Ingredients

I still don't know when I'll be making the apricont-rosemary chicken thighs, http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/apricot-rosemary-chicken-thighs-50400000136935/. Maybe Friday night. I'm sure not going to make them Thursday night after sitting through inservice all day. But I think I'll go shopping for the ingredients tomorrow. This recipe will be easy. There's nothing in it that I won't be able to find locally, and I'll use my own homegrown rosemary and parsley. But sometimes it isn't always this easy. I've gone out of town many times looking for ingredients. Rarely have I had to go any further than the Lakes. However, there have been a few instances in which I had to order ingredients online. This is the sort of thing we have to deal with living in such a rural area.

This recipe, includes one of my favorite ingredients, almonds. I love almonds whether they're raw out of the shell or baked into cookies. One of the things many people don't know is that if you are cooking with almonds, you really want to roast them in the oven a bit; otherwise, they are sort of plastic and lacking flavor, but once you've roasted them, they are crunchy and have that sweet nutty taste.

Once a long time ago, I don't remember when or where, I heard almond pronounced (ah-muh nd). I was curious and looked it up in the dictionary, and sure enough, the phonetic pronunciation was with the "ah." So, of course that's the way I started pronouncing it. My brothers gave me such a hard time about this, and they still do. I kept telling them to look it up, and they wouldn't, and I wasn't about to shove a dictionary in their faces. Now I see that at dictionary.com, they include multiple pronunciations; however, at this point in my life, I'm going to stick with my "ah."