I’m glad that the few top pizza companies in our area are having a pizza war. Calling the pizza man to deliver a pizza used to be a fast and affordable meal, but those days have long gone by the way side. Besides the cost of the pizza, there is a delivery charge, along with tax and of course you must tip the driver as well and I’d consider myself a good tipper. That all adds up, but if that what it takes to get a pizza delivered you do what you gotta do.

I have been a fan of Domino’s thin crust pizza most of my life. The more cheese and pepperoni that is piled on it the better. Since the prices are being cut, due to the competition I can afford to order it more often! I was listening to the radio the other afternoon and they were talking about how pizza deliveries are always on the rise when the lousy it wet and cold outside. I wonder why that is. Is it because we are so mean that we enjoy making a delivery person suffer in the nasty weather and then only give him the coins in change? I sure hope that isn’t the case. What a horrible thought.

One of my favorite Christmas presents that I received last Christmas was a nice set of wine glasses, along with a few bottles of my favorite wine. The problem is that I don’t have a stemware rack to display these wonderful looking glasses. The bottles of wine have long ago been emptied but of course I still have the glasses. I was told about a good web site that has a great selection of wine glass racks.  This website of glassstemwareracks.com guarantees the lowest prices possible for glass racks, they constantly check the Internet to make sure that they do have the lowest prices, if you find any that are lower they urge you to contact one of their customer service representatives, which I think is pretty cool.

So over the weekend I spent some time looking to see what they had to offer.  My goodness they have some very nice looking racks for sale and their prices are very low, I’m glad to see. I’m really interested in their hanging glass rack that I’ve placed a photo of below; it’s made of hammered steel and gives me a place to store the wine bottles and a few other items as well. Right now it is on sale for just a little over $200 and I’m glad to see that they accept PayPal.

Hammered Steel Hanging Wine & Stemware Racks

The plan is to spend the night at my parents place on Christmas Eve as so many friends and relatives aren’t available to come to the actual family Christmas dinner as I don’t want to miss seeing any one of them, if at all possible. People have picked up and moved all over the country, it would take a miracle to get everyone together all at the same place at the same time. So we do what we can, when we can and at least some are making an effort by at least stopping by on Christmas Eve.

Glazed Burnished Cherry Door Sample

All of the people who all went in together and purchased the rta kitchen cabinets (Ready To Assemble) for our mom are all going to be there on Christmas day and we are all so excited and can’t wait to see her face when she opens up the envelope that contains the gift certificate that I made up on my laptop to present to her that morning. Mom has been so unhappy with her kitchen for so long and we figured this would be a good place as any to start on the remodeling job that she is so deserving of. Lord knows she has spent and will continue to spend a ton of time in there for each and every one of us for all of the family dinners and festivities that demands a good cook, like her.

These past couple of months I have been making a huge effort to eat healthier as much as I am able to. I am now drinking more water and I have cut back on the amount of sugar that I put in my iced tea and Kool Aid that I am constantly sipping on morning, noon and night. You see last time I was at my doctor’s office, she ran the usual battery of blood tests that are done at least once a year and she is concerned with my cholesterol and triglycerides numbers. They have set me up to meet with their Dietician on the 29th and I’m very concerned with what type of foods I will be needing to start eating and worse yet, what type of foods I will not be able to continue eating.

I have never, ever had to watch anything that I eat. I have always been tall and slender and have had to try to gain a few pounds my entire life, to be told that I can’t eat it will be a totally new world for me, sigh……

So at the grocery store last week I spent more time that usual looking at various foods that I know for a fact are going to be good for me to eat, besides the obvious of eating more fruits and vegetables. I’m not really a huge snacker but I do enjoy chocolate and other sweets on occasion and then my favorites are the salty snacks like chips and pretzels and the like that the grocery stores have allowed an attire aisle dedicated to this types of snacking products.

I spotted the new Kellogg’s Special K Cracker Chips that I’ve seen commercials for lately, so I bought the Sour Cream and Onion ones along with a box of the Cheddar Cheese flavored ones. They are “baked snacks” which of course are much better than the traditional fried chips that we all grew up on and have had a love affair with all these years. These chips are pretty bland tasting, but all in all not too bad, knowing that they are better for me helps them taste a wee bit better, but Lay’s Sour Cream and Onion are still my all time favorite, naturally delicious as they are known for saying about their chips.

Special K Sour Cream Onion Cracker Chips

One thing my mother was really good at and loved doing it was to cook. My all time favorite recipe is her cheesy hashbrowns and her spaghetti sauce. It’s too bad that she suddenly found herself to be a single mom of three girls that had to work 2 or 3 jobs at a time, because she never really had the time to teach me, the youngest of the 3 girls, to cook a darned thing. Now my oldest sister can cook up a storm, which is pretty typical to find, they (mom and dad) had plenty of time to spend with her while she was the one and only. But then came the 2nd baby girl and then by the time I came around, 6 years later, they had divorced so valuable time and money became a huge issue for everyone involved.

Don’t get me wrong I eventually figured out that I can cook, I just learned later in life then most people and mainly by trial and error and with a little help from my friends and my sisters. We (my sisters and I) are now in the process of trying to collect favorite recipes from a large variety of female relatives that we can put together and hopefully handout/present to all the relatives at the next family reunion that is scheduled to be hosted by my folks in 2013. That’s going to be a big deal and a lot of hard work, but should be fun when it’s all said and done. And a nicely put together “family cookbook” to have available at the reunion would be good timing. A nice memento from the occasion, one that would be not only appreciated but useful and could be passed done as well. I can’t wait to see the finished product.