Welcome rain and pasta

It was a dark and stormy night...oh, wrong lead-in - sorry. Well, the rain WAS welcome last night - we enjoyed the sounds. We also enjoyed a nice dinner of spaghetti with Ken's homemade sauce from the freezer, and a salad. Ken is having his fall cravings - potatoes and beans are high on this list, so we now have 10 pounds of potatoes to add to the mix. I love potatoes too, but my heart did sink just a little when I saw them. Oh well - creativity is the name of the game, isn't it?! Stay tuned for potato action.

I spent a few minutes this morning looking in my Oriental cookbooks for a nice recipe for our stir-fry tonight. I pulled out the can of water chestnuts and the jar of bamboo shoots from the pantry shelf, and made a mental note of the pork chop, 2 scallions, and carrots in the fridge. I've got fish sauce, soy sauce, cornstarch, ginger in the freezer - I think we're set.

Does everyone have a zillion bottles of various liquors and liqueurs on their shelf, like we do? We don't even DRINK hard liquor or liqueurs, really. I use some for cooking - dry or cream sherry, coffee liqueur, rum and brandy. But we also have Scotch and Becherovka (a Czech liqueur I only drink in the summer mixed with grapefruit juice). The other night I discovered we still had some Pimm's, that quintessentially British stuff that makes a dandy summer drink mixed with lemonade and garnished with a cucumber spear and some mint. There are at least 6 more bottles of stuff with suspect origins that we will NEVER use. Maybe I'll organize a liquor swap, like the spice swap I mentioned in an earlier post. We'll see where that goes.

I'm all about using up or giving away what we don't use. The recipient's reward is something new on hand - MY reward is empty shelves. Looking forward to that day! See you tomorrow.