Five Dollar Dinner
Every now and then, reasonable and learned grownups forget about the food pyramid and/or the food groups and feed themselves like they would have if they had been in charge of dinner at the age of five.
I have an example.
Tonight, my friend E and I took a break from studying and went to Aldi. Now, there is a secret to shopping at Aldi. You can't go with a list. You have to go with fuzzy categories of things that you need/want. Like, "Meat for two or three meals" or "fresh fruit for lunches." If you go with a list that reads "two apples, one ripe pear, six ounces of Orange Roughy", you will be disappointed. That is just the way it is.
So, we went to Aldi with the fuzzy category of "something to have to eat for dinner" (and, I needed some sort of hard, crumbly, preferably low fat cheese). And, what did we get? A bag a stir-fry vegetables (not bad),grapes (pretty good), macaroni and cheese (not bad, but also not good), a box of scalloped potato mix (again, not bad but not good), and some oatmeal craisin walnut cookie dough. While any combination of these things probably would make a lovely meal, it was probably unwise to eat them together. But, we did eat them together. We had a grape course, followed by a pasta course, followed by a potato course and rounded off by a cookie course.
While there is part of me that is tsk-tsking about having pasta and a potato in the same meal, my inner five-year old is happy as a kitten with a new ball of yarn. And, I have to tell you, it is hard to complain about life when your inner child is that happy.
