Food Backlog

Getting overwhelmed and 'backed up' seems to be a part of modern life here in the States. Everywhere, possibly? Voicemails back up, emails breed like rabbits on viagra, to-do lists build up, household repairs keep getting tacked on to the list.

And now food can go on the list. I'm getting food backlog now. Food that I planned to make but was so tired that I persuaded everyone that having a 'snacking' dinner of fruits and vegetables was really a fun and exciting new thing and not a desperate attempt by their mother to avoid cooking. Sometimes it even works if I have enough cookie cutters and gaily colored plates and bowls (They're mismatched, but they secretly make non-cooked food sparkle).

However, the food that I 'planned to make' for a meal will go bad if I don't make it soon. And if I avoid cooking for a couple lunches and a dinner, then I have three meals worth of food that I have to make.

I'll tell you the truth. Normally? I'm a horrible person. I'm the type of person that frugal people gather together in mobs to hunt down and lynch.

I usually just freeze the food, or it goes bad and I throw it away.

Just saying that means that my own mother can never read this blog or she's obligated to come over here and bring some Irish pain down on my ungrateful, food wasting behind.

You have to understand. This is a woman who used to go out to to our rented back yard to gather fruit, underneath the rented plum tree that we secretly loathed because all it did was grow plums and then wait for you to walk underneath so it could drop the over-ripe balls of goo on your head. Or right before your feet so you stepped in it.

My mother, on the other hand, would pick up every plum that had fallen, bring it inside, and cut off the 'bad spots' before keeping the rest. For me, the entire plum was the bad spot. But my mother has some supernatural ability to figure out which parts are 'full of deadly botulism spores that will kill you in ways too gruesome for an NC-17 movie' and which parts are 'getting ready to spawn bacteria, but don't quite have the numbers yet.'

I know this because she will then eat the plums, and she never dies in gruesome horrible ways. Personally, I view eating the fruit that has grown that soft as a sort of gruesome death, anyway.

So you can imagine her view of my food-wasting ways. Evil is a mild word for it. I would be smacked with dollar bills until I'd seen the error of my ways. While 'The Price is Right' played in the background.

She would be so proud of me now.

Because since we're buying nearly everything organic, or non-GMO, and have to get some rather exotic foods to boot, our grocery bill has almost tripled. I look at the grocery bills, then at the food, and I think, "Oh no WAY am I wasting this. It cost too much!!"

See, it just took more pain in my pocketbook for me to become a penny-pinching food-miser.

But that means that tomorrow is the day of cooking. Cooking D-Day. I need to make vegetable stock, and then use that stock to make two different types of soup (butternut and acorn squash), and then I need to make dinner as well, which is teriyaki burgers with coconut aminos and organic ground beef and pineapple and gluten free biscuits which we'll adapt and see how it goes.

I expect it'll take me from 1 am to 11pm, at my skill level. A new world record in slow cooking that's supposed to be fast cooking.

I used to think that catching up on my email was time consuming.

It doesn't feel all that hard anymore.