THIS N THAT

I am very aware that our Jurupa Valley (the area of rural Riverside County where we live) is not downtown Los Angeles, but that still makes me laugh at certain comparisons. Our daily newspaper today announced the 10th Annual Jurupa Food Fest, where restaurants and local “chefs” will participate in a charity cooking event. Held in the classy venue of a mall parking lot, ticket purchasers get to sample the best creations of our local cookery. While LA is always having such things, featuring chefs of the caliber of Wolfgang Puck, little Jurupa Valley does it with cooks from such places as Jurupa Unified School District food services, Sizzler, Albertson’s supermarkets, Mother Clucker’s Chicken and Flabob Airport Café.

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If you happened to read a headline in our paper this morning that said, “Belly Dancing to Help Shelter Animals” would you suppose that lessons in belly dancing are going to be given to the poor pound puppies?

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Now it’s not always our local paper that has a line or event to be laughed at. I find funny things in the LA Times too.

Today there is a magnificent half-page article on making a curried Cauliflower salad that serves 8 to 10 people. Granted, an enticing photo takes up part of the space, but I have to tell you that this certainly must be the world’s longest and most involved recipe. But then it should, because it takes 1 hour and 20 minutes PLUS cooking time to make. There are cashews in this salad and the recipe starts off having you bake 2 cups of cashews, and you end up making them “curried” by what you do to them in the baking process. The kicker is that after you go through all this, you only use ½ cup of them in the salad. Somewhere there must be a reason for the apparent imbalance of using 3 heads of cauliflower and only ½ cup of cashews. That’s about 2 cashews per serving, it seems to me, and may be hardly worth the time it takes to curry them.

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How’s this for a puzzler: The headline reads, “Man Is Found Dead in Restroom at L.A. Airport: Slumped in a stall, the victim’s head was covered in a bag and his hands bound.” The article in paragraph three says, “…but Los Angeles police said a preliminary investigation indicates the man possibly killed himself.” Say what????

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If you recall, some time ago the 99 Cents Only stores needed to raise their prices. In an effort to be clever and to retain their signature “99 Cents,” the owners raised prices from 99 cents to 99.99 cents on all items. That’s a penny increase, folks. Well, they got sued for doing same. According to the Times’ article, the move apparently irked some customers who “felt they were being duped.”

We are such a litigious society!

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And then a marvelous photo by LA Times photographer Don Bartletti of Turtles at the San Diego Zoo reminded me of the last argument I had with my first husband.