salads

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Grocery Store Report; Doubly Awkward Encounter; Dinners This Week

I don’t have any new shortages to report, although Lunchables, which seemed to recover briefly, are once again non-existent and frozen pancakes remain highly elusive. But I had to rush here immediately to alert you that iceberg lettuce at my grocery store is currently selling for $3.50. That’s U.S. dollars. THREE DOLLARS FIFTY CENTS. Iceberg lettuce. 

I am well aware that prices of many items are creeping ever upward, but this seems like a GIANT LEAP. Usually, a head of iceberg lettuce is somewhere between $0.99 and $1.50. So the increase feels rather dramatic. 

It wasn’t even a particularly large head of lettuce, either. Smaller than usual. 

I find it so curious that the label says “2 for $7” instead of “$3.50 apiece.” Does 2 for $7 sound BETTER? Because it doesn’t sound better to ME. When did ICEBERG LETTUCE become such a hot commodity?!?!

Well. The other types of lettuce seem to be holding steady at their normal egregious pricing, so I’ll just forego my beloved iceberg for something more nutritious and less delightfully crunchy, like romaine. 

I was so gobsmacked that I mentioned the price increase to the checker. He commiserated and said that the shock waves of the pandemic were causing very strange cracks in the system. Even though I haven’t noticed a big difference in staffing – I see the regular staff members I’ve come to know over the past decade – he said they are really struggling with understaffing issues. 

He was the only checker open – which didn’t strike me as too strange; it was eight in the morning after all. But there was a guy behind me with two items to my full cart, so I let him go ahead of me. Then a woman got in line behind me, also with two items. What was I to do in that situation? Let her go ahead of me, too? It would have taken five seconds but then what if the next person showed up and only had two items? Or five items? I told myself that I had done the nice thing, letting the one person jump ahead of me in line, and that I didn’t have to do it again. But she had SEEN him go ahead of me, and I didn’t want her to think I was a jerk. So I told her I thought that the customer service desk would check her out, since she had so few items. She thanked me and headed off to buy her muffin and juice at the customer service desk. 

The whole interaction was super awkward already, but then it became doubly so when I realized she was my old hairdresser. 

I swear to you that I blogged about breaking up with this hairdresser, but I rummaged around in my archives a bit and couldn’t find the post, so you will get a small recap: I went to this hairdresser for several years and liked her. But then she started outsourcing things to others so she could work on other clients. Not just the shampooing. But like… “Oh, I’m going to send you over to Dean to do your color while I cut this other person’s hair.” Or… “Kelly’s going to trim your ends and then I’ll be back to do your color.” I did not care for this. First, it was a salon that charges more based on your stylist’s level of expertise, so I felt a little miffed that I was paying for HER level but getting half of my hair done by Dean or Kelly, and who knows WHAT level they were… plus, I wanted to see HER because a hairdresser/hair-haver relationship is very intimate and based largely on trust. So after this happened a few times, I went elsewhere for my haircare needs. 

It’s so AWKWARD, though, to dump a service provider. I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine having an end-of-relationship conversation with a hairdresser. “It’s not you, it’s me” sounds even more insincere when it’s directed at your stylist, right? So I just… ghosted her. (I did the same to the next hairdresser, too, which is even MORE awkward because she remains my husband’s hairdresser.) (Then my next hairdresser ghosted me, but that was because she didn’t return to work after the pandemic and who can blame her.) I have seen the old hairdresser out in the wild a couple of times, but on those occasions I spotted her from a distance and I think I was able to slip away before she saw me. Or if she saw me, it was as I walked speedily away, head down, eyes averted. Yes, I am very mature.  

But this was the first time I have seen her face to face. Not only that, but I SPOKE to her. I was wearing a mask and glasses, and I am several years older by now. Sure, I remember her name and her daughter’s name, and the type of books she likes to read, but I was one of many clients that she’s had over the years. So I’m hoping she didn’t recognize or remember me. 

There’s nothing to be DONE about this very small, very fleetingly awkward interaction. Even if she did recognize me. Even if she did think, “Wow, there’s that person who ghosted me half a decade ago.” Even if she reacted with anger or hurt feelings. I can’t change any of it. It will likely be years before I run into her again in public. And yet I AM STILL THINKING ABOUT IT, and may continue to do so for hours/days, twirling and twirling the interaction around itself, trying to reshape it or make it less awkward by perseverating on it. Why is being a human so rife with these little inescapable twinges and pains? 

Let us now change subjects abruptly to meal planning.

I went to the grocery store with one meal in mind, and while I was there I came up with several possibilities. So now I have a full fridge and a nice list of dinners to make for my family this week.

Dinners for the Week of November 15 to November 22

WAIT A SECOND IS THANKSGIVING NEXT WEEK WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TIME WHERE HAS IT GONE?

  • Fire Fry: We haven’t had this in a long while, and I am craving crunchy veggies in a fiery sauce. My husband made me promise to drastically reduce the amount of spices I add to the yogurt though. He is no fun at all. 
  • Chicken Paprikas: Another meal we haven’t had in far too long. And I have a bunch of cooked, shredded rotisserie chicken in the freezer just waiting to be added to a rich, creamy, potato laced sauce and poured over noodles. 
  • Asian Chicken Salad: I think my husband will appreciate this meal, as it is neither tacos nor chicken/zucchini stir fry, both of which he is tired of. I will probably make some teriyaki dressing as well since I don’t care for the peanut dressing listed in the recipe.
  • Chicken/Zucchini Stir Fry: Oh yes, I love this stir fry. It’s so easy and so tasty and all the zucchini makes me feel so virtuous. And despite my husband feeling like we have it all the time, we do NOT and it has been many weeks since we’ve eaten it and it is time once again. 
  • Thai Red Chicken Curry: Am I in a stir fry mood or what? 
  • Red Wine Braised Short Ribs with Polenta: Why yes, this has been a recurring bullet on my dinner posts since October 25. I STILL have not made this meal, but the short ribs are in the freezer waiting to be immersed in red wine until they collapse in drunken ecstasy and the polenta is very calmly waiting on the shelf and I have a nice package of inexpensive-compared-to-iceberg-lettuce romaine waiting in the crisper, so perhaps THIS is the week it will all come together.

What are you eating this week, the last week before THANKSGIVING, which is somehow nearly upon us?

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Dinners This Week

(La la la, continuing to ignore current events.) 

Usually I try to blather on a little bit before I list the meals I’m planning for the week – I don’t know why; so this will feel more like a Regular Blog Post? Who knows. But I’m fresh out of topics for today. Literally the only thing I can think to tell you is that I saw on Instagram (I think?) that you can store your asparagus in half-filled jars of water to keep it fresh longer. Who has room for THAT in their fridge (besides the Instagram poster, whose fridge was FULL of veggies and fruits in matching glass jars that no one would ever have to worry about knocking over while reaching behind it for the milk), is what I thought. But I also thought of some asparagus that has been in my fridge for ** a while ** and that I haven’t been able to motivate to cook and eat. So I tried it. It is in my fridge now, in two small jars. We will see what happens. Now I don’t even HAVE to eat it, because it is An Experiment. 

They’ve been in there for about twelve or so hours and don’t seem the worse for wear.

Look at that – I managed to blather on for a whole paragraph! Never put it past me to come up with some words about nothing, I guess. 

Dinners for the Week of January 19 – January 25 (whew – I looked at my calendar wrong and originally wrote “February 1” instead of “January 25” and TOTALLY ACCEPTED IT AS FACT because time is meaningless) (thank goodness for very minimal proofreading!)

  • Slow Cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup  : This was SO GOOD last time I made it, and I have been thinking about it ever since. Like last time, I will add a can of black beans and a cup of frozen corn. Also, like last time, I suppose I will omit the lime juice? At least, I can’t remember putting lime juice or cilantro in it at any point? And it was delicious? How can I recreate a recipe I enjoyed when I apparently didn’t follow the instructions, but not in a purposeful way but in an I-clearly-didn’t-read-the-recipe-all-the-way-through way?
  • Chicken and Zucchini Stir Fry: This has become such a solid standby. It’s easy (even though I also chop up an onion to throw in with the zucchini) and it’s tasty and I feel very pleased with the amount of veggies it contains. 
  • BBQ Salmon Bowls with Mango Salsa: Okay, I get squicked out by the combination of avocado and mango, so I am just doing a plain old mango salsa with this one. And I think I may put everything on top of some romaine instead of rice. (I am every food blogger’s nightmare.) Hmmm. If I do lettuce, I’d have to make a dressing, wouldn’t I. But I could do a nice honey-and-lime vinaigrette. Yes, that sounds yummy.
  • Something with the asparagus.

I AM going to eat the asparagus. But come on – you do this, too, right? You buy something, fully intending to eat it, and then it loses all appeal before you can do it? I bet you have something like that in your fridge right now, no?

Okay, Internet. That’s it for me. I wish you good health (mental, physical, and emotional) and happy eating this week.

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Ingrained Belief Systems, But About Inconsequential Things

One of the things I’ve begun becoming more aware of in the past few years is how so many of my belief systems and behaviors come directly from my parents. This is not groundbreaking information by any means. And, in fact, I knew this, all along. But – maybe since Carla was born, and I’ve had to confront my own goals and priorities as a parent – I’ve really understood it on a deeper, more personal level. And I’ve had to really grapple with the fact that maybe just because my beloved parents felt a certain way about something doesn’t mean that it’s the only way, nor does it mean that I have to feel that way. It’s also complicated and confusing and eye-opening to wonder if you think a thing because YOU think that thing, or because it was so deeply ingrained in how you were raised.

It’s hard enough to deal with this stuff on your own. But then you add in a spouse, who likely has his/her/their own deeply ingrained beliefs… and things can get rather sticky.

Now, we could talk for days about the troubling and insidious examples of this phenomenon – abuse or racism or other really dark inheritances that parents pass down to their children. And we should give these topics proper weight and attention and thought. But this isn’t really the space to do so, and I’m not at all qualified to address any of those topics. Plus, I have a good relationship with my parents and, in fact, I feel like they were/are really EXCELLENT parents, so I don’t want to harp on the handful of low-risk things that I might be questioning as an adult, especially in a public space. Plus, there’s enough CLEAR EVIDENCE of the dark stuff swirling all around us on a daily basis, so we could all skip on over to twitter or whatever if we wanted a nice bracing slug of doom and dread.

No, I’m not trying to broach the big stuff, or the heavy stuff, or even the lower-but-not-low-stakes stuff, like ingrained beliefs about finances and education and religion (which I find fascinating, but can nonetheless Be Fraught). Instead, I want to talk about inherited beliefs regarding ridiculous and unimportant-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things things. Specifically, salads.

My mother made dinner for us almost every night. And – unless we were eating taco salad, which has salad right there in the name – we almost always had a salad with dinner. Fried chicken on the menu? Side salad. Pot roast for Sunday family meal? Side salad. Mulligatawny soup? Fresh bread… and side salad. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mom served a side salad on nights when we picked up a pie from Pizza Hut. (I felt absolutely ridiculous, there, referring to a pizza as a “pie.” My belief system does not allow for the terms to be interchangeable. But lyrically I did not like the repetition of “pizza from Pizza Hut” and would have felt more ridiculous still had I gone with my only other thought, “pizza from ‘The Hut.'” So you get what you get.) Salad was a ubiquitous part of our meals. As an adult, I choose to think that this was my mom’s interpretation of “meat and a vegetable,” but even when vegetables were part of the meal, the side salad was there.

My husband and I do not do this. And to this day, it feels off to me, like something is missing. Could I add a side salad to our meals? Sure! But that’s where the problem lies. No. My husband and I have differing ingrained beliefs about salads.

My mom’s side salads were very simple: Iceberg lettuce, diced carrots, and diced red onion. With Italian or bleu cheese dressing from a bottle. Once in a while, if she had them on hand, she’d slice some green peppers or cucumbers or radishes and throw those on as well. YUM. I still eat these salads, to this day, for lunch. They are so easy to make – you can wash the lettuce and dice everything in under ten minutes. And BAM, you have a delicious crunchy salad, all ready to eat.

(This was my idea of an after-school snack, when I was in, oh, late elementary school through middle school or so. Maybe even after that. I’d trudge up the mile-long hill that counted as our driveway, turn on some quality after-school TV like Square One or The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, and make myself a salad.) (Lest you question my programming choices, keep in mind that we had five channels to choose from: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and PBS. Sometimes, if the weather was clear, we could get CBC, which was a Canadian channel.) (Do not pity me my meager television choices nor my salad snacks. Mine was an idyllic childhood and I think back on both fondly.)

It would be so easy to add this kind of simple salad to my meal plan! My ingrained belief about what constitutes A Wholesome Dinner practically SCREAMS that I add one to each meal! But here’s where my husband’s beliefs and my own butt heads.

I don’t know how he was raised, salad-wise. I just know that somewhere along the way my husband came to believe that my mom’s four-ingredient option does not count as a salad. Firstly, he does not particularly like iceberg lettuce – which, for me, is far easier to clean and prepare than a head of red leaf lettuce or romaine, and far less expensive than the pre-washed/pre-cut lettuces our grocery store sells in abundance. (Plus, I LOVE iceberg lettuce. It’s crunchy and flavorless and wonderful.)

But our marital salad division goes deeper than lettuce choice. My salads are too plain. For my husband, a salad requires substance. It contains veggies, sure, but it also has meat. And cheese. And nuts. Maybe some sort of fruit. Maybe something crunchy – like wontons or croutons or chips. I am more than happy to make this kind of elaborate salad as the entire meal, but less inclined to put one together as a side when I am also responsible for a main course.

And so, as with any inconsequential marital schism, where neither of us will give (he won’t eat my four-ingredient salads; I won’t make elaborate multi-ingredient meal salads as dinner sides), we pretend it doesn’t exist. We do not mention it. We simply work around it. We instead have salads as the whole meal, or we have veggies with our main course. If we are suffering, we do so in silence.

And I eat my little iceberg lettuce salads for lunch.

 

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