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@mongoose:

1) People are amazingly cheap, sometimes,

and

2) There is NO accounting for taste.

I got Annie's pasta mixes on sale at the grocery store, whee!

This week is cheeseburger macaroni with leftover sloppy joe meat. Last week was creamy penne with chicken. This week is definitely better. The sauce curdled and separated last week - it tasted fine but looked like "when dairy products attack".

CHEESE =)

LOL @ chili nazis...when I moved down to Ohio, apparently a lot of people put mushrooms in chili. Now I lovelovelove mushrooms so I don't mind, but I still get surprised when I find them in chili.

Glad to hear the zucchini thing worked out well too. My favorite zucchini recipe - for the leftovers - is sliced, spread in baking dish, sliced tomatoes on top, and finally slices of sharp cheddar cheese. Bake till zucchini is tender. Yum...

It's the tail, by the way. They thought it had to be part of a fish.

Fried stuff = county fair.

Many similar items on the menu.

Wonder if Ohio was settled by Scots? Maybe my husband should wear his kilt to the fair this year... =)

Toll House cookies here, which happens to be a very customizable recipe (my mother's tweaked the sugar content to accommodate my diabetic father).

Also the recipes on any package of dried pasta. Sometimes while boiling the pasta I read the box and wish I'd read it in the store so I could have gotten ingredients and made whatever-it-is instead of whatever I was planning to make. =)

Scary, extremely scary, and yet I think I want this...if only just to reheat coffee. =)

Sourdough bread, leftover London broil, leftover hollandaise or bearnaise sauce, sharp cheddar cheese, spinach leaves.

This even makes the packaged dry mix hollandaise/bearnaise sauces taste good. They don't taste anything like the real sauces, but the butter and herb content is high enough that they are still pretty tasty. There is, however, no lemon flavor in the hollandaise at all. Weird.

Agree with all the previous...happily married for 11 years to Spaghetti-O's man...who still likes Spaghetti-O's but doesn't eat them as often as he used to, and DOES appreciate my cooking and tolerate my adventures in gourmet-land (there's sourdough starter in the refrigerator right now, I've baked the last two weekends, and the 2 loaves of bread have been gone by the end of each week). He also doesn't like Mexican food, never has, never will, but he is totally cool with me going out without him every once in a while to have some (which I'm trying to do a little less often due to calories, anyway).

The only caveat I would make is that now that we have kids...I do wish he would eat more healthy foods and more of a variety, because the kids watch me eat tofu, edamame, brussel sprouts, asparagus, cauliflower cheese, and all sorts of different things...and then watch him eat Spaghetti-O's, Cap'n Crunch, and so forth...and guess what they eat?? =)

But it sounds like this is a while down the road for the OP, during which time she can cook for him and expand his horizons a little bit (gently).

Early on in our marriage I learned never to ask "Do you like this?" because his answer would always be a monotone "It's OK..." which I still am not sure what it means!! Instead I would ask "Would you eat this if I made it again?" which was really what I wanted to know, anyway, and got much more useful answers.

That egg is scary. I thought it was filled with lemon Jell-O, and thought that was kind of creative. Then I realized it was the actual egg. Whoa....

Ummm...Velveeta dip...

Velveeta, Ro-Tel and ground beef. With Scoops or those little white corn tortilla bowl things.

I might try to do buffalo chicken bites with boneless chicken...my 11-year-old son and I like buffalo wings but he gets annoyed at the lack of meat and the messiness. (Wish he'd get annoyed at the mess in his room...)

BTW, the price of GS cookies (and the profit percentage) is still WAY better than the stuff my kids are expected to sell for their school. At least I can buy 3 boxes of GS cookies for $9 from my receptionist's granddaughter, and my husband can buy some from some other kid, and we spread the support without breaking the bank. The last time my kids brought a fundraiser home, there wasn't a single item (operative word, SINGLE) for under $14.99. So the minimum I can spend - since I can't just buy from one of my kids - is $30. Last I heard the school only gets 10%. I asked if I could just write a check to the school, and the office staff got REALLY confused. =P