(no subject)

[miko2]

Last night out of curiosity I checked out a Farmer's Market/Dollar Store on Auburn Way South of downtown that I'd noticed last Saturday while driving to B's Christmas party. As a "Dollar Store" it mostly failed -- some things were a dollar, but most things were more than that. As a very cheap grocery store, however, it did pretty well. It seems to double as a Mexican grocery store with a lot of stuff geared to Mexican shoppers (they had stacks and stacks and stacks of tortillas -- giant bottles of Tapatio sauce that must have been 1.5 liters at least -- Seguro cactus roots and leaves (fronds?) in the produce section.

A lot of stuff was the kind of stuff you'd see in a dollar store though -- cheap brands, stuff that was past the sell date. I bought two Hershey bars for $1.29 each.. these were the gourmet dark chocolate bars with macadamia nuts, cranberries, blueberries etc. in them. The sell by date was June 2008, so I know they're a little old, but the price was right. ^_^

My plan for the office Christmas party on Friday is to try and make tabouleh. I had printed out a recipe but left it in the car... but I decided to pick up some of the ingredients. I grabbed some roma tomatoes, green onions, a cucumber, fresh mint and fresh cilantro (.33 cents for a bunch -- much cheaper than Fred Meyers and I don't even want to think what Top Foods would have charged me for that).

Of course, I need bulgher to make it, but I also needed lunches for the next two days... and it turns out that the recipe calls for parsley but not cilantro. Well, I love cilantro so I decided to make some brown rice tabouleh-style salad. I cooked the rice, added olive oil, lemon, some red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, chopped cilantro, tomatoes, green onion and cucumber. I cooked two lime cilantro chicken breasts (they'd been in the freezer a while, but still not bad) in my George Foreman grill, and I had two lunches ready for work. It tasted pretty good. ^_^

I didn't get very much writing done yesterday. I did exercise though. I was tired from lack of sleep and I felt kind of blah in the afternoon, which I attribute to to the lack of sleep, eating far too much crackers and cheese log (that was set out near my desk) and maybe having a slight cold (it's hard to tell -- but my throat feels just a little raw). As of now and for the rest of the week, I'm setting aside my attempts to work on Girl's School and am trying to work on a Christmas story instead. It's short so in theory if I write one to two thousand words a night I could have it finished for the writer's night Christmas party on Saturday.