It’s 10:35 p.m. I spent two hours plowing through an excruciatingly bad student paper, trying to make SOME sort of sense of it, assigning a score of 35/100, feeling bad, the guy’s probably dyslexic, feeling frikkin’ frustrated, sick and tired of explaining the same grade-school trivia over and over and over and over and over and over and over to adults who didn’t learn it in 13 years of K-12 schooling and certainly aren’t going to learn it now and truly I remember why I said all those years ago that I’d rather go on welfare than ever teach freshman comp again.
Then presto-changeo, the next paper is almost perfect!
What happens that some people never manage to learn the most basic writing skills? And some, stuck pointlessly in English 101/102, perform on a near-professional level?
Another 12-hour day. I’m whipped. The dog hasn’t been fed, I haven’t been fed, and it’s past bed-time if I imagine that even under the influence of a pair of Benadryl I’m gonna get more than four hours of sleep. Nose has been so stuffed up I’m not hungry, but Cassie the Corgi certainly is hungry.
Unclog the nose with a toxic medicinal spray. Realize I really should eat something. But there’s precious little, we having run out of food and out of money near the end of the budget cycle.
But…
But YES! There’s a freezer!
Dive to the bottom of the chest and resurface with a container of home-made stew, redolent of onions, carrots, celery, and wine. And a smaller plastic box containing one serving of lovely comfort food: Costco’s excellent scalloped potatoes!
And there’s exactly one glass of wine left in the bottle of plonk on the kitchen counter.
Not only did I save a great deal of money frugally building a delicious stew and squirreling away one-person portions of the lifetime supply of potatoes, last winter’s me rescued this evening’s sickly overworked little me from a miserable dinner of cheese rinds and stale crackers.
Frugality! There’s more to it than meets the eye.
I *love* my freezers for exactly the same reason. I must have starved in a previous life because I cook and stockpile food as if it were gold.
I expect to open the freezer and find several meal options neatly portioned for one. I also freeze dessert, like individual portions of cake I’ve baked (without frosting, of course), and small portions of home cooked all-fruit preserve to mix with plain yogurt. Since I love to cook (most of the time), this is easy for me to do. I’m sure folks that find cooking a boring chore wouldn’t want to do this so much.
@ Linda: Mercifully, there are now some pretty good prepared foods out there, free of weird chemicals and artificial flavoring.
At Costco you’ll occasionally come across stuff like this — the soups that come in those plastic containers are pretty good, not oversalted. Their scalloped potatoes are TO DIE FOR. I like to buy the lifetime supplies and apportion them into individual servings. These come in very handy.
Also Trader Joe now has a bunch of edible stuff, mostly of the ethnic variety. I’ve found their Indian and some of their Asian foods are pretty good. If they’re not already frozen, they freeze handily.
It’s hard to go wrong with a good tamale or burro. Either make your own burros (easy) or buy some decent ones from a Mexican food merchant. Tamales are difficult to make, but some organic food suppliers do produce some very nice tamales. Either one — burro or tamale — freezes nicely.
Pasties freeze well, although they’re a little hard to defrost. You really shouldn’t microwave a pastie. They need to be reheated in an oven so they don’t get soggy. So good!!!!