I was born in southern California, where both my parents grew up. Because my parents were from the Los Angeles area, they developed an early appreciation for Mexican food, long before most of the rest of the country had ever heard of it. They both loved to visit the street vendors and small restaurants that dotted SoCal, serving up burritos and tamales and such.

When we moved to rural middle Tennessee in 1977, no Mexican food was to be found – anywhere. My mother couldn’t even prepare her own Mexican food very easily because the ingredients for even the simplest Mexican dishes just weren’t available at the Shelbyville, TN Kroger store circa late 70s/early 80s. She was able to find some salsa and tortillas, and she was able to make her own refried beans from pintos. While other families had sandwich fixins in the fridge, we always had the makings of a tasty, Bell Buckle-style burrito. And we consumed many of them.

Eventually there were Mexican restaurants in Nashville, an hour’s drive from our house. But it would be years before there was a real Mexican restaurant anywhere close to where we actually lived.

Enter Taco Bell.

Taco Bell came to a town closer than Nashville sometime in the first years after we moved to Bell Buckle. It was the closest thing my parents had seen to the fast food-style Mexican they had loved back in L.A. Not great, but close enough. So sometimes on the weekends, when my mother got a hankering for something other than our homemade burritos, we would all pile in the Datsun station wagon and head 20 miles up the road to the nearest Taco Bell, where I would gorge myself on a variety of tasty items, smothered in Taco Bell’s no-longer-available (damn you Taco Bell!) green sauce. As family finances and logistics made eating out at all a huge and rare treat for me as a child, these trips to Taco Bell were – dare I characterize a trip to a fast food restaurant in a strip mall this way? – quite special. In any event, they were memorable and pleasant times spent with the fam. So I became a Taco Bell fan early on.

Fast forward to college at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where I spent the next five years with no car and no money. The Taco Bell within walking distance of campus, with its extensive menu of 99 cent items, became a staple, sometimes THE staple of my diet (the exception was during one period when my boyfriend worked at a nearby pizza restaurant called Stefano’s, during which I was able to consume massive quantities of free or discounted pizza and beer…). My love for Taco Bell only grew during the college years.

In other words, I have a long and storied history with The Bell. I have already run for the border approximately 65,998 times in my life span. So I was pleased to find when we bought our current house, in 2006, that a Taco Bell was located just two blocks away, in the parking lot of the infamous Fellini Kroger. Unfortunately, over the past several years, I have determined that just as there are “Bad Times” Locations for grocery stores, convenience marts and drug store chains, there are also Bad Times Locations for Taco Bell franchises. And our Taco Bell is clearly one of them.

For starters, the store is often less than clean. I usually use the drive thru, but on the rare occasions I go inside the place, I always have a sort of, “My eyes! They burn!” reaction, and I promise myself that I will never again risk my ability to eat the drive thru food by grossing myself out with a peek behind the curtain. When I use the drive thru, I can pretend the place is clean…enough. So that’s what I do. But even the exterior periphery of our Taco Bell is sketchy. I frequently encounter people in front of my in what is supposed to be the car line trying to walk thru, or even trying to beg the window cashiers for change. One time, as I was busy ordering at the drive thru window, my 11 year old daughter asked plaintively, “Mama, is that man dead?” and she pointed out to me that there was a man who did indeed appear to be deceased sprawled in the “decorative” landscaping that rings this Taco Bell’s exterior. I turned to the window cashier and pointed the man out to her, asking of she could please dial 911. She just shrugged and told me that “he sleeps there all the time.” I did end up calling 911 myself, and the responders came quickly, but they seemed familiar enough with the guy that all they did was poke him with some sort of long pole, at which point he got up, shook himself off and staggered away.

But the real problem with my neighborhood Taco Bell is with the food. They almost always get my order wrong to greater or lesser degree and/or the food just isn’t very good. How an individual Taco Bell can manage to ruin their formulaic menu items, I have no idea. But they do. I have recently calculated that it is only approximately one in every five to seven visits that my order is both A.) correct and B.)prepared in a way consistent with other Taco Bells I have visited. And those times when the food is correctly prepared and my order is accurate aren’t necessarily the same times. I’ve learned with this Taco Bell to just eat whatever happens to turn up in my bag once I get it home. If I ordered three crunchy tacos, but instead find myself in possession of a crunch wrap supreme and an apple caramel empenada, I just eat what they gave me. It’s less trouble than returning and trying to correct the order (an ordeal that’s worthy of its own blog post altogether). As far as the food quality, it’s rarely inedible, but it’s often close.

So why in the world do I keep going back to this Taco Bell at least once a week? Well, I’ve been asking myself this as well. I’ve decided that it’s a combination of laziness (it’s nearby and thus, convenient), warm childhood memories, and a type of Pavlovian response. What I mean with that last reason is that it is five to seven times more likely that my order will be wrong/bad than it will be right/good, I am clearly motivated psychologically – even conditioned – to continue buying food from this Diane Arbus Taco Bell in front of the Fellini Kroger by those rare and completely random occasions when the food is tasty and my order is correct.

In other words, I am like one of those piano playing chickens in a box at the state fair. I keep pecking the keys because I know that eventually I will be rewarded with what I really want. I may get the electric shock five times in a row, but I keep going back for more in hopes that the next time will be the time that I get the tasty treat instead. It’s kind of pathetic, actually.

On Friday night, while The Baby Toddler Cousins went to see “Finding Nemo on Ice” (because every story is better told on ice, right?) with Uncle Ray and Aunt Betsy, I took J, E and their cousins M (age 7) and E (age 11) to the Fellini Kroger with me to do some catch-up grocery shopping.

While at the store, and against my better judgment, I allowed myself to be wheedled by all 4 children into buying a “Make Your Own Gingerbread House” kit for $6.99. The box promised that it was so simple that even a very young child could complete the project without assistance. It was the “without assistance” part that sealed the deal, because in addition to hating baking and crafts of all kinds (although this kit did not require any actual baking; the pieces of the house supposedly came ready to assemble), my idea of torture would be working on a craft project involving jujubees that I would not be allowed to consume. The combination of crafting and delayed gratification would be a disaster waiting to happen for me.

But I digress.

Again, against my better judgment, I shelled out the $$ for the gingerbread house kit, and the five of us headed the 3 blocks back to our house, where the kids excitedly showed the colorful box containing their kit to Jon, who looked up from the book he was reading long enough to bemusedly mutter, “Bad, bad idea,” before going right back to reading. He’s low key that way (and as it turns out, usually right).

Oh no, I assured him, with the kids nodding their heads in enthusiastic assent. This is a VERY easy gingerbread house kit! It says so, right on the box!

I halfheartedly offered to help the children with their project, and was not so secretly glad when they said they could do it all by themselves, and that they wanted to. So I helped them find a few supplies they needed (actually, we had to interrupt Jon to find some of the supplies, as I was unsure whether we had something the instructions referred to as an “electric beater.”) Once the kids were set to go, I went and took a hot bath for nearly 40 minutes whilst reading the latest Star Magazine. As I caught up on the latest hijinks from those wacky Kardashian sisters, I assumed that the kids were busily at work on their SUPEREASY gingerbread masterpiece. I imagined how cute the finished product would look on our mantel during the holiday season just ahead.

However, I don’t think I will be displaying their handiwork on the mantel…or anywhere else for that matter. But I thought I would let y’all take a gander at what the kids produced with this “so easy that a drunk chimpanzee could build it” gingerbread house kit.

Yes, this was the result, and the children had already decamped to the upstairs, leaving their deconstructed “gingerbread house ” – and all of the mess they had made – behind on the dining room table. They assumed, somewhat bizarrely, that I would clean it all up for them. They were wrong.

But it goes without saying that I certainly DID go ahead and eat all of the jujubees. After all, I didn’t want them to go to waste.

Me: Wow, is that some of the delicious cheese from Sam’s Club over at East Towne Mall?!

Dr. Neighbor: I prefer to say that it’s “from Vermont.”

My summerlong quest for the perfect margarita has come to an end just as the season wraps up. After trying various options – restaurants, bars, my own concoctions – I can now report with confidence that the best margaritas in Knoxville, TN are the work of one Dr. Jay Pfaffman. Apparently, it’s all about key lime and triple sec.

Now, what should my Fall quest be?

I posted this on my Facebook page the other day:

Sometimes, when it’s 5:10 pm and raining outside, and I haven’t yet left work to go home and feed hungry people, I say a little silent prayer of thanks for whomever it was who invented the glorious frozen pizza and its trusty sidekick, the pre-washed, bagged salad. Thank you, Mr. Frozen Pizza Inventor Guy. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

But then, one of my friends commented to let me know that the inventor of the frozen pizza wasn’t a guy at all, the inventor was Rose Totino, who dropped out of school at the age of 16 to clean houses, became a wife and mother, ran an Italian restaurant with her husband, and eventually became the first-ever female VP of Pillsbury.

Of course, frozen pizza was invented by a working mama. Of course it was! I should have known.

….tada!!!!

(If you haven’t heard about Wacky Wednesday, more can be found HERE.)

Every Wednesday night, my sister in law and brother plan a “special” meal for their four children. Here are a few Wacky Wednesday creations from recent weeks.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

E was gifted with a bag of disgusting, sugary cereal this week – the kind we almost never have in our house, and this morning he deigned to share with his baby sister.

Notice how Leo (dog) keeps sniffing around, hoping one of them will drop some of the cereal on the floor…

I am busy. I don’t have time to drive all over town for a simple bottle of wine to enjoy with supper, you know?

In the past several days, C. has discovered something the rest of the world already knew: chocolate goes very nicely with the bottles of milk she enjoys as a regular part of her one-year-old diet.

We rarely keep chocolate around the house, but the holiday season is a different matter. The house is brimming with it – homemade candy and Hershey’s kisses and cookies….the stuff is everywhere. Until now, C had never seemed that interested in the occasional tiny taste of chocolate she’s gotten from Jon or me or one of her siblings, but a couple of days ago, she had one of those “aha” moments, and she is now fairly obsessed with the stuff. She follows people around the house begging for chocolate.

“A bite? A bite? A bite?” she asks over and over and over in a plaintive little voice, until someone capitulates and feeds her some chocolate. She has also figured out that Hershey’s kisses come in shiny foil wrappers, and at least twice this weekend I caught her trying to quicky chew and swallow some discarded candy wrappers she found. She clearly held the the vain hope that the trash might taste like the chocolate she now craves, and she threw a screaming fit when I dug the crinkly, metallic wrappers out of her wee mouth.

She has also started refusing other food because it isn’t chocolate. She will take one bite of whatever I offer, at which point she realizes it’s green beans or eggs or cheese instead of chocolate, and then she spits it out and looks disgusted before beginning to beg for “a bite?”

I think we may have to completely hide the chocolate, and wean her cold turkey. She doesn’t seem to be able to handle it in moderation.

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