I hope all of you are having as good of a holiday season as we are here!

We’re lucky enough to have the whole family gathered once again this year – both myself and my husband, my son who lives in town, and my daughter who has to fly into town from Washington D. C. – and of course our darling “baby” (dog, that is), Cocoa.

I’ll be back to posting as usual in a day or two, but for now, I hope you all have Happy Holidays!

Danna

Happy Thanksgiving, to all of you who practice it! This won’t be a particularly “big” Thanksgiving for our family, just my husband and me enjoying time with our son, but I’m grateful nonetheless for the opportunity to do so. Even if you don’t live in the States, I hope all of you Cozy Mystery readers can take a bit of time today to think about some of the things in their lives that they’re most thankful for!

As the title of this entry says, I’m not talking about mysteries today since I don’t have anything Cozy-Mystery-ish to complain about. This has to do with something I am missing. (I’ve been trying to limit my Rants and Raves, but this really grinds me!)

As I have said many times before, I don’t particularly enjoy baking/cooking. I take every short cut I can when it comes to feeding my family. For holiday meals I serve Stove Top dressing, doctored with lots of onions, celery, and chicken broth. Oh, and I don’t make the chicken broth myself, rather I depend on Swanson to do the tedious work involved in making it. As for my creamed onions, frozen Birds Eye pearl onions are my staple >>> I skip all the onion-preparations my grandmother did.

Well, to get on with my rant…

Years ago, my husband bought me a bread machine – since he loves freshly baked bread. I remember telling him he had better learn how to use it, since I did NOT plan on making bread. I didn’t even make room for it on our kitchen counter… that’s how determined I was NOT to use it. I think I finally relented on his birthday, and went ahead and made a loaf of bread, and I’ve been hooked ever since! So much so that when my old machine “wore out” I bought a new Oster bread machine four years ago.

The reason for my rant is that I can no longer find the boxed bread mixes for bread machines that we like. I know I have complained about San Antonio now having a monopoly grocery store in town. (H.E.B. ran all the other grocery stores out of town with bottom-low prices,  and upon getting rid of their competition, quickly raised their prices. >>> But that’s another story…)

Apparently people no longer use bread machines – but prefer to use either their hands or their mixers with dough hooks. Not me! I like the add-a-cup-of-water-top-with-mix-then-the-yeast method, where I go about my other business while the bread machine does the work.

Anyway, I get quite miffed when things that I really like >> such as easy bread machine mixes, are no longer available in my local grocery store.  How about you — are things you used to use all the time no longer available in your local store?

P.S. Thank goodness for the grocery sections in my Walmart and Target!