It is Sunday, December 6 and there are only 19 days until Christmas.  Get that butter softened and those cookies in the oven!  Today we remember the birthdays of Orazio Tiberio Vecchi, Paul Friedrich Struck and Steven Wright.  On this day in 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered Haiti, in 1768 the first edition of the “Encyclopedia Brittanica” was published and in 1971 Lewis Franklin Powell was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.

First let me say that I have not forgotten about giving you the lowdown on all the foolishness we went through trying to sell our house.  I just have not gotten the word on whether or not the new owners have gotten the final CO yet.  I will check and let you all know.

Next let me say that I am sick of turkey for a while.  I have had the main meal on Thanksgiving, leftovers, turkey soup made from the carcass, turkey sandwiches and turkey casserole.  ENOUGH!  Don’t misunderstand.  I enjoy turkey and look forward to having it every November.  But you can overdo a good thing.  Every year we all (that is a general we, not specific to my family) sit and enjoy the meal and then ask, “This is such a great meal.  Why do we only have it once a year?”

There are a couple reasons.  One is like I mentioned last week.  It takes a lot of effort to prepare a meal that is finished in 30 minutes.  The other is that we end up eating the leftovers for days after and become tired of turkey.  When we can no longer stand it, we toss out what is left and vow not to eat turkey again for at least a year.  It is like all the other traditional meals we have for holidays.  They are a great idea as the holiday approaches, but a pile of stuff in containers in the refrigerator that are starting to smell and that no one wants any more of after the big day.

I keep telling the lovely Elaine that we should get take-out containers and send the stuff home with everyone like goodie bags.  She gives me the look, but each year I think she is getting closer to considering it.  I think what we should do is not eat it as leftovers.  Instead we should freeze the stuff and break it out in February when we are sitting around wondering what we should have for dinner and the snow is too deep to run to the store for something or to go pick up a pizza somewhere.  

One of the things that I think would be handy would be to buy one of those food saver vacuum things.  They sell all different types and models and I think they are a good idea.  These things allow you to take food, vacuum all the air out and save it in the freezer for months.  This would be a good deal for the turkey I mentioned earlier.  One of the benefits is that the food would be usable in a couple months.  Not like what we do now.

Our current practice is to take the food and put it into those freezer storage bags.  We go through a variety of maneuvers to try and get all the air out before sealing the bag.  For the most part they do not work completely.  As a result, a month or so down the road, we are trying to decide what our menu will be for the next few days.  The lovely Elaine asks me what we have in the freezer.  I look and see that we have a lump of frost covered meat that the information written on the bag claims is chicken, another frost lump that is pork and yet another that we forgot to label and have no idea what it is.  The one thing they have in common is that they all end up in the garbage.

The benefit to the food saver device is that we would be able to actually use some of the stuff we have frozen.  It would also mean that we were throwing less meat away, leaving room in the garbage for the containers of vegetables that we put in the refrigerator, which end up being pushed to the back where we can forget about them until they become a science project, and begin to make the refrigerator smell.

As a side note, I am not positive that the commas belong where I put them, but I inserted them to allow you to breathe while reading that last sentence.

Back to the subject of food saving, we had a vacuum food machine some time back.  It was a small battery operated, hand-held device that worked with special bags.  It was a very simple operation.  You put the food in a special zip lock bag and closed it up.  The bag had an opening that you placed the device over.  When you turned it on, it pulled the air out of the bag, the hole sealed itself and your food was saved.  We had it for a couple months and every time we used it we marveled at how great it was.  It was not that big and fit in our cabinet.  The bags came in a box and were easy to store.

There was only one problem with the whole thing – they stopped making the bags and we could no longer get them.  If we decide to buy one of these new devices, I just hope they continue to make the bags for a few years.  I would hate to go to the trouble of buying one, finding a place to keep it and then have to get rid of it because they don’t sell supplies for it anymore.

This week we have two facts that are connected – 1) tells us that most brands of lipstick are tinted with extract from the cochineal insect and 2) tells us that most lipstick contains fish scales.  And the lovely Elaine wonders why I get so upset when she gets lipstick on my coffee cup when she takes a sip of my Starbucks.  It is quite simple, insect juice and fish scales do not go well with coffee.