When You Get Lemons ......

Make lemonade ... isn't that the saying??  Well I'm here to attest to the fact that sometimes, that doesn't work out so well.

I had an appointment with my financial advisor yesterday.  That's like sticking sharp sticks under my fingernails.  I'm an Accountant, I should deal with it better.  The trouble is I listened to my parents years ago and put most every penny I made into savings accounts.  The next step up was investments.  Not stocks, because the BIG one that crashed during the depression was the cause of my mother saving every piece of tinfoil she touched.  I learned that lesson well and have always tried to invest in sure things.

Until the NEXT big crash where I lost a ridiculous amount of my investments, which I, along with probably everyone else, have never recovered from.  Now when we have these meetings, they have to pry the pennies from my fingers to get me to invest more.  After all, I already have a nice burial plot in my back yard and I can always find coffee cans to bury it in.  I got lemons.  Coffee can burials are lemonade to me!!

At any rate, the one hour meeting turned into three as I signed a hundred sheets of paper transferring everything to another ... I hope better ... investment company.  It's exhausting because I'm so afraid it will all disappear again.  At any rate, I got home just in time to whip up a casserole for dinner.

This is a pretty good example of how I cook, which resulted in making lemonade.  I chopped and browned the onions for the tamale pie.  The hamburger was defrosted and ready to drop in the pot when I realized it wasn't really hamburger after all.  It was steak ... as in chicken fried ... and tenderized to look like hamburger.

Now what???  I frantically scanned the freezer shelves to find NO hamburger.  I wondered what happened to it as I plopped the steak on a cutting board and began to slice and dice it into tiny pieces. I got lemons ... maybe I can make tamale pie with chopped beef and take out my "investment" frustrations in the process.

Now for the sauce part, except I didn't have the required taco sauce, or tomato sauce or any suitable replacement except barbecue sauce.  At that moment I saw myself digging another hole out back as I dumped it in.  Boy, this batch of lemons is pretty sour!!  At this point I SHOULD be layering this with tortillas, which are on my grocery list, but NOT in my fridge.  What I DO have is Fritos, the perfect substitute, yes??  Think LEMONADE!!

Making it worse, the cheddar cheese I planned to grate over the top had the nicest growth of fuzzy mold.  I know you can cut that part off, but it wasn't worth the trouble.  That's Monterey Jack on top.

Thirty minutes later, I was hesitant to take a taste, as you can imagine.  Okay, it's not something I would feed to guests, which I'm sure makes you happy should you ever come to my house for dinner, but all in all, it wasn't TOO terrible.  I ate a big chunk.  Just a LITTLE sour, this lemonade is at least edible.  Let's put it this way, I'm eating it because there's nothing else in the house at the moment.

All through the Elks meeting last night, I hoped and prayed I would have no ill effects from the lemonade.  THREE tums this time and I was in perfect shape to have horrible nightmares all night long.  Maybe it's not such a good thing to make lemonade EVERY time ... a nice platter of pancakes might have been better!!