Merely some incoherent ravings about food.

Meat! Oh, warm and savory animal tissue! Tonight I cooked meat for the first time all semester; I really shouldn't go shopping when I'm feeling out of it, because the other day I came home with a pound of reduced-price frozen turkey, ground up in a tube. I used it to make Asian Turkey Burgers, which were a very delicious vehicle for ketchup, that most delectable of sauces.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 egg white
• 2 tablespoon soy sauce
• 3/4 cup dry bread crumbs
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 16 ounces ground turkey
  

In a bowl, combine the first seven ingredients. Crumble turkey over mixture and mix just until combined. Shape into four patties. Cook in a nonstick skillet coated with nonstick cooking spray until no longer pink.

Last week I bought some of those new pepper Triscuits and they were gone within 24 hours; K and I simply demolished them. This week they were out - pepper Triscuits are a craze sweeping the nation apparently - so I got fire roasted tomato instead, which were half-off but not quite the taste sensation of the pepper ones.

Another thing that's revolutionized my life in the kitchen lately is Jiffy cornbread mix. I always bake bread on Sundays, but we often run out, and when that happens I supplement our starch supply with biscuits - made from Kroger baking mix - or cornbread, made from scratch using the recipe in the More With Less Cookbook. Now, however, I have tried the Jiffy mix and I will never go back. It's just 37 cents a box, and all it takes is an egg and 1/3 of a cup of milk! You can have warm corn muffins for tea whenever you want! Revelation!

And oh, man, ORANGE JUICE! This is the first time we've had orange juice, all frozen and condensed - brought me back to my childhood. Good stuff! I've been getting a little crazy with the groceries lately - I bought all this name-brand stuff: Triscuits, Honeymaid Graham crackers (they're SO much better than the store-brand though), Minute Maid orange juice, Kraft cheese. I really need to cut back a bit - next week, no fancy stuff! Maybe name-brand raisins, but that's it!

On Friday I did a shift at the soup kitchen and they actually let me do stuff! I got to chop up a million eggplants (and then that night I went home and made eggplant parmesan, yum) and make salads! Eric, the guy in charge, pointed me in the direction of some bags of wilted lettuce and said he didn't like to stifle people's creativity, so just have at. There's a limit to what you can accomplish with wilted iceberg lettuce and carrot sticks, but I had fun. TWO shifts next week because I'm on Spring Break, and I'm totally looking forward to them.