Whatchamacallit?

- "Leek", I said as she stared blankly at me and my bunch of white-green somethings. Leek. Just a bunch of regular leeks. I was checking out at a local grocery store and the one standing in front of me was a twenty-something year old female. "Oh", she said and crammed it into a bag.

I've been planning to cook some pasta-leek-yogurt dish for a while now, but I couldn't find leeks that weren't overgrown and had the green parts still tender enough to be eaten by someone without an extra set of teeth. So I found them tonight, those leeks. Not some rare, special parts for a nuclear reactor or anything.

A few months back, maybe even sometime last winter, a woman at Walmart had a question for me. She was around my age (man, was she young!) and she seemed lost in space. Err. Lost in the produce aisle. She approached me with a question - well, she actually had two - first, she needed to know if a six month old baby could eat zucchini. And then she also wanted me to show her what zucchini was. I sure do hope she peeled and cooked them, too. She might've, because there were no articles in the paper including babies and zucchinis.

I am such a nice cabbage lady. Even though I have not attempted to pickle any since 2009.

I used some of those whatchamacallit leeks tonight in place of green onions. I picked a meal I was going to cook tonight (I cook, usually, for the next day) and ran to the store. And forgot some of the ingredients. No, I have no good explanations whatsoever as to why I didn't have a grocery list. I usually do, which still doesn't prevent me from forgetting at least 1/4 of the needed items.

I decided to make some quiche. There was almost a full dozen of eggs in our fridge and the box said Sell Before Oct 3. Excuse me, btw, why do I need to know before when the store needs to get rid of its merchandise? I would, thank you for asking, prefer to know how long I have before the said items poison me. Anyway. I guess it's some weird obsession of mine. I always try to have eggs in the fridge and I can never buy under a dozen of brown ones (white eggs are also forbidden by my very strict religion, okay). At the same time, we do not really eat eggs. I will cook with them occasionally and I will eat a few hardboiled ones for Easter. A couple times a year, I might eat a bite or two scrambled eggs with mushrooms and/or zucchini. But those damn bastards just need to be there in the fridge. And then the expiration date comes. Then I start panicking because I hate throwing away things that could be eaten... then I cook quiche, I suppose.

I do not bake my own pie crusts. If I do (I've tried a few times), they usually turn into something pretty bad. Why, you may ask? It's that religion of mine. It bans the use of white flour. It can be mixed with other ones, though. And wholegrain pie crusts... let's just simply say that they are not too good. At the same time, I do eat some white flour products from time to time. Just like the Amish will use a phone here and there, y'know. For my pies (which I make maybe three times a year) and my quiches  (which I make, again, maybe three times a year), I just buy premade Pillbury pie crust and, yup, just like the picture says - you just unroll it. And sometimes, like I had to this evening, you need to patch it up a little bit.

I have to admit I didn't alter the recipe that much this time. I used almost all the ingredients it called for. Almost, I said. Green onions were not used because, well, I didn't have any. But I had homegrown sweet onion which didn't even make me cry. I wanted some greens floating in my filling, so I shaved a few leaves off of those leeks. Voila. The recipe was from Coolinarika, a Croatian recipe site, so it mostly called for Croatian ingredients. Or at least those that can easily be found in Europe. Well, tough luck.

Instead of so-called sweet cream, also known as cooking cream, I had to make do with Crema Mexicana - it works for some things, but not so much for some others. I cut down on calories by splitting the quantities with some 2% milk. Good enough. I also added three eggs instead of two because, first of all, my brown organic eggs are microscopic and, secondly, I needed to get rid of as many as I could. Good enough, again. Then it wanted some shredded trapist. That's cheese. And I have to admit I have no idea if anyone here would have any clue what it was. So I got some Italian shredded mix. Good enough, ok? Pimento-stuffed olives on top. Yay, had those. A clove of garlic. Had that. Two tablespoons of olive oil. Had them.

And then - shrimp. Well, okay, did not have shrimp. The shrimp. I had a bag of frozen somethings. They're not too bad. Except that it seems that Walmart no longer has those we loved. Ohwell. Happens all the time. Thawed them, dried them (they are froozen cooked!), threw them on a pan, cooked them a bit along with those onions, leek greens and garlic. Added some spice. The recipe wanted Vegeta Mediterranean, but I didn't have any of that (we do have regular Vegeta for those few dishes that just really need it). Some Mediterranean spice mix we got in a Christmas goodie bag a year or two ago did the trick. This smelled good and tasted kind of okay, too.

Here are them shrimpies, in the process:

Finally, I stuffed it all into the oven, where it sat enjoying some high temperatures of around 200C for about 40 minutes. The house smells of fish, but the final product looks pretty damn good. However, the damn thing is our tomorrow's lunch and, at this point, I can't even tell you if it's any good. Oh, the suspense!

P.S. I am absolutely guilty of breaking off a tiny little bit of the crust.

And, another important update, the SD card should be here tomorrow. Woohoo.