Love and Cooking

I haven't been cooking a lot this past week. I had a lot of supplies at the beginning of the week - the Cursed White Bean Soup, frozen sausage and English muffins for breakfast, and meat and veggies from Trader Joe's. In the middle of the week, I came down with a cold, which means that my diet was tea, toast, scrambled eggs, hot and sour soup (usually I make my own, but I got it take out), and chicken potstickers (from the Chinese take-out, or frozen from TJ's).

In the middle of which cold, my beloved cat died fairly suddenly of congestive heart failure. (First symptom: she started wheezing a bit and spitting up her food.) The crying certainly did not help my throat.

So I'm still surviving on the above, and was glad I picked up not one but two rotisserie chickens when I was at the Bowl. I was well enough to go to the knife skills class recommended by my pal Biggles and learn a Couple of Things (like, I don't know how to rock a knife). I will be thinking of Maya as I feed the kitten the scraps off the chicken carcass. She was always Very Interested when I opened a tuna can or had a chicken around.

The next Mourning Maya task will be to clear all the partially-eaten jars of baby food chicken out of the fridge and start with a new supply for kitten training (rewards for scratching on the post, not on the furniture). I will, of course, have a wake for my faithful and beloved companion, and I'm working out what to serve (salmon, a favorite of human and cat, is an early favorite in the running).

Re food blogging, I wish I'd gotten a pic of Maya with her "milk mustache" when I gave her the yogurt after the last time she got out of the vet's. Imagine this cat as a "Got Milk?" poster:



I probably have a metric boatload of film pics of Maya looking oh-so-cute against the green kitchen floor, but not all that much in the digital line. (Long term project: sort out all my film.) But here is one of Maya and Maggie reaching an early truce (it was taken in January, shortly after Maggie joined the household) at the food dish: