Two Days in a Row

Tonight we had baked chicken, rice and vine ripened tomatoes for supper. I know what you are thinking, “Shit! Just what we need in the world, another food blog!” Not to worry, I am not starting to write a food blog, but there are some recipes that I would love to share. My Biscotti recipe is particularly good as is the Whipped Shortbread and my Snickerdoodles are without equal, so perhaps sometime in the future I will get to them. Tonight I am going to talk about what happens after we have eaten.

We all do much the same thing, we eat our fill and unless we are very good at estimating or very wasteful, there will be left overs. Art of our dinner ritual is finding the proper sized container to hole the food, covering it with plastic wrap and bunging it in the fridge. We almost never think about the plastic wrap itself and when we do it is because we are running out. I have been using it for the better part of my life and I know next to nothing about it.

In 1933 Ralph Wiley who worked at Dow chemical cleaning glass ware came across a green substance on one of the glasses that he couldn’t clean off. He named it Eonite after an indestructible substance in the little Orphan Annie comic strip. Dow chemical turned it into a dark green film that the military used to protect equipment from sea salt and the car companies used it for upholstery. The first cling wrap for household use was brought out in 1953 and has been used ever since.

It is made from PVC originally, but there are now non PVC alternatives since there is some concern about the transfer of plasticizers into food. We haven’t stopped using it or similar materials because it is so convenient and more than likely makes the Dow Company and the politicians living in their pockets a shit pile of money.

I can remember that sandwiches weren’t put in plastic bags or wrapped in PVC’s; they were lovingly covered by folded waxed paper. Every day at lunch time I would pull a beautiful rectangle of waxed paper out of my lunch tin and unwrap it to see what kind of sandwich mom had surprised me with today. Beside the sandwich would be a brightly polished apple and with any luck a Twinkie or a snowball. Life was good, well it would have been if that was how lunch played out. Unfortunately, when lunch time came around I would pull a crushed peanut butter and jam sandwich out of the well worn paper bag. It would have been crushed by the bruised apple that was keeping it company in the bag. Twinkie or Snowball? I don’t think so! I can’t ever remember having desert, but I am sure that I did and I am equally sure it wasn’t sweet with coconut marshmallow icing.

For old time’s sake, every now and then if I have to wrap a sandwich, I will pass on the sandwich bags and the insulated lunch bag, opting instead for a sandwich wrapped in wax paper and an apple in a paper bag. I never do it two days in a row.