I’m Me-elting!

Said, of course, in a Wicked Witch of the West voice (cue the jokes about how I don’t properly pronounce my Bs).

This post is masquerading as a Mid-week Middle-aged Musings, but I’m afraid it is just an excuse to complain about how hot I am. How boring is that going to be? Probably pretty damn, as I wrote the preceding and can’t think of one other thing to say.

Last night I tried to fix a warm weather dinner. I had some fake crab meat so made some cocktail sauce to go with it — heavy on the horseradish. I love horseradish. That didn’t look like much, so I decided to make a salad.

First I chopped up a zucchini. Actually, I think you could call it dicing, because the pieces were fairly small. How small makes a dice? Smaller than the size of the dice you shoot craps with (not that I ever shot craps, but I was in a production of Guys & Dolls in high school). Maybe I’ll remember to look it up before I post this.

(NOTE: Steven’s dictionary only says small cubes, not how small. I am far too lazy to walk downstairs and check with Joy of Cooking. Let’s just assume it was diced.)

Where was I? Oh yes, taking a long time to chop — uh, dice the zucchini. Then I chopped an avocado and a couple of tomatoes. Finely diced some red onion (not a whole red onion; red onions are BIG) (I’m quite sure these were small enough to count as diced) and added a jar of artichoke hearts with marinade. I saw that there was plenty enough marinade to count as dressing so I stopped there.

I should perhaps mention that I was not cooking with wine but with ice water. I must fight dehydration in this weather. Um, to clarify, I drank the ice water while I cooked; I did not add ice water to the salad. To be honest, I almost never add wine to the food even when I do cook with wine. But perhaps that’s a subject for a different blog post.

So I was pretty pleased with my warm weather dinner. The only hot things were the horseradish and Tabasco in the cocktail sauce. And, of course, the cook, but you knew that already (see the second paragraph). It was nice and light, too. Excellent fare for somebody (me) who has to watch her waistline. I have no idea why I was up two more pounds when I stepped on the scale this morning.

But it’s too hot to worry about these things. And for any of you readers who may be gearing up to say something like, “You think YOU’VE got it hot!” or “At least you aren’t getting these terrible storms,” or “The reason you are up two pounds is that…” well, no doubt you are right. It is certainly too hot to argue about it.