Food for free

I realized this morning that I spent my entire food budget for the week on junk for Thanksgiving. Since I can't eat any of it until Thursday, and the turkey's still frozen solid even if I did want to cook it early, I have to be a bit creative if I want to eat anything other than raisin bran until then. At first I was all upset because the cupboards are pretty bare--although I've always got the pearled barley--but then I realized that I'm doing pretty good for food after all. And I'll make a game of it, to see how many meals I can make without buying any new ingredients.

So I'm eating chicken and rice right now, made like this:

1. Drain the broth from a can of chicken noodle soup (you should get about half a cup of broth); discard the noodles or feed them to the dog or something
2. Add enough water to the broth to make 2 cups liquid (or whatever your rice calls for)
3. Prepare rice with the watered broth (I used medium-grain rice because that's what I have)
4. Drain the water from a 10-oz can of chicken (actually my can was 12.5 ounces, but it was one of those "25% more free!" cans so ordinarily it would be 10 ounces); give the water to the cats and put the chicken in a large bowl.
5. Fluff the rice and add it to the chicken; mix.
6. Add a lot of pepper.

There you have it--totally boring but surprisingly tasty chicken and rice! If I'd had real chicken broth I would have used it, but the soup broth worked just as well.

And what does this have to do with books or writing? Nothing.

I'm at 30,000 words on my NaNo book, and I've started reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in earnest. It'll be my December book-of-the-month, but it's so long I figured I'd better get started early. It's quite good, but the mass market paperback version I'm reading is driving me nuts. The binding is very good--so good, I can't bend it back at all and I have to go through the most annoying contortions to push the pages down so I can read all the text. I'm usually pretty darn hard on my paperbacks, leaving the bindings creased--but this one resists me. Sure, it's great that the binding won't crack, but I'm finding it physically difficult to read. This book would be ideal as an ebook.