Seemingly I have become a food-hoarding loon.
Now, my being a hoarder will not be news to most of you (although when it comes to yarn I prefer to think of myself as a collector rather than a hoarder. It's perfectly normal. Shut up.) however at some point in the last few years I seem to have been unable to remember how much of anything I have in my pantry.
I don't shop like most North American folks that I know do. I don't do one big shopping trip and fill up the freezer once every month or two and then thaw stuff and cook it. I shop almost every day. I don't ever freeze meat; I buy what we're going to use that day and then use it and then the next day buy what we need. I'll buy enough lunch meat for my husband to take to work for two or three days. I seldom freeze bread unless we get a deal on a huge bag of buns or something; I buy what we need for a couple of days and then we use it and then I buy fresh again. Same with fruit and vegetables; the only frozen veg. I will buy is peas. Because despite my commitment to fresh food, I love frozen peas. (Cooked, of course. I'm not that mental. Yet.)
A couple of years back, I ran out of Bisto gravy powder. I don't think you can get it in the US, or if you can it's not as common as it is here. It's just basically powder that you use to add to stock to make gravy. My daughter loves gravy on mashed potatoes (and who wouldn't be? Ermagherd, you'd be a fool not to) and so I always keep some on hand.
Always. Except for That One Day. So I had to run out at something stupid like 11pm to get some so that my kid could have mashed potatoes and gravy in the middle of the night. Don't all families eat that in the middle of the night? Don't all mothers do that for their kids? If not, then they should. It's the Right Thing To Do.
Apparently it scarred me and I got it in my head that we had NO BISTO IN THE HOUSE and I bought some every time I went grocery shopping. Twice a week. For a couple of months. It wasn't quite that bad but I ended up with something like eight or ten boxes of it before I realized I'd gone overboard.
So then I stopped. Well, actually I only stopped when Mr. Assmuppet went shopping with me one night and I went to put a box of Bisto in my basket and he said "Um, honey? Don't we have quite a lot of that? Put it back. BACK AWAY FROM THE BISTO!" or something of the sort and I realized that I might have gone a little overboard.
Yeah. It costs about $6 a box and we were completely broke and I was trying to figure out how to feed us for the week ... with $60 worth of gravy powder in the pantry. Go, me.
And then a few weeks later I realized we were out of butter one day and well ... yeah. We ended up with six pounds of it in the fridge. Or maybe eight.
And then there was the terrifying potato debacle. I think we managed to eat them all before they sprouted. We are very fond of those little tiny white-skinned nugget potatoes. For a few weeks we were very, very fond of them. VERY.
And now, this month my problem is carrots. I realized when I got home after work last night that we have six bags of carrots in the fridge. Two bags of field carrots, two bags of organic baby carrots and two bags of regular baby carrots.
There are also about five bags of coffee beans in the fridge and in the freezer.
I may be a lunatic, but if anyone shows up and wants potatoes and gravy (yes, I've sort of stocked up on both again) and a cup of coffee and a bowl of carrots in the middle of the night; I'm set.
And there's enough yarn for everyone. C'mon over.
