This is what the heck happens with dinner around here...

So this is what happens with dinner around here. I woke up a little pooped from all the meds I'm on and didn't feel like doing much. For dinner I was considering hot ham and cheese sandwiches on good sesame French bread with salad.
    So on the way back from my doctor appointment I stopped in a a good supermarket to buy some good ham and good cheese and good bread. As I entered the store, I thought maybe I should change that to vermicelli with a white clam sauce. After all, I have whole fresh clams, chopped clams, maybe 15 fresh shrimp, some clam juice and crab boil and onions and garlic in the house...so I sort of switched to that on the way to buy the ham and cheese.
     But then, while I was there, I wound up with a pint each of organic blackberries, blueberries and raspberries, plus a beautiful quarter of bright pink watermelon, then happened to glance at the meat section. Yeah, there were gorgeous grass fed, no hormone, no antibiotic ribs of lamb and so I switched my idea to couscous with lamb tajine: Just some potatoes, carrots, a turnip, organic garbanzos, some spices,  a few raisins....so I got all that stuff and was content with the idea of that. See, Madeleina asked me yesterday what a gyro was: She said she always loved that huge meat on the slowly spinning spit but never had one. Heck, I couldn't believe it! I'm certainly going to dad hell for having lived with her in New York City and never having introduced her to a gyro!
    So I'd already looked up "Gyros in Fort Worth" and written a food critic--fantastic writer of in-depth investigative pieces who also does some food reviews--and both the internet and he said there was a place called Paul's in Fort Worth that might have the gyro I was looking for. That being on my mind, that's probably why I peeked at the meat and grabbed the lamb ribs.
    But when I got home and responded to the email from my food critic friend, I said I couldn't believe I had never given Madeleina a gyro. I said I'd given her tajine, moussaka, raita, hummus, lentils, pastitsio and a number of other Mediterranean--Moroccan/Greek--dishes, but not the darned gyro.
    Which, of course, got me thinking of patstitsio: That divine blend of well seasoned ziti at the base of the baking dish, very well seasoned, almost sweet, chopped meat with garlic, onions, tomatoes, wine on top of the pasta, and then another layer of pasta--all covered in a Bechemel (white sauce with parmesan and nutmeg and eggs) sauce, then baked till golden brown.
   As it happened, I had 1 1/2 pounds of good chopped chuck in the house, lots of good parmesan, organic milk, organic nutmeg, fusilli, garlic, onions, tomatoes, tomato paste, red wine and butter and organic flour (I'm up to organic flour for goodness sake! Don't I get a boyscout badge for this sort of shopping?????).
   Right now, the pastitsio is in the oven. We somehow evolved from a hot ham and cheese sandwich on good sesame french bread--one of my favorites--to white shrimp and clam sauce on vermicelli, to lamb tajine on couscous to pastitsio.
   And that's how dinner gets made around here!