Make sure to buy fresh donuts

I saw on the CBS program Sunday Morning that a man named Robert Ligon sold repackaged normal chocolate donuts as low-fat carob donuts. He bought the donuts for 30 cents a piece and resold them for a $1 a piece.

His workers that he hired to repackage and re-label the donuts turned him in for his fraud. He was doing quite well with his scam, but now he is going to prison for it.

I can see how Ligon could do so well convincing people that regular donuts were low fat. My husband, Tom, loves a donut for breakfast with a cup of coffee and is always asking for donuts if there are none in the house.

His dad also ate a donut for breakfast each morning along with a cup of coffee when he was alive.

Tom used to eat a strict macrobiotic diet 30 years ago when he lived in Boston. The macrobiotic diet is eating mainly grains, beans, seeds, nuts, vegetables, cooked fruit and a small amount of animal food such as eggs or fish. Tom told me that he ate the macrobiotic diet strictly for two years until he was chided one day that he never binged from it. A young couple that also ate the macrobiotic diet told Tom that he was being too rigid and asked him if he would come out for donuts and coffee with them. Tom did and he said the donuts and coffee tasted so good that from then on he stopped for them every day before he went to work.

I tried to eat donuts with him in the morning for a while when we were first married, but I just put on weight, and was hungrier an hour later. When I helped Tom dig graves, he would stop at convenience stores for a snack and he usually bought us each a custard-filled fried donut. One day after I ate one of these killer donuts, the button on my pants popped off. I told Tom I had to eat something more substantial, like protein, for a snack instead of a rich donut.

"What should I have gotten you for a snack?" he asked.

"I could eat some nuts or cheese and crackers. I just can't eat donuts like you," I said.

From then on, I brought my own snack and let him chow down on his killer donut.

Donuts can be addicting.

My brother, Steve, isn't a big sweet eater, but the first time he ate a Krispy Kreme donut, he went back and purchased a dozen and before he knew it he had eaten the whole dozen.

"I never eat donuts like that, but I just couldn't stop eating them. I'm not buying them again in such a big quantity," Steve said. That's proof enough to me that donuts can be addicting.

I have a friend who eats only organic foods and she is extremely careful on what she purchases for snacks. One day when our children were at horse back riding lessons she had just come from a health food store and had a packaged natural whole wheat and honey donut. She was eating it when she stopped and realized that there was mold on the "natural' donut and she had eaten the mold.

"Oh no! What is going to happen to me? I ate a moldy donut. What should I take to counteract eating a moldy donut?" she asked.

"The only remedy I know is to go and buy a sugary, white flour donut and eat it. If you are going to eat a donut, eat a donut, don't eat a health food donut," I said.

She laughed and said I was right. We looked at the package that the donut was wrapped in and saw that the expiration date had already passed. She had fallen for buying a so-called "healthy natural donut."

These are some of my reasons of why Ligon made such a killing on those repackaged donuts he labeled as low fat. But a donut is a donut, no matter what the label. At least the label on my friend's whole wheat and honey donut stated that it was fried in vegetable oil and it wasn't low fat. Seeing her eat that moldy natural donut made me hungry for the real thing.

Heck if you are going to be binging, you might as well go for the real thing.

Finally the cold spell has broke

Who would ever have thought that 0 degrees above zero would feel balmy? That's what it felt like this past weekend after the bitter cold days of 20 below zero. So many people had a hard time getting their cars started, keeping their water and drain pipes from freezing, besides just trying to stay warm.

A friend of mine stopped by to visit one evening and he was really cold when he came in the house. His car doesn't have a good heater and he was driving around wrapped up in a sleeping bag. He wasn't wearing his warm boots so his toes were numb. Brr!

I remember driving in our 1972 Volkswagen van and it didn't have much of a heater in it. We didn't go out often after the sun went down in the winter. Whenever we did drive anywhere in the Volkswagen, I had to wrap the kids up in blankets to keep them warm.

My neighbor John always drove Volkswagen bugs. He would be so bundled up in layers that he looked like a bear and you could hardly see his face. I rode with him a couple times in his little bugs when it was bitter cold outdoors. The defrost system didn't work well in the Volkswagen, so the windshield would frost over while he drove.

To keep the windshield free of frost, he drove with one arm out the window holding onto a scraper while scraping the frost off the windshield and steering the car with his other hand. I held my breath the couple times I rode with him and was scared how treacherous it was beside freezing.

My son-in-law David has never felt cold like we had last week before. He grew up in Connecticut and the Washington, D. C. area. He had been living in Los Angeles the past couple of years. This is his first year in Minnesota. My daughter Mary had told him about it getting so cold here that it hurt, but he didn't understand it until last week.

He recently had his birthday and I gave him long underwear and he laughed at the gift. He had said that he didn't want to wear long underwear because then he felt like he had given into the cold. After last week, he saw why we all wear long underwear. He said it was so cold out that his teeth hurt. My son Timmy started to wear two pairs of long underwear when it was so cold and he said that he felt a lot warmer. I thought that sounded like a good idea, so I wore two pairs of my silk long underwear under my wool pants, I felt a lot warmer too. The extra layer made it more bearable to get in and out of the car. I could walk more comfortably across parking lots without the bitter cold wind whipping right through me.

One thing about the cold weather is that we all want to eat more. When I went grocery shopping when it was 20 degrees below zero, Timmy and I had to stop and sit at the deli to eat before we did the grocery shopping because we were so hungry. Usually we can wait until we buy the food and then go home and cook, but we couldn't wait on that cold day. My daughter Mary says she finds that she is hungrier since she moved back to Minnesota from Los Angeles. She keeps a stash of candy and cookies in her desk to nibble on throughout the day.

Even with all the snow we are getting and it is harder to get around, I like it better than when it was so bitter cold. As Tom said, "At least we made it through January, and February is a shorter month. Winter will be over soon."