Photo Essay: Sunday Dinner for Eight.

I woke up from my nap at 2 this afternoon, fully refreshed and dreading the long Sabbath afternoon and evening. So I decided what the hey, I'll cook up something from the pantry, post an invitation on the ward Facebook page, and see how many customers I get here at Valley Villas Senior Housing. Turns out I fed eight people, at 5pm (MST), and had just a tad of soup left over along with about a third of my fruit cobbler. I threw away the soup and put some foil over the cobbler to stick in the fridge.

I cleaned out the pantry and threw it all in my biggest stew pot. For the purposes of Facebook I called it Vegetable Beef Soup. Here is a break down of all the ingredients.
1 can of government bully beef; 1 can of corn; 1 can of peas; 1 can of black beans; 1 can of sauerkraut; a squirt of ketchup and yellow mustard; a long squeeze of fish sauce; a dash of cheap rice cooking wine, the kind that works as paint thinner, too; a tablespoon of dill pickle relish; a third of a jar of Branston Pickle; the tail end of a small jar of capers, with the brine; 4 beef bouillon cubes; 4 bay leaves; a pinch of thyme and rosemary; and some wilted stalks of parsley that by rights should have been thrown out, but instead I put 'em in the blender with tap water and then poured the green goop into the soup. 

Ingredients for the cobbler included

four cans of pears, some raisins and some

elderly rock hard dates. I plastered

oatmeal mixed with brown sugar,

 butter and lard over the top and

baked it in a 350 oven for an hour.

Boy oh boy, how my arthritic hands love

 those pull lids!

Lordy, how I hate doing the dishes

after getting everything on the stove

and in the oven!

And I bet I take out more trash than

anyone else in the entire building.

Everything's loaded on the cart, including crackers --

so it's Go Time!

"Come and get it or I'll throw it out!"

Conversation around the groaning board

centered on Fast & Testimony Meeting, in

which a man with a strong French accent

apparently went on and on and on, until

the Bishop went red in the face with embarrassment.

There was also some lively debate about a news story

of a man who found a McDonald's hamburger from 

1999 still in its original wrapper in an old

coat pocket -- and it appeared ready to eat.

I've thought of asking this woman out on a date

several times -- but she likes to put crackers

in her hoodie pockets.