Day 142: Food Network

I know it's very "first world" but I am super grateful for the Food Network. Because of it my cooking skills have increased ten-fold. I have grown from Velveeta Mac 'n Cheese and Hamburger Helper to complex dishes with flavors I had never even heard of growing up! It's helped me be brave in experimenting with spices, go "rogue" from the recipe every so often (not so easy for a Type A let me tell you), and be willing to expand my food experiences into other cultures outside of the mid-west fare I grew up on. Seriously, the Food Network introduced me to a whole new and fantastic world of cooking and I, and I'm hoping my family, am so grateful.

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Call it a Day

The literal use of this phrase hails from 1838 when the phrase originally was "call it half a day" to mean leaving work early. (source) The modern use of the phrase is to indicate ending something due to false sense of accomplishment.

More bang for your buck

This phrase was used a lot in 1953 but an earlier citation puts it at 1940 in a Metals and Plastics Publications advertisement. Read about it here . The phrase means you get more for your money.

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

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