I am convinced that there are two types of people in this world. Those who thrive living in small towns, and those who go bat-shit crazy. Now I’m not talking a small suburb of a major city. I’m talking out in the boonies, you only have mom and pop shops and you probably live on a dirt road, small. This is where I grew up. Technically speaking, Grand Lake isn’t even a town, it’s too small. Its correct categorization is village, and while we’re getting technical, I didn’t live in the village itself.  Technically speaking, I grew up in the suburb of a village. It was tiny, and believe it or not, this was bigger than the place that we had moved from. My parents were clearly in the category of thriving in a small town environment. I, on the other hand, firmly fall into the latter category. There is a reason that I now live in the second biggest city in the US and love it!

However, despite driving me absolutely nutters, there are a few things that I learned from that upbringing that I do not find amongst my friends who grew up in cities. Namely my tendency to try to fix everything at least twice before I will give in and throw it away. My roommate is from Orange County in California. She does not do this. In fact she generally looks at me in awe whenever I fix something and calls me MacGyver. She has learned to always check with me first before throwing something away to see if I want to try to fix it. She has also learned to wait until I get home before calling our property manager as I know how to do things like unclog a toilet or take the u-bend off a sink to retrieve an earring.

I have always taken all of these things for granted. After all, where I grew up, if something broke the options were generally fix it yourself or go with out for at least a week. There was no such thing as a 24-hour plumber. I’m pretty sure that the only thing in the county – notice, county, not town or village, in the entire damn county – that stayed open 24-7 was the emergency room – notice the emergency room, there was only one – and the 911 operators. Any service-type company closed at 5 or 6, and everything else at 9. So if your pilot light went out, or your toilet clogged or overflowed, you better know how to fix that yourself! If your coffee maker broke, you tried to figure out and fix whatever was wrong, because to replace that entailed a four hour round trip to Denver or three hour round trip to Silverthorne. Now I love me some coffee, but even I would wait until the weekend to go get my replacement!

Therefore, you learn to fix things. You learn to improvise with whatever you have on hand. Hence the nickname MacGyver. One time at work – where I met my roommate – I fixed the front door with a ball point pen and a paperclip. Everybody else had resigned themselves to waiting until the owner finally got around to calling the handyman in. I thought that was ridiculous, so I fixed it. Growing up in such a small community, I never realized how much I had learned to be self-sufficient until I moved to a big city. Even with things that I can’t fix, my first thought is never to call a professional. It’s always, “Who do I know that would know how to fix that?” Again, growing up in small town that was how things worked. You knew what everybody was good at, and you called upon them when they were needed.

The best part was that this was perfectly acceptable. You helped out when needed, and you knew that others would help out when you needed. I am still in contact with several of my friends from my youth, and even today when something breaks, or there’s a dilemma, we’ll brainstorm to figure out who knows how to fix it. So despite the fact that I will never live in a small town EVER again if I can help it, I do appreciate what it taught me. So does my bank account, as so far this week I have fixed a stand fan, a K-cup coffee machine and tonight I’m working on my swamp cooler. That one I might need some help for, we’ll see.

My last roommate was a huge fan of the Food Network channel, and as such, I watched a good bit myself. In the end, I wound up falling in love with the show Chopped. For those not familiar, it’s a competition cooking show with four professional chefs competing.  They have to make an appetizer in 20 minutes, then a main course in 30 minutes, and then a dessert in 30 minutes. However, after each course, the dishes are judged, by three other chefs, and a competitor is “chopped” or removed from the competition. So by the time you hit the dessert round it’s between two people. Now here’s the catch. Each round contains a mystery basket that contains 4 ingredients that must be incorporated into the dish. Sometimes they’re perfectly normal ingredients like rack of lamb or red wine. Other times they’re fun things like fruit cocktail or Cheetos. Half the fun is watching the look of horror on the chefs’ faces when they pull out the mystery basket ingredients. It’s good times.

Because of this show, I now play Chopped in my kitchen on occasion. Not with a mystery basket per se, but when I really need to go grocery shopping and have nothing left but random ingredients in my kitchen, I’ll pick out 4 and see what I can come up with. I usually wind up with something that’s not great, but it’s okay. The fact that I didn’t have to leave my house to go grocery shopping makes it even better. Occasionally I will come up with pure gold and the new dish enters my normal cooking rotation. But every now and then I create something that isn’t quite god-awful, but pretty close.

Whenever this happens I am then faced with an existential dilemma. On the one hand, I kind of prefer my food to taste good. Strange, I know. On the other hand, I really don’t like wasting food and I’m also not made of money. Therefore, do I toss the crap food and buy something to replace it, or do I suck it up, eat it and vow to never put those foods together ever again? Sad to say, the “not made of money” part of the equation gets the biggest vote, which is why I spent all of last week eating a very strange concoction.

Needless to say, I am all sorts of excited to go grocery shopping and have dinners that actually taste good this week. One of these days I will learn to go grocery shopping before I run out of food. Some day. Oh, FYI – rice pasta is NOT interchangeable with rice.