Poverty Cooking Show!

I got up this morning and made the most glorious turkey meatloaf! I don't know why I take pictures of my food but I do. Well, yes I do know why, it's because my entire family always takes a picture of the holiday spread before we dig into it. Just to preserve the glorious bounty that the Good Lord has provided. And Dad's Paycheck, of course.


So although I live alone with my cat and rarely cook for masses of people, I still like to take a quick snapshot of what I've made. Because if I don't, once it's gone, I always think, "Gosh! I wish I'd taken a picture of that before I ate it all!" Maybe I am just trying to convince people that I really can cook! Ha ha! Here's Proof!

Because I still wish I had a picture of the fillet Mignon mini-pizza with cheddar cheese that I made the other night. It was so pretty!


When I am preparing my meals, the ones that take a lot of slicing and dicing, I like to talk to myself in the accent of the nationality of the food itself. This meatloaf was assembled using my Midwestern, natural accent: "Now, Vidalia, you get onto this chopping block so I can dice you'ins into fine pieces for the pot."

The other day when I made this succulent dish of shrimps scampi in caper-butter sauce I cooked with an Italian accent the entire time!

"Thats-a Riiight, Capers. I'm making you an offer you-a cannot refuse-a!"

I decided that what I would be really good at would be hosting a cooking show on the Eating Network (Otherwise known as the Food Network, I believe) called Poverty Cooking! It would feature great recipes using only ingredients I got from the free food bank. For instance, what do you do with those pesky packets of Top ramen that keep piling up? I ditch the powdery and unpalatable noodles and keep the spice packet for use in other things. And the 3 or 4 loaves of really, really, really, really stale bread they always give me, a family of one? Bread pudding, of course!

I figure they could give me the late night slot after everyone but the crank-ho's and party animals had gone to bed and I'd be a hit in my own little poverty world.

Although do crank ho's and party animals watch cooking shows? Sometimes my flights of fancy end up smashed on the turf of common sense Earth.

One thing for certain, life is filled with little inconvenient truths like that. I recently spoke to cousin Tivo-Jane who also has fibromyalgia, and she offered me some advice about handling my meds to alleviate the hangover effect of one of them. She suggested cutting the sleeping pill in half and taking half at night and half in the morning so that I would ease myself out of the shores of sleep rather than spending half the morning face down with sand in my mouth feeling like I'd been beaten by Undersea Thugs.

So I raced right out and bought myself one of those little pill cutters. It works just like a wee, Lilliputian guillotine! I was tickled to death until I realized I now owned a geriatric device.

The first of many, I'm sure. Once you are fifty you stop dreaming of romance and living large, and start contriving to manage bifocals, pill cutters and low-sodium diets. It's okay. It's the Tilt-O-Whirl ride of life. You can't have the long, free-flying swinging spin of it without the gut-wrenching, neck-jerking, slow-down of it.

Unless you are a cat. And then it's all good, all the time!