What’s In Your Shopping Cart?

I believe I am a champion grocery shopper. Fresh organic veggies. Check. Fresh basil for pesto. Check.  Salmon on sale. Check. Husband’s favorite cereal? Check. A case of wine (because you really want to earn that 15% discount, right?). Check.

Six bags later and we could open our own gourmet restaurant.

When I was single, I sucked at food shopping. It is hard to cook for one person. It’s even harder when that one person (me) travelled a lot for business. Add living in major city with abundant restaurants along with lots of single friends to hang out with and lots of single men to date, well, you could say eating in was the exception and not the rule.

But now married, the whole food business has been turned on its head. I learned how to shop. And, cook. (And, basically gained 10 pounds on the spot. I hear this story often from former single people now married and cooking most nights.)

However, getting married later in life adds to the change-up. For one, we have very definite ideas about what constitutes real food. We’ve had about 40 years to declare our different tastes. Nothing spotlights this more than around Super Bowl time. (Someone reallly needs to do a study about how much more food is sold due to football.)

This particular Super Bowl Sunday weekend also was special. We were expecting 28 inches of snow (which is about 28 inches more than we ever get).  I – along with the rest of the town – descended upon our various and sundry food stores a few days in advance to basically wipe them clean. I came home with, oh, about eight bags. This is a lot. Remember, there are only two of us. Oh, and one puppy.

But, apparently, I did not get all the right food. This is because yesterday, as the 28 inches of snow began to descend, Husband announced he was going food shopping.

What do we need? I asked.

Snacks for Sunday. He said earnestly. And, out the door he went into the blizzard to hunt down and drag home two tubs of hummus, one tub of guacamole, a bag of  chips, six boxes of various crackers, grapes, more beer (we were down to a measly six), three kinds of gourmet cheeses, a bag of carrots and broccoli for dipping, various fruit drinks, bananas, and I don’t know what else. It was three bags of snacks. For the two of us.

(He also proudly told me that, when he arrived, there was no guacamole anywhere. But, he tracked someone down who was unloading a truck to get the “just-shipped-in” fresh tub.)

We now could be snowed in for about three weeks and never have anything twice. I do believe we have more food in our kitchen than the Harris Teeter has left on its shelves.  I’m not exactly sure what the correlation between football and a sudden surge in appetite, but it’s there. Good thing it’s snowing. We’re gonna need some shoveling exercise.

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