Stories best kept to yourself

Sometimes, I am just dumb. This is one of those stories that I should just keep to myself, by really - where is the fun in that. This is honestly how my mind works - for better or worse.

I am trying to cook more. It isn't that I like it, or that I especially want to eat it, it is that Ryder insists. Kids can be so demanding.

We butchered a cow, so the freezers are overflowing with beef (227 pounds of hamburger to be exact) and I get SO SICK of hamburger. I cruised around Pinterest and found some chicken recipes for the crock pot and thought I would give some a shot. One (salsa chicken) was such a hit that I decided to be more adventurous. I wrote down my list of required ingredients and headed to town to the grocery store.

I did well on my list; cream of chicken soup, ranch dressing mix, bacon bits (yum), egg noodles (those tripped me up for a minute), sour cream ... then there was a dilemma. Garlic. Hmm I thought. Garlic.

I know I like garlic. I have eaten things that were garlicy before. Just the other night I had garlic mashed potatoes. But where, oh where, in a grocery store would one find garlic ... and in what form would it be once one found it?

Does garlic come in solid or liquid form? Surely if I use my context clues I can figure this out.

You use garlic to keep away vampires. I'm pretty sure you have to make a necklace out of it. You can't make a necklace out of a liquid, unless it is a vial like the kind you would put a drop of blood in - which would attract a vampire so you should never ever do that.

This isn't working. Better check the recipe.

1 teaspoon minced garlic. Now what the hell does that mean. Small pieces? Why can't people just say small pieces if that is what they mean? This recipe calls for diced onions. If diced onions are small pieces of onions, wouldn't small pieces of garlic be diced garlic and not minced? Maybe minced is smaller than diced.

I think back to Christmas past, and I have a memory of mom either buying or receiving something called a garlic press. Well alrighty. If you press garlic, it must be a solid. But if you press it, what comes out? Shouldn't the recipe call for flattened garlic? I make a mental note to send an email to Pinterest when I get home.

I decide the spice aisle is as good a place as any to start my search. What with this being Blanchard, the spice aisle isn't terribly long, but it seems to be ridiculously expensive. I find minced onions (of course I do!) and based on the size of the container, I may have overestimated the size of minced. There is no solid form of garlic of any kind in this aisle. There is garlic powder and garlic salt. I wonder if either of these would work. Perhaps if I add something to them to thicken them up to minced size ... maybe a syrup of some kind. Maple syrup would surely do the trick.

No, no. I best not venture into making my own minced garlic from scratch yet. I head toward the vegetable area, thinking maybe garlic is a vegetable.

I don't really do vegetables, and the vegetable area of anywhere is not a place I spend a lot of time. It isn't that I am opposed, I grew a garden this year, but I like normal vegetables. Vanilla vegetables. There are some funky looking vegetables in that area of a supermarket. I pick up something I assume could be garlic, only to see a sign clarifying that it is a mushroom of some kind. I prefer my mushrooms in a can, and now I have proof of why. That thing was nasty looking. It looked like it should have had an expiration date of 2009, and it smelled like it too. Garlic would have been it's more aromatic cousin. Woof.

I am now basically down to the frozen food and bakery sections of grocery store. I am defeated. I have no idea where to look, and at this point I have been wandering the aisles for so long that I am pretty sure they think I am casing the joint. I am too embarrassed to ask for help (I live in this town, this very, very small town) and my lunch hour is over.

Back at home, I throw a pound of hamburger in the microwave to defrost and secretly hope we are not visited by vampires tonight.