When Joe's around, I cook stuff. Whole chickens, pudding and pie crusts and bread and all sorts of other things from scratch, rice pilaf, apple oatmeal, disgusting apricot-pumpkin brownies. I have so much cooking stuff that most of my moving boxes are labeled "KITCHEN." When we go to the grocery store, Joe likes to check the utensil aisle to make sure I already own at least one of everything they sell.
If it's in the kitchen, I've got it covered.
Until Joe leaves, and I'm alone, and I decide that any food that takes more than 4 minutes to prepare is way too much trouble.
If you pay close attention, you can see each subtly different phase of my transformation from chef to minimalist. Watch:
Day -7 to Day -1 (Right Before He Leaves): My finest hour (other than Thanksgiving, of course.) I'm cooking everything he likes, everything I can think of that he might want. Visits to the grocery store cost an obscene amount. The dishwasher runs three times a day. The fridge overflows with ingredients and leftovers. Still, we go out to eat every few days, making our last visits to our favorite local restaurants.
Ground Zero/Day 0: I come home from dropping Joe off at the airport. I'm distraught, listless, and hungry for comfort. The candy or desserts, if there are any, they go first. Later, I begin to look through the cabinets and realize I don't care enough to actually make anything. I begin to prey on the leftovers.
Day 3: I'm still taking time off from my job. I still burst into tears at the sight of Joe's belongings. My supply of leftovers has grown quite meager, and I will soon have to switch over to freezer food. I let a ray of sunshine into my life by going to Chik-Fil-A for dinner.
Day 5: Still not doing my work, but it's about time I got back to it. I can get through an entire day without having an emotional meltdown, which is good because I really need to go to the grocery store. I'm out of leftovers, out of freezer food, and I haven't had fresh fruit in days. So I go out and buy more frozen food and some fruit. On the way home, I stop at Sonic and get dinner.
Day 8: The final phase begins. The transformation is complete. I've gone back to my job and mostly adjusted to life without Joe. I'm out of fruit again. The previous night, waiting in line at Chik-Fil-A again and brooding over my bank statement, I decide I'm done with fast food for a while. So I go to the grocery store and stock up on fresh fruit, vegetables, milk, eggs, frozen chicken, bread, and tortillas. (And a box of brownie mix.) These will be my staples for the forseeable future. (Except the brownie mix; that's my weekend binge food and will be replaced by something else next weekend.)
So here we are, Day 49. Once a week, to keep myself away from convenience foods and Chik-Fil-A and WaWa, I prepare giant batches of a couple types of food, and I live off of them 'til they start rotting or 'til it's grocery shopping day again. For example, last time Joe was gone, I lived off refried bean burritos for two weeks.
But here's what's on the menu this month:
Breakfast: Sugar-free honey-sweetened yogurt with blueberries and sugar-free granola OR frozen microwaveable greasy hot savory IHOP Scramblers with a side of blueberries to health it up.
Lunch: Chicken salad with grapes and apples. Here's this week's batch:
Alternative lunch OR snack: Two lightly salted hardboiled eggs, and raisins glued to celery sticks with sugar-free peanut butter.
Dinner: Chicken with spicy mayo and lettuce on a tortilla. This week, I ingeniously mixed the chicken with the spicy mayo to eliminate the burden of spending 2 minutes every night preparing the sauce.
Now doesn't that look appetizing?
On the dinner menu a couple of weeks ago was buffalo chicken with bacon and ranch on tortillas, served with celery. It was...kinda gross, and I will probably do it again when I get bored with mayo-based chicken salads.
So, in short, because I can't be bothered to plan meals and cook daily while Joe is gone, I've learned to be efficient. I live off sandwiches and wraps and grapes and celery sticks and watermelon. Sadly, by the time I'm with him again, I'll have completely forgotten how to prepare a decent meal and will have to re-learn how to cook.
At least by then I'll know roughly 27 quick & easy ways to make dinner out of a chicken breast and a tortilla.
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