AMoores

Saturday was a beautiful day to be out and about and that is just what we did. We got out of the house earlier than we normally do on weekends. We first stopped at my job because they were having a company yard sale and there was a desk chair I wanted to buy for $10.

Anyway, after that, we drove to Cary in search of bento boxes for a food blog challenge I’m supposed to submit an entry for. First we went to Toyo Shokuhin & Gifts. Since their name says ‘gifts’ I thought they would have a bigger selection of Japanese items, but they didn’t. It was just a small corner of the store that they had the usual kitsch items like tea sets, dishes and the like. They had one bento box, but it was way over priced as is much of the items in the store. Most of the items they had, you can get at other Asian markets at a lower price. Jade did buy a couple of packs of cookies at about $2.79 each and they were very good.

So we went to to look for the other Asian market that I haven’t been to yet, Grand Asia Market. Boy, was it grand! It was crowded! But then, it was Saturday morning and the weather was gorgeous so I guess it was to be expected. The aisles were packed and there were long queues at the seafood section, but it had a festive air to the whole place. It could also be that since it was our first time there and it was all new to us, that it seems festive in its novelty. Maybe it will eventually wear off. lol!
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Twenty-five N.C. school districts were affected by the recent beef recall. This news has been on all the local news broadcasts all week. They has been describing how Wake County, one of the largest school districts in the state stands to lose as much as $100,000 unless they are reimbursed by the supplier. They say that there haven’t been any cases of children getting sick from the recalled meat. They also claim that none of the meat have been served to children. That is a bit hard to believe considering the recalled meat goes as far back to 2006. They probably just do not want to cause panic and undue worry, but I’m sure some of that meat has been cooked up and served.

While my children do not eat school food, they bring their lunches from home, it makes me wonder how much of the recalled beef I’VE served them at home. They never mentioned whether some of this same beef was ever released for public consumption or if they were only used for intitutional use. That is truly worrisome.

Do you know why the beef was recalled? Granted, we do eat dead meat. We prefer it that way. However, we do prefer the animals to be healthy before we slaughter them for food. You don’t have to be a scientist to figure out that when meat is unhealthy or dead (decaying), it can’t be good for you. A California slaughter plant violated this basic premise by serving up cows that are on the verge of death. They are prodded to stand and walk to slaughter just so they can say it was alive when slaughtered. There are even allegations that sick cows were fork lifted to slaughter so long as they were still breathing. This is sad and cruel and an apalling example of greed. That’s the bottom line.

Please help support the work of the investigators who bring these shocking abuses to light by making an emergency contribution to The Humane Society of the United States’ Investigations Fund.

There’s always good news along with bad news it seems. The good news is, I am getting a new stove! Since we moved to N.C., I’ve had an electric stove and I’ve hated it! In ten years time, I’ve eventually learned to work with it but never really grew to love it. I always yearned for the blue flames of a gas stove. Last December the darn electric stove finally conked out. Well, it’s been trying to conk out for a while but it hadn’t coincided with when we could afford to buy a replacement stove. This time around, when we got down to two small eyes working, and enough money to buy another stove, we both had that gleam in our eyes when we said let’s go for it!

Since that decisive date, I’ve had visions of me in front of the gas stove cooking Christmas dinner. That didn’t happen. New Year’s dinner? That didn’t happen either. Here I am going on the tenth day of the New Year and still hadn’t happen. Worse, I don’t even have the crappy electric stove anymore! Yep, no stove. Before they took the old stove away and delivered my shiny new gas stove, I cooked a roast duck and baby back ribs to tide us over for the weekend. You see, they took the crappy stove away last Friday and I was thinking I’d be cooking up a storm on the new stove come Monday. WRONG!!
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Here is my Thanksgiving experiment this year: