Since we live quite a ways from town and the grocery stores there, the high school teachers only go shopping once a month. We go together on the first Monday of every month, giving the highschoolers that day off of school, and buying enough food in town to last us through the month until our next shopping day. It's not a bad plan, but for my first "shopping-for-a-month" trip, I was rather intimidated. I have never had to shop for a whole month before! What happens if I run out of food? So I carefully plotted out exactly how much food I use in a week, multiplied each item by four, and figured that would probably be what I would use in a month. And I was right.
However. (I hate howevers) The month was not actually a month. No, this last sneaky month was MORE than a month. The first Monday of January happened to fall not on a respectable number like the 1st or the 2nd of the month, but rather on the 6th. The SIXTH! That is a whole week past the four-week-mark that I used for my estimations. And let me just say, I was REALLY good at estimating. On the 31st of December we began to run out of every single staple in my cupboard. Vegetable oil, eggs, sugar, margarine, butter, noodles, all canned goods, cheese, I watched sadly as they each were fully consumed, one by one. Did I mention what an irritatingly good estimator I am? By the 6th, we had made it a week on…. well, I'm not completely sure what we ate that week. Mostly potatoes. And borrowed things. By the time our shopping trip finally rolled around, I was SO ready. Incidentally, Rachel, the other high school teacher, had done much the same thing and had also had a week of staring blankly at her bare cupboards wondering if there was a new way to cook potatoes.
We enthusiastically set about shopping. FOOD! BUY ALL THE FOOD!!!! By the time we were done going to every store we could think of (because we were out of something from each of them), the back of our land cruiser was so full we could barely fit the last grocery bags in. I got home and put the food away and began to realize that I may have gone slightly overboard. But I didn't regret it. t poked food into every nook and cranny in my kitchen, gleefully thinking of all the non-potato meals I could now make.
However, there was still some food to come. I had, along with my neighbor and some other ladies on station, ordered some meat and eggs from a mission station down the road. However, they emailed telling us that they currently did not have any cows that were ready to butcher, and so they would not be able to fill our order for some time. Well, we still needed eggs and at least SOME meat, so we decided to go ahead and drive over there and pick some up just to hold us over until such time as they could fulfill our order. I got a case of eggs (9 dozen), a couple chickens, and some little packages of mystery cuts of beef that they had lurking in their freezer. (Tomorrow we find out what "schnitzel beef" is).
That afternoon, after we got back home, we got a text from that mission station, informing us that our order was ready after all and we were welcome to come pick it up the next day. (Where did they find a cow???) SO, not only did we have our "hold us over" meat and eggs, we also had our entire order as well!
Needless to say, my kitchen is now stuffed to the brim with food. Canned food, frozen food, bagged food, vegetables, meat, eggs, pasta. But not one potato. And I think I'm ok with that.
