Some Blog Site

One of the things my wife finds odd is that I prefer wax paper over sandwich baggies for sandwiches when I pack my lunch.  No one in her family ever used wax paper for that, so she was confused/surprised why I did that.  That’s how my mom made bag lunches, so that’s how I do it.  And since I make my own lunches, my wife has no problem buying wax paper for me.

Wax paper is better than the plastic bag thingies.  First of all is cost.  One roll of wax paper is $1.29, and that is for 75 square feet.  I use about 1 square foot of wax paper per sandwich, so that’s about 1.7 cents per sandwich.  The sandwich baggies with the zipping-and-locking-type fastener run $1.99 for 50 bags, or 4 cents per sandwich.  That more than twice the cost.  And sometimes the sandwich won’t fit in those, so I would have to use the quart-size bags, at 5 cents a bag.

Secondly is size.  Wax paper can accommodate various size breads without much hassle.  I can’t use the non-zipping sandwich bags anymore because now all the bread is shorter and wider (low-profile bread) than the traditional squarish slices.  So I can’t fit my sandwich into the bags that are intended to hold sandwiches.  I suppose I could cut my sandwich into pieces and arrange them to fit into the bag, but why bother?  Wax paper can be cut a little longer for larger bread or shorter for smaller bread.  I have found that placing my sandwich at an angle, before folding the wax paper over it, allows for better coverage of the low-profile bread.

The only category in which the zip baggies are the winner is air- and water-tightness.  But I am taking my sandwich to a desk job, not white-water rafting, so I don’t care much about water-tightness.  And as for air-tightness, I have noticed that the bread does get a little stale after 36 hours in wax paper.  If you are making a week’s worth of sandwiches at once, then that may be a consideration for you.

Summer is the time for fresh fruits and vegetables, and one of the items in late August and early September is corn.  We were given several ears of corn by a farming family.  The children and I were in charge of getting the corn ready for cooking, and then my wife would handle the actual cooking part.

So I showed the kids the art of proper shucking.  I showed them the tassel and how to remove all the silks from the ear of corn.  Okay, you can never remove all the silks, but close enough.  They left that part to me anyway.  I also showed them how to shuck the corn – pull each one off and you’ll eventually get down to the kernels.

I saw that my demonstration piece had a hole that went through several shucks.  So I put a couple of them back (I hadn’t removed them so they were still attached at the base of the ear) and then showed the kids how the hole went through each layer.  I told them a bug must have eaten through it.  Then we got to the kernels and I showed them that the hole went right through the kernel.  At that point, the older child informed me that a worm was on the end of the ear of corn.  My response was that was the one that had been eating our corn.  So we threw him away (him being the bug, or the corn, as we did dispose of both).

The next day, I got home from work a little late, and the family was already eating dinner.  My son then informed me that there was a caterpillar on the window.  It was actually on the window frame, and it was not a caterpillar but another corn worm.  I assumed it was another worm that had escaped from the bag of corn, but my wife was not happy with the thought that there could be more corn worms roaming the house.  I threw that one away and we have not seen any since.

The worst flavored food in recent memory was a sandwich that I made one day.

I wanted to make a ham-and-swiss-with-mayo like I usually do, but we were out of the normal wheat bread.  I looked around and put the ham, swiss cheese, and mayonnaise on the only bread I could find – cinnamon and raisin bread with icing.  I tried to eat the sandwich, but I couldn’t make it more than a few bites.

I saw a list of the worst possible ice cream flavors a while back, but the only one I can remember is “wet dog flavor”.  Also, Marmite has a very bad flavor, but they are aware of that and have put together some recipes which may help mask the taste of the Marmite itself.

Also, if you ever see a menu item called “chicken teriyucky“, don’t order it.

Things taste better in Spain.

Normally, I do not like brussels sprouts. But at lunch one day they served brussel sprouts, and I tried them. They tasted like little clumps of spinach – I wouldn’t choose them over other items, but they were not bad. Definitely better than my memories of them from when I was a child.

Normally, I dislike olives, especially on pizza. Their putrid flavor overwhelms everything else in that bite of food. But at every dinner, the appetizer-type plate included olives. I tried one and it was not as strong or nasty-tasting as the olives one finds in the USA. I had another one the next night, but again would not choose them over other items.

Here in the USA, we normally expect Mexican food to be spicier than the typical American food, whatever American food may be. Spanish food did not have much spice to it. It was good, but not spicy.

Most of the items would seem normal to an American. The most interesting item I saw on a menu was black rice. “How do they make the rice black?” you may be wondering. They color it with squid ink.