No finger parts were used in making this meal

Today’s breakfast menu was french toast, but I discovered we did not have any bread. Priscilla used the last yesterday when making grilled/oven cheese sandwiches to go with the Campbell’s boxed Thai tomato and coconut soup. That is some good stuff; good enough for an unsolicited mention.

With french toast not possible, I checked the pantry. Hmm. Muffins, maybe. We have Malt-O-Meal. Not this morning. Imagination. Okay. Peanut butter and crushed graham crackers. And chocolate chips. OK. We’ll use the Malt-O-Meal muffin recipe and substitute graham crackers and throw in some peanut butter and chocolate chips.

I got everything together on the kitchen island and then sprayed a muffin pan for six muffins. Then for some reason, I decided to use 1 1/2 cups of regular flour. Arrggh. That’s for a full recipe. (Actually, a full recipe of Malt-O-Meal muffins calls for 1 3/4 cups flour, but you get the idea.) Rather than put back half the flour, I sprayed the other half of the muffin pan and then crushed a few graham crackers (closeable plastic bag and dough roller), exactly half a cup.

Everything mixed together just fine, including a big glob of peanut butter in the flour/baking powder/salt mixture. (I recommend no more than 1 glob. A larger amount might cause difficult stirring.) Chocolate chips next, then an egg, the remainder of a quart of whole milk, the first five-eights of which my wife used in making banana pudding for the office pot luck lunch last week, and a small pouring of 2 percent milk. Then in the muffin pan and into the oven.

I think the muffins will be good.

Supper last night was good, too, although not what I originally planned. From a diabetic menu magazine recipe I got everything needed for what was called “Cajun Stew.” I don’t know why the magazine people didn’t just call it “Gumbo.”

That was to be the third meal of the menu planning, but when I got ready to make Cajun Stew, I could not find the magazine. OK, I decided. I’ll just get the subsequent menu from the downloaded cook book on my Nook.

Not to be. I pressed the upsidedown U on my Nook, as instructed to “wake up” the device. Nothing happened. It has a full charge.

I had chicken to use (soonest), so I went online and found a reported Cajun recipe that called for everything I had. Except the recipe did not use okra or diced tomatoes.

Not a problem. I had a recipe and ingredients. Time for chopping and mixing.

Now, last week, Prsicilla bought a really, really, really sharp kitchen knife, the kind we used to call a butcher knife. This thing is sharp. When I went to slice into a large onion to take off the outer layer, the knife, on its own, sliced through two layers.

I got the onion chopped and was nine-tenths through chopping a Bell pepper and … A really, really, really sharp knife causes no pain when it slices into a finger. That thing sliced through my skin same as an onion. I stopped slicing before the knife took the chunk completely off.

Priscilla completed chopping and all of the cooking. Chicken and sausage in a roux with onion and Bell pepper over brown rice. It was good. And no finger parts were used in the cooking.