"what are you feeding me?"

Yesterday I realized I needed to do something to finish off the apples that have been in the crisper since late January and the whole-berry cranberry sauce from the weekend. I decided to make apple-cranberry compote, just like the stuff in my favorite Healthy Choice frozen dinner. After we had our ham and green beans for dinner, I asked Ken if he wanted some compote for dessert.

"Compost?" he asked.

"Compote. Apple-Cranbery compote."

I do the cooking, since I like it more than Ken does, and as far as I know his actual cooking skills are limited to pancakes and Welsh Cakes (the latter make up for his general culinary slothfulness, belive me!) Besides, my range of dietary restrictions make anyone else's attempts to fix a meal I can eat problematic. Add to these factors that I grocery-shop mostly in health food stores and can't leave an established recipe alone, and dinner time gets interesting.

A couple of months ago, I made baked acorn squash. Ripe acorn squash is deep green and needs to spend about an hour in the oven to get to the point where you can cut it, let alone get it fully cooked. I put half an acorn squash on Ken's plate one night. His response was, "What's this black thing you're feeding me?"

On the other hand, Ken has introduced me to edamame in the shell. So easy to cook--throw the pods in a pot of boiling water with a bunch of sea salt for five minutes and you have a yummy and fun-to-eat vegetable. Just pop the edamame beans right out of the shells into your mouth! Definitely kid-friendly (unless they're allergic to soy). Ken has also introduced me to onagi (eel) sushi. Yum! I don't make that at home though. Yet, anyway.

Totally unrelated but dangerous...Amazon.com was really out to get my money this week. They sent me an alert that I could pre-order the next volume of one of my manga at 33% off. I got in to shop around for another treat so I could get Super Saver free shipping and learned that you can save on the cover price by pre-ordering books! So now I've blown $40, all on manga and graphic novels.