The list

Since we usually do our big weekly grocery shopping trip on Saturdays, it has been easy for us just to buy Aunt Mae’s groceries at the same time. She usually calls on Saturday morning to give us the list.

As you may have guessed from other things I’ve written, Aunt Mae is not only an incredible cook, but also downright hillarious. So, getting the list is, like most things we do with her, usually quite entertaining.

The list usually starts out small, with about five items (of course, as you’ll see, an “item” might be something like “twenty boxes of pudding”). After that, she’ll say “that should do it, honey … oh, except for…”, and then she’ll add a few more items. Then, “I think that’s it, except for…”, and add a few more. After shopping, we usually find that our grocery cart is two-thirds Aunt Mae.

Not only do we get the list of items she needs, but also a small story about each. For example, last weekend, she needed four packages of cream cheese. Three of them were for the cheesecake that she was going to make when so-and-so came over this week. And by the way, did you know that so-and-so’s daughter and her family are doing well? They live in this-place-or-that now, and she hasn’t really seen them since they were in visiting so-and-so. The other box is for bagels, of which she still has plenty. She didn’t eat many last week, because she wasn’t in the mood for bagels. She did eat quite a few Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, though, you know.

Oh, and did you know that so-and-so is other-so-and-so’s cousin?

“That should do it, honey … oh, except for…”

Do people even read the grocery store fliers anymore? You know, the ones that list all the stuff the store has on sale for which you don’t even need a coupon? Aunt Mae does.

When there are big specials, like twenty boxes of cook-and-serve pudding for $10, she gets twenty. Do people these days even know what to do with twenty boxes of cook-and-serve pudding? Or twenty boxes of anything, for that matter? Aunt Mae does.

Last week, she noticed that hams were on sale. Not ham, like coldcuts, or slices of ham, but hams. She wanted a fourteen pound ham. The smallest I could find was a fifteen pounder, which was fine with her. Do people these days even know what to do with a fifteen pound ham? Aunt Mae does.

God bless you, Aunt Mae.

Perforation

Is it just me, or does perforated cardboard never seem to do what it’s supposed to? I always end up either mostly shredding the parts that aren’t perforated as the tear shoots off in some random direction, or tearing the perforation so slowly and carefully that it may as well not even be there in the first place.

At work, we have a Keurig single cup coffee maker. We get our coffee singles from Green Mountain Coffee (Keurig seems to be heavily marketed through Green Mountain, are they subsidiaries?). I’ll admit that although I like drip-brewed coffee better, the coffee singles are actually pretty good.

Anyway, the coffee singles come in boxes that are perforated on one corner, kind of like the 12 packs of soda that are meant for your fridge. They also have this nice cutout for your thumb or finger on one edge of the perforation. Apparently its purpose is to lure you into thinking that you can just insert your thumb or finger, pull, grab a single and brew. It never fails that I partially destroy these boxes while trying to use the obvious approach.

The perforations on those damn 12 packs never seem to work out either.

I don’t get it. Perforations really seem like they should work. If I had more free time, I’d invent a better way, but since I don’t, I guess I’ll just complain-blog about it.

Mac Salad

Lori left this note for herself last night. When I noticed it in the morning today, my nerd brain immediately tried to make an Apple-related news headline out of it.

Of course, it had nothing to do with Apple, Macintosh computers, or anything remotely geeky at all. This past weekend we hosted two pool parties and ended up with a refrigerator-full of leftovers. Lori decided to bring the rest of the macaroni salad to her work luncheon on Thursday.

I suppose that makes me a nerdy fan-boy. So be it.

The special

Because Aunt Mae is such an incredible cook, we almost always have dinner at her house when visiting, but last night, due to some unfortunate circumstances, we ended up at a local Eat & Park for dinner. Fortunately, Aunt Mae is the kind of person around whom you just can’t help but smile and laugh, no matter what the circumstances.

When we were being seated, on the table next to ours was this sign. That brought on a few laughs, and lightened the mood.

When the time came to order, Lor had decided on the cheese-steak. “The regular or the special?” asked the waitress. Lor asked what the difference is, and the waitress answered that the regular comes with american cheese, and the special comes with Cheez Whiz.

In my mind, it’s debatable that american cheese qualifies as cheese, but I’ve always thought of it as at least being a closer approximation to real cheese than Cheez Whiz. I almost laughed out loud at the thought of Cheez Whiz as an upgrade to american cheese.

After the waitress walked away, we all laughed out loud for a bit. When the waitress came back, Lor ordered the special.

Sticky barcode tea, now with paper bits

I like loose tea, and a while back, I bought a Bodum stainless, single-cup tea infuser to keep at my desk at work (I don’t quite qualify as a tea snob, though). When I decided to make my first cup of tea with it, I opened the crinkly plastic packaging and removed the strainer and lid to find that stuck onto the bottom of the strainer, covering nearly all of the holes, was a product barcode tag.

Surely, I thought, given Bodum’s emphasis on functional design, this would be one of those vinyl tags with the nice post-it-note-like adhesive that just peels right off. I might have to run it under some warm water to get rid of the last little bit of residue, but then I’d be ready for a nice cup of tea.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be the paper variety with the unnecessarily strong adhesive. The ones that come off in bits the size of grains of rice and leave their sticky backing firmly attached to the product.

I prefer milk and honey in my tea, rather than ink, paper, and glue, so hopefully soaking the thing for a while will get rid of the tag remnants.

In general, I like Bodum products. My experience has been that they typically do what they say they will, and have nice design aesthetics. While I don’t know for sure that the tag was put there by Bodum (I bought it on Amazon), it seems like it was since it had a bright red Bodum logo on it. I do know, however, that the tag turned a potentially nice product into a very frustrating initial experience.

Pineapple lopsidedown cake

Aunt Mae is one of the best cooks I know. She’s the kind of good cook that results from fifty-some years of cooking for a family of 4 kids, and armies of relatives on every holiday. She uses real butter because lard is tough to find these days. She keeps a full side of lamb in her basement freezer. She uses the forty year old cheesecake recipe that doesn’t list Splenda as an ingredient. Her mistakes are more delicious that my well-planned meals.

The other day, she made pineapple upside-down cake. Somehow she had managed to put the rack into the over with one side higher than the other. The batter slid to the lower side, and consequently, the cake turned out thick on one side and pancake-thin on the other. We dubbed it “pineapple lopsidedown cake”. It was, of course, delicious.