“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 952 (Tuesday) – betty quaker

Over the weekend, the ghost of Betty Quaker visited the BungaLowell and was welcomed with open arms. Betty Quaker is the name my sister and I came up as kids with while joking that Betty Crocker and the Quaker Oats guy should get married. We called each other Betty Quaker while making brownies and whatever else in the kitchen of our youth, and then we would laugh hysterically. 

Hot on the steam of the baked sweet potato – apple – sausage thing, Betty Quaker engaged in a pantry raid. The first instinct for a follow-up bake was macaroni and cheese, but things got all crazy up in the kitchen and some improvisational cooking happened.

Instead of mac and cheese, the idea morphed into baked gnocchi with grated cheese of various cheesy flavors. It was pretty good and will likely be made again. 

Hooray for Betty Quaker.

There are now several perfect portion sized containers in the freezer containing the sweet potato stuff and the gnocchi, expanding the microwavable fast lunch and supper options. Today’s supper was a bit of each, supplemented by stuffed grape leaves from Market Basket. 

I used to buy the stuffed grape leaves from MB all the time pre-pandemic, but hadn’t had much luck finding them recently until one of last week’s several “my hobby is now grocery shopping” stops. And now the grape leave obsession can begin anew. There was a stretch when I ate them regularly until I overdid it and just couldn’t eat any more. Luckily, it seems I’ve recovered. Other food overdoses haven't had a miraculous recovery.

There was a situation involving a solid white chocolate cross on Easter when I was maybe eight or nine years old. Because I loved it, the Easter Bunny brought me white chocolate while my brother and sister received milk chocolate bunnies. It turned out that eating the entire ten-ton hunk of white chocolate before church was a great way to be cured of a love of white chocolate. Sometimes, too much of a good thing really is just too much.

A more extreme situation occurred with the chopped liver overdose of the mid 1980s. We never had to eat liver growing up because Mom hated it, but Mummu liked it, so I had it at her house. Decades later, I was introduced to chopped liver while visiting the in-laws. After I had a speck of it on a cracker and said I liked it, Ex 1’s mother sent us home from the Bronx with a margarine tub packed with the stuff. After eating it for another day or so, it was like a switch flipped and suddenly, the sight and smell of it was unbearable. 

White chocolate made a mild comeback after many years, but chopped liver can stay in the been there, done that, never going back section of life. Betty Quaker shall make sure to avoid such a fate for stuffed grape leaves.