Today seems to be just one of those days.  I look around and see that many of my friends are feeling the strifes, people are being poo poo heads, other people are being big dumb dumb doodles, and my back hurts.

It hurts to sit, it hurts to lay down, so I've stuck my walker in the middle of the kitchen and I'm puttering around making things clean and making things taste good.  These two jobs create sort of a cycle.  The more I cook, the more dishes I have to wash, the more I wash, the hungrier I get, the hungrier I get, the more I cook.  

Today I decided to do something with the remaining ham from the canned ham we opened to meat up the bean soup.  I was taking stock of what I had on hand and realized... half an onion, half a green pepper, about eight ounces of cooked ham... I could make ham salad.

Out comes the food grinder!  I inherited this from my Da when he got a sexah new attachment for his uber stand mixer, so it is the same food grinder that I remember making this dish in as a child.  

Touch up the edge on my knife and chop chop chop the ham, onion, and pepper.  Sure I minced a little bit of garlic and threw it in with the ham, it was right there by the cutting board snarking about my knife skills.  That'll teach it.

Everybody goes into the machine and produces a group of colors that only ever look good on a blond co-ed's argyle sweater.  The green and the pink and the pale cream all extruding from the grinder like some evil child's play-doh mess.  This is the point at which I stop thinking about what it looks like and just trust that it's going to taste good.

The batch of salad grindings was quite large, so I tossed it with my hands and put most of it into a tupperwear container.  As we want to eat it, we'll portion out a little into a bowl and mix in the salad dressing and mustard just before it goes on the toast or crackers.

It doesn't take a lot of dressing and mustard, just enough to hold everything together and a pinch of black pepper to make it feel pretty.  It's important to plop the wet things down in the center there and then just very gently fold up the meat and veg around it.  Don't stir and mash it all to squish.  Nice and easy, gently foldy, let everything get to know each other.  Keeping a light touch during the folding will result in a nice light tasting salad spread.

I cut this bit into four quarters and spread each one gently on a piece of happy whole wheat toast.  Crunchy, tasty goodness.  Not at all soggy, not at all slimy, just delicious happy comfort food.  Suitable for a rainy day when the world isn't quite the place you want it to be... yet. 

As long as I can perch on my walker and wash up my food grinder, there is hope that tomorrow will taste even better than today did.  Who knows, if I can figure out how to improvise this tortilla press, tonight might even taste better than today did.