My homemade de-icer – I like to make a big batch and put it in an old spray bottle. I think I used an old Febreeze spray bottle. It lasts me a handful of snowy/icy mornings every Winter. You don’t need to saturate the windshield, otherwise you risk smelling the rubbing acohol when you turn on your car and that’s not going to lead a pleasant exprience.

When I REMEMBER that I have this item, I have this windshield cover that does help! I’m sure if my car had feelings it would be relieved it didn’t have to work the defrost fan so hot and hard at a cold start.

A lap blanket – I have a very small collection of old Target Dollar Spot and Old Navy throw blankets that are nice while on the couch, but even better as a lap blanket while driving, because I don’t have heated seats. and it’s fine, I just need it to keep my legs warm (a cold leg and foot makes me kick as I shiver and it’s not fun accidentally kicking the gas pedal) until my cabin heater really kicks in. Usually the same lap blanket is great as a picnic blanket in the summertime for impromptu outdoor meals or outdoor events where it’s nice to sit on the ground so if you see a blanket in my backseat or trunk, that’s what it’s there for!

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Don’t get mad at me, but this is a throw everything in and mix it recipe.

For all intents and purposes, the following directions make 1 bowl of noodles.

Ingredients

• A single serving of dried thin rice noodles according to the package (I did the ol’ fashioned spaghetti serving of a fistful of pasta)
• Equal parts of:
  • Soy sauce
  • Toasted sesame oil
• Even smaller parts of:
  • Hoisin sauce
  • Worcestershire sauce
• Optional add-ins for added flavor and nutrients:
  • Sauteed mushrooms
  • Sauteed spinach
  • Frozen carrots and peas
  • Soft boiled egg
  • Kimchi

Directions

1.) Fill a small pot with water and heat to boiling (do you have a pot you use for personal-size ramen noodles? use that.)
2.) Place the noodles into the boiling water, stir a little bit so nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan, boil for the time indicated on the package.
——2a.) If using an egg, toss the egg into the pasta pot at the same time and set a timer for 6 minutes to achieve a soft-boiled egg (cooked white part with a jammy yolk to enrich the sauce).
——2b.) If including sauteed vegetables or the frozen veggies, use a small frying pan on a separate burner set to medium heat to cook your favorite veggies for a couple minutes in hot oil. Toss occasionally so nothing burns in the pan.
3.) While noodles are boiling, make the noodle sauce in the bowl you’re going to put everything in. Let’s say 2 Tablespoons of soy sauce and toasted seseame oil, and 1 Tablespoon of Hoisin sauce and Worcestershire sauce. Take a fork or small whisk and mix until the sauce looks good enough.
4.) When noodles are done, use a pasta fork/strainer to take the noodles out of the pan and into the sauce bowl. Let the egg continue boiling in the pot however long it needs.
5.) When the vegetables are done, use tongs to move the vegetables from the pan into the sauce bowl.
——5a.) If including other ingredients like kimchi, add those into the bowl now as well.
6.) Take a fork or pair of chopsticks to mix the noodles and add-ins so the sauce is incorporated into all of it.
7.) When egg is finished boiling, carefully remove it and run the egg under cold water until it’s cool enough to handle and remove the shell. Place it into the bowl and use your chopsticks, fork, or a knife to cut it open and dramatically watch the jammy yolk inside drip over the noodles. Then I just cut up the egg and mix it in with everything else. (If you ended up with a hard-boiled egg, that’s okay!)
8.) Eat and enjoy.

I feel the need to apologize for calling this asian-inspired, but NGL it really is a noodle dish that doesn’t have a specific Asian country of origin. This is my favorite dish to make on a cold day when I want something warm in my belly but is also fairly quick to make. I’ve had this for breakfast and i’ve had it for lunch. I really just throw it together and eyeball a lot of the ingredients as I prepare it.

On days when I want a meal with a serving of rice but strangely don’t have any leftover in the fridge, rice noodles come to the rescue. The last brand I used was A Taste of Thai. I keep rice noodles in my pantry for Pad Thai nights but in a recent chore to clear my pantry of old ingredients, I found an opened package of these noodles, saw that these can be boiled in 3 to 4 minutes, and decided these were going in my belly. For quick cooking, find the noodles labeled “thin,” or at least they look like the Angel Hair kind compared to regular spaghetti.

If my directions seem unclear or you have any questions, shoot me a message! The next time I make this I’ll take a picture and add it. I was hungry, okay?

In my younger years, I want to say the range of years of somewhere in my late teens and some of my twenties, I had reoccuring nightmares where I was being chased by a serial killer. Each time i’d dream this dream, i’d get a certain amount further in outrunning the murderer. It started out at my childhood home. Humorously it kind of played out like a Nintendo game. I’m talking first generation Nintendo system games, like a Mario Brothers game, where you can move forward in the game but can’t go backward.

The first dream would be me realizing i’m being attacked by a dude so I start running. I get out of the front door of my house, down the driveway, then a little down the road and then I wake up.

The next few nightmares wouldn’t take place in the following nights like you’d expect, but i’d go numerous days and months of regular dreamless nights and experience other dreams that don’t have rhyme or reason. My normal dreams would just be visual reruns of images and people who I’d seen the previous day or in recent times.

Maybe three or four dreams later, I’d start to experience the endings of these nightmares. In one I would run futher around my neighborhood, start to feel tired, and just stop running. I don’t see the murderer get me, in fact there was never a bloody scene, but I assume that since I stopped running and my dream ended abruptly, that I got murdered. Another one had me running back home, into my fenced backyard, towards a corner of where I used to squeeze through to get into my friend’s backyard for playdates (maybe my unconscious mind took the warm memory of my friend’s house to lead me to believe I was escaping to safety), then the dream ended again.

In most of these nightmares it was difficult for me to run. Usually my body would feel so heavy that I couldn’t pull myself up to stand. I’d spend half of the dream crawling on the ground; and miraculously I’d still manage to outrun the murderer for some of the time and that was kind of funny.

I also never saw the face of my murderer. I knew it was a male identifying individual but my brain never constructed the head!! I’d like to think my brain was too lazy to decide on facial features or just place one of my male friends in the dream.

The very last of these reoccuring dreams was where I guess I finally conquered my murderer. Like I said, it never played out like a horror movie and nobody visibly died, it was more like the movie scenes where you can safely assume something terrible happened while the camera pans away or cuts the scene. I was trying to run, I kept on looking back at where the murderer was in relation to the me, I think in one of the dreams the cops were called and were on their way as well, then I used my sense and timed when he would reach me. At the moment the murderer got to me, I swiftly turned around to face him and then I woke up.

That dream never happened again.

It’s been over a decade since those dreams, and I can’t recall if there was anything major that happened in my life at the time to experience those dreams or the end of it. I’d like to think that in general it probably marked a time of maturing where I felt I needed to face my life’s problems and roadblocks more confidently and head-on. There were a few milestones in my life where I did need to pull myself together and handle on my own, as scary as they felt in the moment.

Last night I had another dream. It was a combination of little vignettes from daily life, included some family members whose faces I saw clearly, and another dude trying to kill me! This time I went hog wild and picked up a sharpened yellow pencil, wrestled the guy to the ground and tried to stab him in his midsection somewhere in the vicinity of his kidney or lungs. If that didn’t kill him, it would at least stall him trying to get up and try coming for me again. In order to take advantage of the time I hope I bought myself, I tried to run. But while my dream was previously taking place in a building with numerous hallways, now I was faced with so many different flights of stairs to climb! Once again I felt that heaviness and the dream ended when I was climbing a set of stairs using both sets of my arms and legs. In my dream I thought, this is ridiculous.

I woke up still thinking the same. I’m not sure if any real life events are affecting my unconscious mind to start a new serial killer dream, but thankfully I’m not sitting here worrying about it. I do commend my dream self for trying to kill the guy first. Maybe that’s how i’m approaching life these days – shoot first, take names later. Don’t mess with me.

Happy Wednesday! Love, Auntie Erma