Food From Trays

Full disclosure upfront:  I am going to be both unfair and hypocritical today...

Kroger has "Free Friday Downloads" which are online coupons that can be downloaded to get one specific free item.  The free items cover the range of groceries available at Kroger, being anything from candy bars on up.  I used to think these were designed to get shoppers to hunt for them, thereby forcing shoppers to walk through and look in more aisles of the store, but the Free Friday items are now always located near the front of the store, so the intent must be to drive web traffic towards Kroger.
One of my Rules for Life is:  Just because something is free, doesn't mean you want it.  Following this, some Free Friday items (gum), I don't bother with, while others are a risk free way to try something I wouldn't otherwise buy.

A few weeks ago, Stouffer's FitKitchen was the free item.  It promised, "Hearty Satisfying Meals."  Sadly, it wasn't, but at least the cost to me was about commensurate with the product.

The beans were rubbery.  The chicken was even more rubbery, and the sauce can best be described as odd.  The sweat potatoes were tolerably good.  Here is the part where I'm being hypocritical.  Some of my other weekday meals could be considered on par with Stouffer's FitKitchen.  I actually like frozen chicken wings.  Frozen pizza (with toppings added) are nearly a staple.  But the FitKitchen, frankly, reminded me of the 1970's TV dinners we occasionally ate as a child.
I would hope that either my memory of TV dinners is clouded and that 1970's culinary adventure was actually worse than I remember it, or by 2016 ready to eat meals could have advanced.  I suppose the one thing that the 1970's TV dinners had going from them was the lack of microwave ovens.  Coming in a plastic tray, Stouffer's FitKitchen has only the microwave as a cooking option.  Thinking back, I can't imagine how bad the 1970's TV dinners would have been if microwaves had been nearly universally available then.  To this day, I think I dislike peas just due to the memory of TV dinners.

There must exist a world, somewhere, between Chris Kimball's fantasy land and the TV dinner where most of us live.  Yes, some of America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country foods are touted as simple.  But having both time and energy to go the Kimball route on a daily basis is a delusion.  Staying in the PBS world, I once saw Caprial admit going to McDon... on occasion with the kids - this was refreshing, but that show has become unwatchable now that they have some truly bizarre onscreen husband-and-wife dynamics.
America's Test Kitchen plays its watchers disingenuously.  When not wearing a costume, Chris Kimball likes to start the show with the absolute worst example of a dish, and then improve on it - thus setting the bar impossibly low for success.  He also claims to have a "very small kitchen," and yet Cook's Country is reportedly filmed at his farm in Vermont.  By that standard, my kitchen is a thimble.  

Walking through Kroger yesterday, I paused by the frozen dinner section.  "TV Dinners" designed for oven cooking still exist.  Many of these are now in paper or plastic trays which is a little frightening, but I guess it works OK.  So maybe the unhappiness with the Stouffer's FitKitchen should be against the cooking method, not the cuisine?  Either way, the frozen meals were left in the freezer - available for the next shopper who wants to eat over 1 pound of food.

I actually think much of the food I grew up on would be pretty unpalatable by today's standards, or by my standards today.  But TV dinners, something special when I was young, don't seem to have improved much since then.  Perhaps the real issue lies in the fact I've been eating them wrong all along.  After all, TV dinners were created to be eaten off of steel TV trays, sitting on the sofa, while in front of the TV, with shag carpeting underfoot.  Shudder.

Office Detritus: The Things We Leave Behind

This can be a brutal time of the year accompanied by major funk brought on by cold winter days, the monotonous cycle of work-eat-sleep-repeat and little good to look forward to.
This funk may grow again this year, but I am hopeful it won't as I have three things going for me.
First, winter hasn't been too heinously bad.  This weekend is cold on a nearly intolerable level, but we've had a couple really nice weekends recently allowing bicycle riding and even some grilling.
Second, I have a trip coming up.  Not only does this give me something to look forward to, but the thinking and planning (an integrally fun part of the trip) allows for something to break up the monotony.
Third, I am in transition to a new job at work.  While I won't get too jazzed up about work, the change allows for some corporate repletion, even if it ends up being bleakly short.
This transition just sort of happened.  At first I wasn't too sure about it, but now that I'm two weeks into a five month transition, I'm realizing that I'm quite ready for new problems.

My work transition has me working out of two offices, or rather, my old office and new cubicle (damn, it feels good to be a gangsta).  As I sat in my new cubicle on one of my first days in the new job, I opened all my desk drawers.  As usual, the previous denizen had done a reasonably good job of cleaning it out, but there was still some flotsam and jetsam.
The previous occupant must have been very paper oriented as there was no shortage of folders and folder tabs.  These will end up in the shred barrel soon enough, but there were much more interesting things:

• Five pairs of scissors.  Why did "Rod" have a need for not one, two or even four pairs of scissors, but five?  I can only hope that they are remnants of past employment civilizations.  I'll keep one of these and the rest will be discarded.
• Two telephone headsets.  Why did "Rod" need not one, but two telephone headsets?  This is a standard office cubicle where talking on the phone with any degree of decorum is difficult, so one phone is a stretch.  Two headsets looks like a problem.  Reusing these feels almost as gross as rewearing someone else's pants, and they'll likely end up in the landfill (sorry future generations).
• Six opened boxes of staples.  I'm quite sure all the staples that the world will ever need have already been manufactured.  Every work location I've every moved into has at least a partial box or two of staples.  But six?  I guess I'll keep these, future archaeologists will assume these are some type of office idolatry and I must be in a very sacred place.  Oddly, there was no stapler.
• A vast assortment of pens and highlighters.  I kept a couple felt tip pens and sharpies.  I have no affection for highlighters and am partial to gel ink pens.  "Off with their heads!" says the Red Queen to the rest of the writing paraphernalia.
• A powered USB port.  I've never needed one of these at work, but I guess I could someday.  I'll stick it in the drawer likely to be discarded later in office life.
• Various other sundries:  pennies (keep), paper clips (in the stables camp), toothpicks (um, really gross), rubber bands (keep, but discard when they start to deteriorate), screws taped together (cubicle must be missing some critical hardware somewhere), and other things that I, frankly, have no idea what they are...
• The most curious thing though has to be this Plantronics device.  I'm really not sure what it is, but I strongly suspect it has been supplanted by cell phones long, long ago.  My suspicion is that since this was probably really expensive initially, "Rod" must have been unable to appropriately discard it when he left the cubicle even though it now has negative residual value.  Curiously, I have not thrown this away either, yet...

I shouldn't and won't beat up "Rod" too much.  I've never met the guy and probably never will.  But I also know that once my job transition is complete and it comes time to vacate my old office, I will probably leave a few parting gifts to a future generation of subterranean office dwellers.  

I guess the only question will be:  What do I do with my partial boxes of staples; do I begin breaking the generational cycle of office detritus?