Salad Days

Life interferes with the best laid plans. Besides last Friday's flare-up of my degenerative disc disease causing agonizing pain in my lower back and left hip, and arthritis pain in my left toes making every step painful for the previous 2 weeks, we now have no water in the kitchen. The drain pipe has a 6 inch hole in it, so any water that went down our kitchen sink flooded the apartment beneath us, the apartment beneath that one, and all the way down to the basement. The owner spent 4 hours here the other night, nearly in tears. He usually does all the repairs himself, but this one was a doozy and he felt he needed the help of one of his friends who knows plumbing, but he's unavailable for at least a week. He left our kitchen a mess, including a non-functioning dishwasher (Never worked in the 15 years we're in this apartment) blocking my stove and most of my kitchen cabinets and a pile of soggy, moldy plaster and fiberglass insulation in the space where the dishwasher used to be. Not to mention the gigantic hole in my wall exposing that leaky pipe and soggy wood and insulation. Of course, our water is turned off in the kitchen.

Great. I'm not only having to spend the holiday weekend with no way to cook but it may take as long as 2-3 weeks. I could wash some dishes in a bucket in the bathroom, but of course, would rather not. And most of my pots, dishes, microwave, even some food items, were now unreachable behind the piles of crud and the dishwasher. Thank goodness he came up during dinner so we had a few plates, bowls, and one small pot either in the sink or the dish drainer, so we could use those, along with the one accessible burner on the stove. My son was able to shift the dishwasher enough and with his long arms managed to grab the oatmeal for breakfasts, the toaster so he and hubby could make their toasted bread for lunches, the teapot, so I could make up some McDougall cups for myself for my lunches, and, using one of those grabbers, our medications.

Time to make something new for dinners instead of the planned meals. Mary McDougall has a lot of hearty salad recipes in the McDougall Quick and Easy Cookbook, so the next morning I had my son bring me to the grocery store (My back still hurts too much to drive myself) and grabbed a few items I would need to make a week's worth of salads for dinner. I figured I better make them all right then before plans changed and I had people tearing my kitchen apart for who knows how long. I'm glad we always keep a stash of paper plates, bowls, and plastic utensils handy - and they were on the other side of the kitchen!

Because I was still able to reach one burner of the stove and the one pot we had was the right size, this was the first one I made.

I doubled the recipe because we like to get a few meals out of each recipe.

Here it is, still in the mixing bowl, and when put away, it nearly filled the 11-cup Pyrex:

Since we haven't eaten this yet, all I can say about it is that I really don't like the smell of fresh cilantro. Unfortunately, it's used in more of these recipes and in greater quantities.

More in the next post. For some reason Blogger won't let me insert anymore graphics.