The last of the Christmas cards were sent on Monday - the deep freeze has made it hard to leave the house. On Monday I waited 20 minutes for the bus, then walked to the post office, which was almost a foolish mistake. It's a 10 minute walk, but it was long enough to really feel the cold in my hands. I missed the bus on the way back, but fortunately the wind was in another direction by then. Brrrr!

With craft sales almost overwith, it's fun to cook again. It's also fun to have food in the house - until yesterday we were pretty much down to Coke Zero and coleslaw in the fridge! Last night we had another recipe from the Mennonite Christian Home Cookbook. One of my Mission 101 goals is to make five recipes from this book, and this was #3.

This cookbook is a particular challenge because it was published over 40 years ago and some of the ingredient sizes have changed. It also has no pictures and little instruction. With most recipes you can guess how they'll turn out even without the help of food stylists, but these are real chin scratchers. Mixing mushroom soup, tomato soup, cream cheese and crackers together is not something you'll find in the average cookbook. It's also unintentionally funny - there are three recipes for ham loaf, but only one is called Delicious Ham Loaf. There are five recipes for chop suey, but one is subtitled "The real Chinese way" :-)

So it was with great intrigue that I combined celery, cheese, mushroom soup, chicken broth, crushed crackers and chicken in the casserole dish. I crossed my fingers that an hour later it would come out tasty; after many trips to the Country Cousins restaurant out in Linden I had great faith that there is no such thing as a bad tasting Mennonite meal.

But I had second thoughts as I dished out the casserole. To be honest, it looked like barf on a plate. The diced cheese had melted and was suspended in little globs in the mushroom soup while the celery bobbed up here and there. My husband looked down at his plate and I recognized that look of fear and disappointment from the orzo loaf disaster years ago. He didn't say anything but politely dug in. To our complete surprise, it was amazingly delicious! I don't know how, I don't know why, but it just was. That's the magic of Mennonite cooking, I suppose! I could see substituting pork chops next time.

( And the recipe... )

If cryogenics became a real, affordable option (i.e., if you could freeze your body until aging and illnesses were better understood), would you consider it?

I'd have to say no, because the future is not always what it's cracked up to be. There was an excellent issue of Transmetropolitan that explored what happened to people who were frozen - they suffered from a sort of future shock and ended up in homeless shelters because the future had no reverance for the past, only a contractual obligation to fulfill.

If so, do you fear you'd miss out on the wisdom that comes with growing old and dying?

This is the illogical part of the question, because all living organisms grow old and die; cryogenics just time-shifts it (in theory).