Dear Folks, I know that I've been rambling on about my recent cooking urges but for those of you who aren't aware what's been causing it, here's the reason. For the past number of years I had all but totally lost my appetite and it was all that I could do to force myself to eat little helpings of food three times a day. AND I was losing too much weight. I'm 5'6" and at 114 pounds that equaled a very scrawny woman. That is until my VA doctor prescribed Megace for me to stimulate my appetite and WHOA, did it ever! As a result my interest in food has obsessed me, I've been pigging out on everything and this evening when I weighed myself, I'm now up to 120 pounds. WHOOPEE! I'm still excited about cooking up mouth-watering food and last night I planned this evening's special gourmet meal. Something I hadn't fixed in a number of years. I had unearthed a plastic bag of chicken parts from my freezer and figured they were skinless boneless chicken breasts. Well, at least they were skinless. Last night I put them in the refrigerator to thaw out and all day today I checked my special gourmet "Chicken Loraine" recipe to make certain that I remembered it right. Well in the first place, I found that I no longer had the perfect Pyrex dish to contain the boneless chicken breasts and with the three pieces of chicken that were thawing out, I had an awkward time trying to fit them into some sort of oven proof container. As a result I had to settle for a very deep Pyrex "pot" that would accomodate the three of them on the bottom. When it came time to settle in to doing everything necessary to cook up my gourmet dinner this evening, I followed my simple recipe, poured white Chardonnay wine in the bottom of the pot, sprinkled Parmesan cheese liberally over the chicken and then lavishly dotted the top with butter. Into the oven it went. It was that simple. In the meantime I knew that plain boiled rice was the perfect accompaniment and since I had some already in my freezer, I just thawed it out. But then there was the perfect vegetable to go along with it--sauteed onions and sliced summer squash. I dug out out half the sliced onions from the freezer that I had put in there only a couple of days ago and then dug out the summer squash that I had frozen around Thanksgiving time, sprinkled garlic powder over them and sauteed them in a frying pan. The timing was perfect. The chicken had baked the prescribed number of minutes, I assembled everything on my dinner plate and then dug in. WELL, Houston, we had a bit of a problem with the dinner. In the first place not only wasn't the chicken skinless boneless chicken breasts but it seemed to be something along the lines of skinless large pieces of chicken thighs with the bones and backs still connected. The only way to eat it was to try to pick the meat off the bones. In addition, because they weren't breasts they were underdone and tomorrow I may find that I'll come down with Salmonella poisoning! How were the squash and onions? Frankly they were watery and quite tastless. Well, how about the rice? There wasn't anything wrong with the rice with the exception of what was supposed to be the ultimate sauce poured over it. That would have been the combination of wine, butter and Parmesan cheese. Well, Boys and Girls, guess what? That was also tasteless. Rather than drag this sad tale out any further, let me just give a bit of advice to you. Although you KNOW that you have the perfect recipe to serve to the most elegant company, carefully check out your ingredients first, make certain that they're fresh and make certain you still have the proper baking pan for the chicken. vee