Hello, My Name is Mrs. Harridan, and I'm a Food Nerd

I have to admit to a certain level of food nerd-dom, although it's lessened over the past few years. When I was in my twenties, it was not altogether uncommon for me to spend a Saturday night clipping coupons and reading cookbooks*, looking for the best way to maximize my teensy income.

As a result, I have a collection of cookbooks that instruct how to make one's own groceries, use the cheapest foods as the bases of decent meals, and how to make mixes similar to those available pre-packaged in the supermarket.

This last one, Make-a-Mix Cookery, is the best; when I was super-poor I learned the value of the library, and I got this title from inter-library loan (best. Library. Service. Ever.), then photocopied the recipes I wanted. I still have those photocopied recipes in my recipe binder. Sadly, some of them didn't make it to the revised edition of the book, so I'm glad I did. Nyaah, nyaah, permissions -- I'd do it again!

Tonight I dragged one of the books out (I now inexplicably own 2 copies, and I blame Ebay for this problem) and made granola. I halved the recipe and still made about 5-6 cups of granola. It seems pretty healthful** (sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, oats, honey, brown sugar, etc.), and it was remarkably easy. Let's hope that it actually tastes good - Chris and I will give it a trial run tomorrow, when we would normally eat store bought granola bars (I have yet to understand why the variety pack includes "s'mores" flavor. Why would you want a s'mores flavored granola bar?). If nothing else, they will give us our annual allotment of wheat germ, which I haven't knowingly ingested since childhood, when a jar of Kretschmer's sat on the fridge door for years after some health craze/diet of my mother's during the wacky seventies. Says there it contains plenty of folic acid. If that's anything like what was in the prenatal vitamins I've taken in the past, I will be daydreaming of colonics in the very near future.

* Much to my mother's dismay. She wanted me to be drunk as a lord all weekend, every weekend, and securing a fun-loving but dependable husband in the process. She failed to realize that Dirty Frank's, my fave hangout at the time, was hardly conducive to finding a man who had all his teeth, let alone a job or a middling-high sperm count.

** My husband is insistent that I use the word healthy rather than healthful. But then, he is basically Mr. Malaprop, so I dismiss him with an imperious wave of my hand. Which of us is right? Do tell, proofreaders of the Interwebs.