Restaurant Wars

Surgery made me lazy.  Ok, laziER.

I haven’t cooked dinner more than once a week in I don’t know how long.  The amount of money we’ve spent on take-out and eating out could have purchased a new air conditioner so we wouldn’t have to suffer through another heatwave like we had earlier this summer.

The amount of food that we’ve wasted because I bought the groceries intending to make the dinners that it turned out I was too lazy to make for real is disgusting.  Mostly it’s produce that has been wasted because I have not one but two refrigerators with freezers and another stand alone freezer.  Wanna know the problem with too many freezers?  It is also possible to waste frozen food.  Freezer burn claimed a lot of stuff in my freezer too.

I needed a plan.  A cold-turkey kick the habit nip it in the bud program to stop the insanity.

So this week?  There will be no eating out.  At all.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I know, that doesn’t sound hard for most people.  I realize that most people don’t let themselves get to this degree of lazy, but I always said I was speshul.   You just didn’t know how speshul.

Ok, so really this plan is actually going to be in effect for longer than a week, I just didn’t tell anyone else that so let’s keep that little tidbit to ourselves, mmkay?

In preparation for this turning over of a new leaf I went grocery shopping today, the kind of grocery shopping that requires an advanced clean-out of the fridge, which I did the night before.  Because what makes sense after wasting a colossal amount of food more than going out to buy more, right?  That was my thinking, exactly.

I got up early this morning.  It was only 8:00-ish.  On a Saturday.  Really I deserve a medal just for that because come on.  Who get’s up before 9:00 on Saturday?

Only the truly dedicated, that’s who.

I went to Winco.  That’s right – this was the real deal.  The bag-it-yourself, get shoved out of the way of the lady wanting potatoes, small children with grubby paws in the bulk bins kind of shopping.  It’s not pretty, but it’s effective.

I had my list and I filled that cart.  I mean I filled it.  In my defense, about a quarter of the cart was taken up by my stacks of reusable bags because I?  Am a friend to the environment, yo.  Still, I’m a pro.  I’m such a pro that I had those groceries bagged and tagged in under 10 minutes.  I may be lazy but I got skillz.

On the way home I stopped at another store for the items that I couldn’t get at the Winco.  One of the things I found on sale at this store was chicken bewbs.  For $.77 a pound.  SCORE!  But they were on the bone.  And I’m lazy, remember?  Since I was turning over a new leaf and all I bought two packages, which I schlepped home with the rest of my loot.

It took me 45 minutes just to unpack and put away most of it.  I had to re-arrange the pantry to get the rest crammed in, and there may have been a pair of pliers involved.  I was on such good behavior, partially fueled by the amount of freezer burned food in my trash, that I re-packaged all of the meat I bought so it wouldn’t happen again.  Marked with dates even!

Then I broke out the knives.  I actually took the time to bone and skin around 20 chicken breasts, and I only stabbed myself once.  I packaged those into meal-sized bundles and put them in the freezer.

But wait!  Because waste is my new enemy I tossed all of the bones in the bottom of my stock pot, threw in carrots, celery, onion, water, and a bouquet garni and I made stock from scratch.

Where’s that freaking medal?

My house smelled like yummy goodness all afternoon.  My reward for all of my hard work was that I used some of the stock to make risotto for dinner and it tripped the cheesy fantastic.

It was a grand way to start off the week of no restaurants.  We will see if I keep skipping along with resolve or if I cave to the lure of the easy button.