Trivial details

As the scope of our world has shrunken somewhat, small details become more obvious.  This feeds right in to my head full of useless trivia. 

This week, I've come across a new word which is rarely used but some of you may remember it from the Watergate era.  During the hearings, the inimitable Sam Ervin found the possibility that the Nixon Whitehouse was using charity as a shield for their activities preposterous, so he posed this question to the witness - "Are we to believe that the [Committee to Reelect the President] was an eleemosynary institution that gave $45,000 to burglars simply because it felt sorry for them?"  After the laughter died down in the room, Ehrlichman replied "I'm afraid that I'm not your best witness on that, Senator."  Indeed not.  LOL

This delightful word, eleemosynary, turns out to be useful in another way.  I had heard it spoken and so I had no idea how it was spelled.  In an effort to figure out what this word was, I turned to Google and entered my best guess based on pronunciation 'iliamossenary.'  And then, a rare phenomenon occurred.  A fun internet puzzle is to try to find a word or phrase which stumps Google and comes up with nothing.  Google is pretty sophisticated at this point and will usually suggest some likely alternative with suggested pages.  But this misspelling did the trick - no hits returned and no suggested alternatives.  So cool to stump Google!  I had to guess a few other spellings to find the actual word I had heard.

Back to our main topic of food, I've been paying more attention to the ingredients I use in my normal dishes.  So when it calls for cheese, I make sure to buy the extra sharp cheddar or the more expensive Romano to add a flavor kick.  Or we add Canadian savory to the eggs in the morning for a little more pizzazz.

Have you been paying more attention to small things in your cooking or to other things during isolation?