Last week I decided to bust out the Ghirardelli raspberry-filled chocolates that I found in the cabinet next to the laksa. Same stratum, probably around the same age. They have not kept quite as well, despite being billed on the package as "Moments of Timeless Pleasure," but it's chocolate and I'm going to eat it and enjoy it.
In normal times, most of my weekly meals are scripted. Monday is steak night; Tuesday is for eating out; Wednesday is burger night; Thursday is spaghetti night; Friday is the wildcard. Then on weekends, raid day is junk food for lunch (chicken fingers, tater tots, that kind of thing) and a simple dinner. Non-raid day is when I do my grocery shopping for the week, and it’s also pork chop night.
You could say I’m in a rut, but I like my rut; the food is good and it’s also good not to have to figure out what to cook every day.
Anyway, quarantine has changed all that. Being home all day means more meals to prepare (no Starbucks for breakfast, no soup + croissant from the corner sandwich shop for lunch), and I’m also not shopping for steak and burger patties every week. So in lieu of my normal meal cycle I’ve been doing a lot of rummaging around in the back of cabinets. It’s like a weird kind of spring cleaning.
It’s also a weird kind of gratitude exercise. I never appreciated all this back-catalog stuff when I could leave the house and go grocery shopping whenever I wanted. But now, I uncover a box of cheesy scalloped potatoes in the recesses of a cabinet and it’s a happy event. (“Better if used by 12/8/16.” Look, for a dry shelf product, these dates are advisory to the point of being meaningless. It was still quite good.)
And there’s lots more stuff back here! Gravy mix for biscuits and gravy. Pizza crust mix (omg yes). Dry fried prawn sauce (what even is this? well, the picture looks good). Café mocha drink mix (useless in normal circumstances, a luxury now). Pasta roni—okay, I can’t pretend to be excited about the pasta roni, even to myself. But I'm nearly out of real pasta, so it’ll probably wind up on the menu sooner or later. Cabinets try hard every day, but they aren’t infinite.
edit: I can’t make pizza because my roommate ate the last three jars of pasta sauce >:(
edit 2: this mocha is amazing though. literally a moving-in gift from my parents. thanks guys!
I love this XD In normal times I meal plan whatever I feel will sound good and we get the groceries for it that week! Since this whole thing started I started meal planning based on what we have in our cabinets. It's led to some weird stuff (we made tins of sardines into fish cakes) but we had some surprisingly good things in our cabinets that we hadn't touched! And I've been able to plan meals for another 3 weeks, so I'm happy for that, even if a lot of them are just pasta with sauce or instant potatoes XD
@Cayst Nice! I haven't really been meal planning since this all began, everything is kinda spur-of-the-moment.
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