The Covid State of Affairs - Random Thoughts on Food and Groceries

Food... it doesn't last long around here

My husband has taken up cooking. He is looking up recipes on the internet. He told me yesterday that maybe we should buy an Instant Pot. I almost had a stroke. I don't know if it was the fact that I completely lost my shit one night, or the COVID lock-down, or the fact that he is now retired. In any case, the man is making dinner.

I really truly do love my husband but I can't help but poke some fun. Here's the background. The man doesn't... or more like didn't... cook. He thinks operating the stove is like programming a nuclear missile. When J was a toddler she used to call the gas station the pizza store and I kept correcting her. Finally one day when I corrected her, she says, "Well, that's where Daddy goes to buy pizza for us." Yep, he'd been buying gas station pizza for the fam while I was at work. He and I have been together since we were 18 years old. The man doesn't cook.

I have always enjoyed cooking. Growing up, being a house wife was on my short list of "what I want to be when I grow up." House wife or farmer, those were my aspirations. We'll save farmer for another post. I became a latch-key child at 8. Both my parents had to work to support our family and they could not afford childcare. My entire childhood I wanted to come home from school to a mom with an after school snack, then play time, then dinner. This is what I saw in my friends' lives. Instead I was given a generous $7.50 a week allowance to care for myself and my younger brother after school. So long story short. My mom can't cook... or keep house. Her place is still a disaster. I thought being a house wife would be the perfect job. I mean, what could be better than staying home all day to tidy the house, cook nice meals, and craft? OK, so I forgot about the whole having kids and taking care of them part. In any case, life didn't turn out that way and the world has moved on to where almost everyone works. Fast food is the current way of life but I have always cooked since a young age and I have always wanted nice things on a shoestring budget.

Fast forward to March. Like I said in my previous post, we had plenty of toilet paper and dry goods so I didn't run out to the grocery store to stock up on things. My plan was to avoid the store for a couple weeks. Let things cool down. People can only buy so much toilet paper and Lysol. I felt that once their homes became saturated with supplies the insanity would stop and the stores would have time to restock. Admittedly, I'm a control freak. I do ALL our grocery shopping because frugality is ingrained in me and I cannot STAND to pay, gulp, full price for anything. It doesn't matter that we're millionaires, saving a couple cents here and there is an atomic habit that I do daily. However... now with COVID and all, one of my biggest fears is that I am an asymptomatic carrier. I mean I'm sure I'm swimming in that stuff all day at the hospital, and I want to avoid spreading it around as much as possible. Therefore, I had NO desire to go grocery shopping. So... I sent my husband to the store one day for a couple things. I believe ground beef was on that list. I always, always, ALWAYS shop with a list! If it's not on the list, we're not getting it. When he came back you'd a thought it was the Apocalypse. The shelves were bare. I already knew that. I'd seen everybody's Facebook posts. He's not on social media. He had no idea. Instead of ground beef he came home with... a package of turkey legs and some huge hunk of pork with a bone in it that I had never seen before. He proclaimed, almost in a panic, "This was the only protein in the store so I bought it!" Ummm... so we're not starving. We have a lifetime supply of frozen venison in the basement. I had no idea how to cook either of these things that he so proudly procured so I chucked them in the freezer... and decided I'd do my own grocery shopping.

There are pros and cons to having your whole family at home all day. I had really cut down on my cooking and baking with just me and my husband at home. Now that there were actually more people to eat the stuff I started baking more. My husband and I had pretty much stopped buying bread because he has been on a diabetic diet, watching his carbs, and I had been dabbling in Keto. Now with kids at home I started making bread. I love baking bread. It's the feeling of the dough coming alive in your hands when you knead it. It goes from mush to a springy ball.

Honey Oatmeal Bread

The kids love macarons. I love them too but they are like $2.00 a macaron so I started working on my macaron making skills. The hard part about macarons is getting the consistency of the batter just right before you pipe them.

Coffee Macarons with Nutella Filling

I finally ventured back into the grocery store on March 28th. I needed more blanched almond flour for the macaron making. I now wish I had taken a picture of the baking aisle that day. There was not a scrap of flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda or yeast to be found. I was, well, bemused. Who knew that so many people baked! And yeast? I can count on one hand the number of people I know that bake bread. Was everyone staying at home and baking? Apparently so. Are you?

I found my blanched almond flour without difficulty. I guess almond flour is not a hot commodity. I was also glad that I buy my yeast a pound at a time and my flour and sugar in 50 lb quantities. I generally buy my flour when it goes on sale for $0.99 for a 5lb bag. Same with sugar and brown sugar and confectioners' sugar. Aldi runs this sale most often but Meijer does it a couple times a year. In any case I still have plenty of baking supplies. 

The bare shelves at the grocery store made me wonder - why are people doing this? Do they really think they're going to run out of food? No, I think it's because stocking up makes them feel like they are doing something. COVID is an invisible enemy. At least by stocking up for the fight they are preparing, doing something. You can see your stockpile. Things you can see are reassuring.

So now the cons of having your family at home all day. They eat. And eat. And EAT! At one point it was starting to be like the Hunger Games at our house. Whole pints of ice cream disappearing in an evening, then screams of "Who ate all the ice cream!!" Keeping up with their appetites can be exhausting at times. I would come home from the grocery store and it would be like vultures descending on the food I was unloading.

The night I lost my shit and the aftermath...
Like I said earlier, I do all the cooking. It really is my fault too due to my control issues. Generally though, I try to batch cook things so we always have a variety of left overs for my family to graze on. This was especially true when the kids were in school because we hardly ever had the time to sit down together, all four of us, for a meal. Since the kids have left home both girls are used to buying their own groceries and cooking their own meals. They are enjoying the fact that they don't have to do this any more but I also know that they're quite capable of feeding themselves. I came home one night after a 12 hour day at work. 7 am to 7 pm, so by the time I drove home and took a shower it was 8 pm. Work has not been terribly busy but it's just tiring being there. I generally like to come home and stretch out for a while and have some quiet time before I interact with anyone. I had just stretched out on the couch and J comes around the corner and asks if I'm making dinner for everyone. Ummm... no, it's 8pm. I figured everyone had already eaten. OK, she goes in the kitchen and starts rummaging around for food. Two seconds later my husband comes downstairs. Hey hon, are you making us dinner? Yep, I lost my shit. What resulted was a chart of who makes dinner on what nights. Plus, I told my husband he had to figure out how to cook that piece of pork and those turkey legs he came home with because I had no idea nor did I have the energy to figure it out. He figured it out. Now he wants an Instant Pot.

Having a meal plan has reduced some stress. Everyone knows what food we have. We now have a running grocery list. Everyone writes down what they want from the store for what they're going to cook. Everyone but me has been wanting to leave the house so they take turns getting the groceries. I've given up on getting the best deals. Meijer has stopped printing a grocery ad. The last time I shopped Kroger they were having a $5 off 5 item sale except you couldn't buy 5 of the same item so it added a challenge to getting the deal and I felt bad about shopping the store any longer than I needed to. It's sad though. After 24 years in business my go-to coupon clipping site went out of business this week...

Surprisingly our overall bills actually have been lower over the last month. I think mainly it's because we haven't eaten out, we are driving less, and grocery prices here are still much lower than in Philadelphia (G was using my credit card for her groceries). When I shop my routine is to go to Aldi first and try to get all the produce and dairy on the list there because they consistently have the lowest prices. I hit up Meijer for everything else. When my husband shops he gets everything at Walmart. When my kids shop they get everything at Meijer.

I think overall we are eating better as a family now. It is actually nice to sit down and have a family dinner with everyone here on some day that's not a holiday. These are the family meals I thought we'd have when I was a little girl aspiring to be a house wife. It's too bad that it took a pandemic to make it happen.