I am a full-time employee at The Courier, a daily newspaper. I live with my boyfriend George, our cat Winston and, for a week every month or two, George’s dad, George A. I have learned a lot about cooking from those two men.
We enjoy food, simply said. When it comes to cooking, we don’t stick to a style or ethnicity or even a particular food other than potatoes. I go by a simple rule I learned from George A. “When you start with things you really like, it can’t be bad. It might not be exactly right but it can’t be bad.” That rule has never failed me.
Cooking, while sometimes a chore, still is interesting. I enjoy putting a meal on the table that people will enjoy. It may not be gourmet and it may only take fifteen minutes to bring together, but I want it to be tasty.
George and I start the cooking process — normally at 5 p.m. — by thinking about what we’re hungry for. When you’re hungry and it’s early evening, defrosting the chicken sitting on the bottom of the freezer isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. If we think a day ahead, the meal is easy, if we don’t, it takes a little more thought. I might run down to Fareway to get whatever we have a hankering for, we might do with what we have or we might eat out.
When George A. is home and doing the cooking, he normally has a plan. The roast comes out of the freezer or he goes to the store to get one, along with whatever else he wants to put with it.
Regardless of what we eat and how we eat it, I normally go shopping for all of the major things we need every other week and spend about $120. In between shopping trips I visit the store a couple times a week to get lettuce or potatoes or even the munster cheese I particularly want to melt over a chicken breast that night. Each time I make a little side trip to the store I seldom spend less than $20.
The freezer is filled to the top, the dry goods are well stocked, but eating from the pantry for a week could definitely pose a challenge for the three of us.
The freezer is a smorgasbord of meats and pizza and things saved throughout cooking extravaganzas. Many things were frozen with good intentions. For example, that broth from the Turkey could definitely be use to make a killer soup. In the freezer we have ground beef, a frozen chicken, steaks, pizzas, vegetables, frozen dinners for me when there are no leftovers to take to work, a loaf of bread and a couple casseroles from the last time I spent a day bent over the stove to make some plan-ahead meals. There’s also ice-cream, a daiquiri mix and other miscellaneous odds and ends we may revert to by the end of the week.
On the dry-goods shelves there is an assortment of pasta: spaghetti, rotini and fettucini. Macaroni and cheese, various rice packets, regular rice, instant potatoes and a couple of hamburger meals. There is a shelf with cream of chicken, celery and mushroom soup, cheddar cheese condensed soup, cans of vegetable and vegetable beef soup and clam chowder. On another shelf we keep our fridge extras: ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise. Along with canned tuna and chicken, some cans of corn, beans, peas and many spices, our pantry is complete.
Our freezer holds so much because in our fridge there is a tiny little cubby-hold that makes up the freezer. Otherwise it’s all fridge space.
There aren’t very many staples in our fridge. There are eggs, milk, butter and cheese . We use the fridge to house foods we are in the process of making or in the process of eating. Sometimes there are just too many leftovers to bring with me to work.
There are some carrots and celery in the vegetable drawer, and in the cubby of the fridge we horde the hashbrowns. Normally there are lunch meats for George to brown bag it to work, and yogurt for my breakfast and fruit for snacks, but sadly those are lacking with no trip to the grocery store this week.
This is where the pantry challenge may break us. George will possibly get cheese sandwiches for lunch and my breakfast may consist of the leftover packets of oatmeal floating somewhere in a cupboard. I’m planning on subsisting in the mornings on snacks which flow into the newsroom on an irregular basis and what I may find in the vending machine.
For sides to go with our evening meals, rice and potatoes may get us through the nights, but fresh vegetables and salads will be missing from our table. Potatoes are a staple at our house, but with only half a bag left for three people and one week worth of meals, sides may get left out all together.
At least the week will be interesting.
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