I Will Always Check The Boxes Now and Gross Food

Yesterday morning I went up to the nearby Walmart Neighborhood Market to get some groceries and the usual cat food. The Neighborhood Market is actually not a bad place to shop, it's not fancy and all clean looking like Vons or Albertsons but the prices are not Vons or Albertsons either. It's Walmart but without the packed parking lot like the Super Walmart. The Neighborhood Market is in a new shopping center with only a couple of other open businesses so for now the parking lot is practically empty and you can park right by the door.

I get my groceries, including a box of assorted cans of Friskies cat food, figuring it's easier to just grab a box than a bunch of cans that all need to be picked back up out of the shopping cart and onto the conveyor belt. One box versus 20 cans and also a bag or two is saved in not having to bag the big box of food.

I get to the checkout and there is a man in front of me and I smell something not so pleasant and I'm wondering if it's me or the man that stinks. I thought I had put on clean clothes that morning but was in a hurry to take Keith to work so I could have the car and don't think I remembered deodorant, but we are in Walmart which sometimes takes on a stink all it's own so who knows where the smell is coming from.

I get everything into the car and then realize that the car stinks, too, so maybe it is me and maybe I should change my clothes and put on that deodorant when I get home.

Then, as I'm getting things out of the car, I find that the box of cat food cans is wet on the bottom and maybe the conveyer belt had something wet on it or something has leaked onto the box. Then, as I'm carrying the box into the house I get an even stronger whiff of something really nasty and something is dripping out of the box of cat food. Okay, so one of the cans must have come open inside the box and now it smells like rotting meat (gag) and it's really bad and now I've got to dump out all of the cans into the sink and find the open one and wash all the rest off.

It was truly disgusting and while the box didn't look like it had suffered any damage, half of the cans inside were all dented and yes, one open one that had apparently been open for quite a while. Just my luck to get that particular box and I certainly won't be buying any boxes of canned cat food at Walmart again without checking it over real well first. Or just buy the single cans. Rotting cat food is not a good smell.

Later in the day I went over to the used book store to look for cookbooks, once again trying to come up with easy but tasty meals to cook, and I got a couple of old Taste of Home magazines. I found this recipe inside one of them.

Yum yum yum, some creamed grouse! On toast! Okay, I know that grouse is a game bird and as such probably tastes like chicken, but the name grouse just does not sound very appetizing to me. It's actually a very pretty bird as you can see in this picture I found and since I like chicken I don't see why I wouldn't eat a grouse except for the name.

And speaking of cooking and cookbooks, while perusing recipes online the other day I found a bunch for what they call dump cooking, specifically for chicken. Basically, you dump the chicken into a bag along with some sauce and then you freeze the bag for future baking. I tried one recipe last night for cranberry chicken which sounded really good because I like sweet foods and I like cranberry sauce, but...no it was not good and I'm so glad I didn't package a bunch of bags of it up for the freezer.

The recipe is chicken breasts with a sauce made from a can of cranberry sauce, a bottle of Catalina salad dressing and a packet of onion soup mix and then you just bake it all, basting with the sauce occasionally. I'm sorry, though, but onion soup mix and catalina dressing and cranberry sauce DO NOT taste good all mixed together, plus it turns the chicken breasts pink. Not good at all and now I'm very hesitant to try any of the other dump chicken recipes that I found.