Adventures OUTSIDE the Apartment!!!
Oct. 17th, 2002 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Ok, that was exciting.
Colonial Pets had no light bulbs (well... nothing smaller than 100W... and only in red-- i prefer purple) but their crickets were the same massive robust kind as up at petland, so i guess they improved their stock.
The grocery store was a madhouse. It was stuffed full of old people-- the parking lot was entirely full, and the aisles all clogged with senior citizens inspecting the produce, debating between au gratin and scalloped instant potatoes, pondering the nutritional supplements, comparing dates on the milk, staring blankly into middle distance, etc. So my choice of shopping times was bad... but it was strangely entertaining for all that. In the checkout line I was behind a middle-aged man with a paunch who was buying only Maruchan Instant Cup-A-Noodles (the kind of ramen that come in styrofoam cups) and little cans of Vienna sausages. (reminds me of a joke from the book by Stephen Ambrose aboutthe B-17 bombing squadron based out of Italy in WWII-- Wild Blue-- "Tell Vienna we'll stop bombing them if they'll stop sending us their sausages.") It was grim, and I wondered who would actually enjoy that kind of diet. But then, I've never actually had Vienna sausages, so...
Today, experimentally, I mostly bought boxes and cans of things. Tuna Helper, Chicken Helper, dried peas for pea soup later on, a bread mix and some little disposable bread tins, tuna fish, stuff like that. So if I don't get around to making all of it, it won't just go bad in Dave's fridge while he eats cheap Chinese takeout. He hates leftovers but loves food. Go fig.
My problem is I don't really know how to cook for just two people. So I'm trying, today, to cook a scaled-down batch of that white chili recipe I posted yesterday. Hm. It could be difficult; I don't really know the recipe at all. I only have it because some friend of Dave's mom e-mailed it to her in Microsoft Word format, and her Mac couldn't open it no matter how hard Dave tried. So she e-mailed it to him, he e-mailed it to me, I opened it, saved it as a .txt document, and pasted the text into the body of the email just in case my PC managed to fuck it up somehow for all the Macs involved. And it arrived both ways, so they were happy. I dunno if that got me any points, or my operating system for that matter, but at least I felt useful, and got a copy of the recipe to boot.
I couldn't get a small enough thing of chicken, either, so I'm going to save half the chicken to make something with Chicken Helper, and stick the chicken in the freezer and hope it doesn't go bad. Eek.
I was going to make fresh bread to go with this chili, but I could not for the life of me find baker's yeast at the Shop-Rite in Bayonne, and I was damned if I was going to go ANOTHER place to try and find it. I barely escaped from my life from that hag-ridden den of depravity (as I was making my getaway, I watched an old man back his car with surprising speed straight into the front of the car directly behind him, with lots of crunching noises, and listened to another old man curse him out with surprising lung power. Neither of them should have been out in public unsupervised... Fortunately nobody was in the second car, as it was parked, so I guess nobody was hurt, unless the first guy's heart gave out. But he actually managed to lift the front of the second car off the ground with his bumper, that's how hard he hit it. Jesus Christ. Heaven preserve me from thinking I can still operate a motor vehicle when I'm like that. It's bad enough now.
I'm hungry. Time for lunch. What shall I eat? Hmmmm... Time to go check out those groceries and see what I actually got. Yum!
Colonial Pets had no light bulbs (well... nothing smaller than 100W... and only in red-- i prefer purple) but their crickets were the same massive robust kind as up at petland, so i guess they improved their stock.
The grocery store was a madhouse. It was stuffed full of old people-- the parking lot was entirely full, and the aisles all clogged with senior citizens inspecting the produce, debating between au gratin and scalloped instant potatoes, pondering the nutritional supplements, comparing dates on the milk, staring blankly into middle distance, etc. So my choice of shopping times was bad... but it was strangely entertaining for all that. In the checkout line I was behind a middle-aged man with a paunch who was buying only Maruchan Instant Cup-A-Noodles (the kind of ramen that come in styrofoam cups) and little cans of Vienna sausages. (reminds me of a joke from the book by Stephen Ambrose aboutthe B-17 bombing squadron based out of Italy in WWII-- Wild Blue-- "Tell Vienna we'll stop bombing them if they'll stop sending us their sausages.") It was grim, and I wondered who would actually enjoy that kind of diet. But then, I've never actually had Vienna sausages, so...
Today, experimentally, I mostly bought boxes and cans of things. Tuna Helper, Chicken Helper, dried peas for pea soup later on, a bread mix and some little disposable bread tins, tuna fish, stuff like that. So if I don't get around to making all of it, it won't just go bad in Dave's fridge while he eats cheap Chinese takeout. He hates leftovers but loves food. Go fig.
My problem is I don't really know how to cook for just two people. So I'm trying, today, to cook a scaled-down batch of that white chili recipe I posted yesterday. Hm. It could be difficult; I don't really know the recipe at all. I only have it because some friend of Dave's mom e-mailed it to her in Microsoft Word format, and her Mac couldn't open it no matter how hard Dave tried. So she e-mailed it to him, he e-mailed it to me, I opened it, saved it as a .txt document, and pasted the text into the body of the email just in case my PC managed to fuck it up somehow for all the Macs involved. And it arrived both ways, so they were happy. I dunno if that got me any points, or my operating system for that matter, but at least I felt useful, and got a copy of the recipe to boot.
I couldn't get a small enough thing of chicken, either, so I'm going to save half the chicken to make something with Chicken Helper, and stick the chicken in the freezer and hope it doesn't go bad. Eek.
I was going to make fresh bread to go with this chili, but I could not for the life of me find baker's yeast at the Shop-Rite in Bayonne, and I was damned if I was going to go ANOTHER place to try and find it. I barely escaped from my life from that hag-ridden den of depravity (as I was making my getaway, I watched an old man back his car with surprising speed straight into the front of the car directly behind him, with lots of crunching noises, and listened to another old man curse him out with surprising lung power. Neither of them should have been out in public unsupervised... Fortunately nobody was in the second car, as it was parked, so I guess nobody was hurt, unless the first guy's heart gave out. But he actually managed to lift the front of the second car off the ground with his bumper, that's how hard he hit it. Jesus Christ. Heaven preserve me from thinking I can still operate a motor vehicle when I'm like that. It's bad enough now.
I'm hungry. Time for lunch. What shall I eat? Hmmmm... Time to go check out those groceries and see what I actually got. Yum!
recipes if you want 'em
About the chicken--I learned last year that chicken DOES go bad after about a week in the freezer. Just so you know... :)