February

I'm almost certain I posted a blog less than a week ago, but it's nowhere on the site 😞; an enemy has hidden or destroyed it.

I'm not sure of the original Latin meaning of the name February; I know 'febrile' means feverish, so February might mean 'hot'.  Over here, February is cold and wet, so that theory is probably one for the trash can.

For various reasons I have been losing weight in the past several months, to the point where my friends and relatives are concerned, and encouraging me to eat more.  I like to snack on junk food (an unfortunate new trend), and that causes ordinary people to actually gain weight, which goes to show that I'm special.  My doctor said, yes, I look just a bit skinnier than he would like, but it's way too soon to panic.

Well, the other day, I was visiting my friend, and she made an enormous bowlful of Pasta Salad (I don't know why I capitalized that) which she knew I liked.  It had all the stuff I like to have in it, including the quartered pepperoni slices, slightly roasted (well, microwaved for 15 seconds).  Also, cheese morsels, and lovely colorful rotini, sliced celery, cubed cucumber bits, black olives ... the whole bit.  After it was properly cooled (you have to persuade the salad that it has been cooled; if you eat it warm, it becomes very unhappy) I ate a bowlful.  It was a triumph!  The salad dressing was perfect (Italian, with sun-dried tomato strips), and not too much.  Heaven.  I think whoever invented Pepperoni should be given a culinary Nobel Prize!!  The true calling of pepperoni is pasta salad; I think pizza should be a mere side hustle. 

Despite the wonderful Okayness of the salad, I did notice that the cucumber bits were a little not-ready-for-prime-time, but of course I did not tell my host; after all, the pasta salad was a labor of love.

I stayed over that night, and in the morning, my friend added to the salad some fresh bacon bits!  You might be startled to see the word 'fresh' in the same sentence as 'bacon', but I merely wanted to emphasize that these bacon bits were fried at home; my friend is into bacon in a big way (a bigger way than your standard Boomer), and she fries the heck out of her uncured bacon.  She crumbled all the bacon that she and I between us could not eat, and mixed it into the salad.  Once again, we cooled it, and ate it for an afternoon snack.  OMG, I thought something horrible was going to happen to me, because the pasta salad was so awesome, that I thought we had exceeded the permissible awesomeness for the day, and I assumed there would be a terrible penalty.  The bacon added that tiny bit of extra salt that brought the salad within the realm of culinary holiness.  I felt we ought to embed a little of it in Carbonite, to remember forever the fabulousness of this dish!  (But then, 25 years from now, we would have been frustrated, trying to actually eat it, just to see whether it had held up.)

I went home that evening, to get some fresh stuff to wear (yes, clothes is the word you would normally use, but this is me, you understand) and then came back the next day, and the pasta salad was still there.  Would I like some for breakfast?  Hey, why not?

Here is where things get interesting.  By this time, the cucumber bits had soaked up the dressing, and tasted just perfect.  The pepperoni tasted as wonderful as always.  But the bacon bits had stopped tasting as fantastic as the previous day!  Yes, they tasted vaguely baconish, but not at all the little miracles they had once been.  Let this be a lesson to all of us. 

Kay