mystery meals

My left felt dull. It lacked mystery and adventure. So I went to the grocery store. Tucked in between the bottled drinks and packaged meats was a cart labeled “marked down for quick sale.”
Hidden among the tired boxes of cereal, dented cans of creamed corn and battered bags of chips were unlabeled cans and plastic tubs of food.
I picked up a can about the size of tomato sauce usually comes in that was labeled 10 cents and shook it. The contents sloshed too much to be tomato sauce. Puzzled, I set it in my cart.
The cylindrical plastic tube with the 50 cents label was obviously frosting, but what flavor? I thought about that a while before deciding that any kind of flavor went with vanilla cake and placed it beside the tin of fluid something.
The oval plastic bowl was stamped with a code hinting it was “ckn.” Anyone in poultry country automatically thinks of chicken, right? But chicken what? Soup, stew, dumplings?
“For a quarter, I’ll gamble that someone might like it,” I said to myself and dropped it beside the frosting.
Nestled in a corner was a tiny label-free can that is usually crammed with bland sausages. I added it to my cart and headed for the check out.
Fending off the questioning looks of the checker, I declared, “I decided to see what my 14-year-old would say if I walked in with a sack of mystery food and declared it was the basis of supper.”
The clerk smiled, “Well this is frosting ..” she twisted the can around to the one-inch square of label that remained and found some tiny letters declaring the flavor.
She started to read he flavor of the contents to me. “No, don’t tell me. It’s supposed to be a surprise,” I exclaimed.
She helpfully tore off the remnant of the label.
The budget didn’t break with the few cents necessary to pay for my mystery meal.
My daughter was just getting home from school as I drove in the driveway.
She looked at the plastic sack of groceries and began pulling out the wrapper-less containers.
“What is this stuff?”
“That is our supper. Guess what you think it is. Then we will open’em up and see what we really have and figure out some kind of meal.”
She shrugged off my guessing game, sloshed the little tin around, negated all my ideas and opened it up.
Tiniest tin of milk I’ve ever seen.
The frosting was dark chocolate.
CKN proved to be a dish of dumplings, gravy and chicken.
The obvious can of bland sausages held washed-out sausages I smashed into a sandwich spread.
The cats got the milk, although afterwards I realized it would have enriched the cake mix with little effect on the flavor, especially the rich frosting.
The chicken dumplings were micro-waved along with a few leftovers.
With a tossed salad, it all graced our table for three and supper was served. As always, since my sons have left home, we had more than enough to eat. The three of us eat a lot of leftovers with an occasional mystery meal for variety.