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Am I still recuperating from Mythcon and hoping to finish a con report later? I am.

In the meantime we still need to eat. Lunch and dinner food service at Mythcon having consisted largely of A Dozen Ways of Reheating the Same Leftover Chicken, we got a little tired of chicken and I called a moratorium on it for our dinner-making, which I've kept up for 9 days now.

The problem arose of what to do after we were invited to a potluck on Sunday and I volunteered to bring the fruit salad. I had this leftover melon and pineapple, more than I'd want for breakfasts in the time it was still good, and what to do with them? I tried searching online for dinner recipes that included melon, with very little success. A suggestion to put steamed veggies in a hollowed-out melon to impart its flavor was only practical after I finished eating the honeydew, and the results weren't very impressive. An Indian melon curry, recipe found online, seemed beyond my capacity to make from scratch, but there are large Indian groceries here that carry lots of curry mixes, so I went to one of them to look. No luck, and when the clerk offered to help, it turned out that he was handicapped by not being sure what a melon was; he seemed to think it was akin to a kidney bean. I didn't want to risk using some other mix; Indian curries seem to be quite specific.

Then there was the pineapple. What uses pineapple? Sweet and sour! We don't eat pork here, and chicken was out as previously mentioned; how about shrimp? I wound up using this recipe, though I cut out the bell peppers and cherries and substituted other veggies instead, and maltodextrin for sugar (my normal substitute) and organic, no-sugar-added tomato paste for ketchup (for what is ketchup anyway but tomatoes with added sugar and vinegar, both of which are in the recipe already?). This was one of those recipes that was a lot more time and trouble to prepare than to cook, but the results were tasty; a thick sauce, but not goopy or oversweet like many sweet & sours.

Now I have half a can of tomato paste left. Historically, this will sit in the fridge until it turns green. I want to avoid that. What else uses tomato paste? Meat loaf glaze. Off to find a recipe for meat loaf with ground turkey.