Tuesday – Normal

Today was a normal day.  I like normal.  In fact, I love normal.  I ate a bowl of normal Grape-Nuts® for breakfast.  (If you were just learning the English language what would you expect Grape-Nuts® to look like if you ordered them blindly from a menu?  I wouldn’t expect Grape-Nuts®.  That’s for sure.)

I went to work like normal.  I enjoyed it like normal.  We ate leftovers for lunch like normal.

We fed the chickens like normal.  Grace and I went jogging like normal.  The dogs chased a cotton-tail rabbit like normal. 

Calvin came home from work like normal, then he went out to the shop to finish working on a bow like he sometimes does while he waited for supper.

Grace and I fixed supper like normal.  We tried our new recipe for the week and it called for something we don’t normally use:  Greek yogurt.  Substitutions are normal in our kitchen.  However, we were trying to be true to the recipe and who knew?  $1.50 for 6 oz. of Greek yogurt just might be the secret ingredient.  The recipe was for healthier-than-normal chicken pot pies.  

Photograph by Kate Mathis

It was very, very good. Here’s the recipe if you’re interested:  Light Chicken Pot Pie. We didn’t follow it exactly.  We tried.  But it just didn’t make sense to bake the potatoes and then cool them when we could quickly boil them instead.  We also took a few other short-cuts, improvised on a few amounts, added green beans instead of peas so that Calvin would eat it, added poultry seasoning instead of fresh thyme, put them in individual ramekins so everybody got a fair share of crisp crust – you know, cooking substitutions that people normally do.  But remember, we did use Greek yogurt.