Peanut Butter

I dashed into Publix today for a couple essentials, one of which was peanut butter. They took a sabbatical on making their own peanut butter (INGREDIENTS: FRESH GROUND ROASTED PEANUTS. THE END.) but they're back on track now and I'm glad. I'm so used to it that when I have regular peanut butter, it tastes way too salty. (Right. Unlike potato chips, which can never be too salty for me.)

At the checkout line, I had to take notes, so I wrote on the peanut butter label with the aforementioned Swiss Army Pen. Publix has festive gift boxes hanging above the checkout lanes with one word on each box:

• encourage
• share
• hope
• warmth

It makes me nuts, of course, since we have three verbs and one noun. It's true that hope could be a noun, too, but that still leaves us with two verbs and two nouns. Either way, I don't like the inconsistency. If we went for the all-noun line-up, it would still be awkward:

• [have] encouragement
• [have] sharing
• [have] hope
• [have] warmth

The gerund sharing throws it off, but it's still better than the all-verb format:

• [to] encourage
• [to] share
• [to] hope
• [to] heat

Or should it be [to] heat up? [to] warm up? Plus, they mean the warm-the-cockles-of-your-heart type of heat, anyhow, not the toss-it-in-the-microwave kind. Maybe [to] comfort. So the copywriter just threw in the towel with the poinsettias printed on it and said no one would notice anyhow, and no one at Publix corporate headquarters did ...

And speaking of consistency, Lee and I went to The Water Witch for breakfast this morning. He, as always, had #10. I, always, had #7.

I wanted to leave the breakfast description right there, and let you do the research, but The Water Witch online menu isn't the same as the on-table menu, so I'll describe them after all.

Both are the organic German Pfannkuchen. I don't know whether to add an S to Pfannkuchen, nor am I certain about that upper-case P. I think the Germans tend towards capitalization, though, so I'll stick with that. Near as I can tell, the poor things are just crepes anyhow.

Lee had salmon and horseradish cream cheese in his. Mine had apples, raisins, cinnamon, and ricotta. Oh my! And then the cook made the horrible mistake of tossing in whole walnut halves (if that's not an oxymoron), so the waitress had to come out and see if that's acceptable. Oh yeah!

It was so good. There's nothing like warm cinnamon this time of year, especially when it's so cold and gloomy outside, something we folks in The Sunshine State aren't used to, no matter what you in Indiana (and you know who you are) have to say about it.

Thank goddess we don't have to choose our fragrances. As we left The Water Witch, we smelled bacon, which is pretty unbeatable. But back to the cinnamon -- what's above that? On the other hand, Andrea -- bless her twenty times over! -- gave me a couple mini-boughs of balsam which her mom had sent from the Adirondacks, mostly in the form of decorated wreaths. Oh man! I'm afraid I'm going to snort a pine needle right into my lungs, but that doesn't stop me from picking one up from my desk here and just breathing in the smell, deep deep deep. The other little branch is on my nightstand.

So yes: no competition for smells. Yay!

Those Pfannkuchen are so big that I brought half of mine home. I also have half the prime rib from last night's dinner at The Pasadena Steak House with The Mahons. Later today, when I've finished huddling under the covers reading the last of Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed, I hope to comfort the Pfannkuchen and the prime rib, but I won't share them; I encourage you to get your own.