December 23, 2004

• Mochi

  Mid-November through December always finds me depressed. Today was a particularly bad day. I braved Walmart, which I normally avoid anyway, because I needed to have a key copied. Well, I strongly wanted to have the key copied.

  All of the handicapped spaces were taken. I drove around to the side of the store, to the garden entrance. The three handicapped spaces there were also taken, as were most of the spaces near the garden entrance.

  The store wasn't just full of people, it was full of bloated women desperately hauling around herds of screaming kids, all apparently under ten years of age, each herd numbering from three to six monsters, each attempt at control as ineffectual as herding cats. Thoughts of violence began to trickle through my mind as I tried to pick my way through the clots and clusters of disturbed humanity-to-be.

  They didn't have the blanks for the kind of key I needed to have copied.

  I shouldn't eat when upset, but I had promised myself lunch at the local Gorge-A-Matic / Family Fatness / eat-all-you-can-stand buffet, Hometown Buffet. I got there at 15:15, shortly before they changed from the lunch to the dinner menu, but I didn't time it that way on purpose. It was still lunch to me even if they added roast beef and turkey to the menu at 15:30.

  I knew I was unusually upset when my soup vanished so quickly. I made a determined effort to eat my salad slowly and calmly. I started to succeed. But as I finished the salad, I tasted the coffee. I almost choked. The stuff was pure garbage. It must have been sitting in the pot for hours.

  My resolve shaken, I set the coffee aside and got a soda instead, a root beer. Then I got some orange chicken, a few fried shrimp, a piece of baked chicken breast and a slice of turkey. Well, I thought it was turkey. It was the first slice off of the bird and was mostly fat covered with a little skin. There was very little meat. It was no problem, of course, since I could always just get more. I never did bother with the roast beef, even though it was very popular and looked very good, but I did repeat on the shrimp.

  The primary reason for my excursion was that we had run out of eggs. Delia and Cathy each eat two eggs for breakfast most mornings. They work. Egglessness is not to be tolerated. In addition, Cathy has started taking sandwiches to work with her and had gone through our supply of bread and sliced cheese. And Delia wanted green beans to fix for Christmas dinner. In addition, I found a DVD of "Chicago" at reduced price and added it to the cart.

  On my way out of Costco, an obnoxious woman rushed past me, jammed her baby stroller in front of my cart and leaned over my cart to tell the guy checking the carts that she wanted somebody to take her husband's cart out to the handicapped area. The guy was confused for a moment, thinking she meant me, a possibility I vehemently denied. I didn't discover until later that during this brief encounter, "Chicago" had taken leave of my cart. I didn't discover its absence until I unpacked the bags of goods at home and found it wasn't there.

  The woman blocking my way with her ridiculous request and her baby had already upset me. My next errand, seeking goat milk at Trader Joe's, also proved fruitless. The goats haven't been putting out lately, they say. But I did notice a new flavor of mochi, one I haven't tried before: mango.

  Mochi is an ice cream ball, a small scoop of ice cream with a skin made from rice flour. The skin is rubbery and powdered with flour, so you can pick up a mochi with your fingers, take a bite out or suck its guts out. It comes in a variety of flavors. The three I got this evening, to help me feel better, were green tea, chocolate chocolate and mango.

  I won't try to describe the green tea mochi. If you've never had green tea ice cream, rush out and get some. The chocolate chocolate is a dark milk chocolate with bits of really dark chocolate inside. The mango tasted just like mangoes in cream. Delia and I agreed that mango was the best flavor of the three.

  Each package contained six mochi, so each of us got two mochi of each flavor.

  • 02:35
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