I served apples with peanut butter for the kids to make sure they got enough nutrition and calories. I used brown rice when I had the time, but always had some white rice on hand when shorter cook times were needed. If using brown rice, my suggestion is to not add the broccoli to the rice until half way through its cook time. I also usually added just a little broth before putting the parmesan on top and sticking in the oven, that way it wouldn't be too dry.

I 100% understand and support you! Been there!!!

I was so scared my kids would be as bad as I was. So in addition to making them join us in the kitchen, every one of them had a six week cooking boot camp type thing when they were about 15 years old. At the end of five weeks of cooking with us, exploring food and flavor, and learning to use everything in the kitchen right, plus food safety (I gave Dh food poisoning on his first birthday that we celebrated together as a married couple), they had to meal plan, grocery shop, and cook for the family for a week. None of my adult kids ended up being food disasters. Yay for me! One is NOT remotely adventurous with flavors and variety. But, he can cook healthy things for himself. The other three are pretty darn good cooks. Dd actually likes to cook. I am convinced she did NOT come from me, switched at birth or something. Despite becoming good at it, I hate meal planning and cooking with the fire of a thousand suns. Dh's cousin is retiring this year from the extension office in her county. She has headed up family nutrition and food science for all those years. She says she has really tried to get political buy in for free, public cooking classes, and bring back Home Ec in schools because of what she sees as a major public health problem, but no one listens.