Have Waffle Iron, Will Eat

I know how fortunate I am to have a husband who does all the grocery shopping. Dan actually likes going to the supermarket, whereas I hate it. We would probably spend twice as much on food if I were the one to do the shopping, because I have no patience for coupons, sales, specials, etc. I see it, it looks tasty, it goes in my cart. On top of that I engage in some “aspirational” shopping, meaning I aspire to cook a gourmet meal, and will buy all the (expensive) components, but my ambition fades even as I unpack the groceries. We end up having Cheerios for dinner while the artichokes wither.

This is a lot like when I was convinced I could not live another day without a stand mixer. I’ve used it at least twice in 5 years, so…that’s good, right?

Dan is a coupon clipping maniac. He knows what, where and when specific items are on sale, he knows about double coupon days and BOGOs (buy one get one free, for you novices). Dan goes to no fewer than 4 different grocery stores over the course of a week or two. His big shopping trip is on the weekend, but he loves to drop by once or twice during the week too. Dan loves the clearance baskets with dented cans and otherwise questionable merchandise, and he eats out of date food too, as I blogged about here.

The thing is, Dan spends an inordinate amount of time at the grocery store. He is like the husband who went out for a gallon of milk and never came back…except thank goodness he does come back, eventually. So far.

Yet for all of this, we have little by way of substantive food in the house. We have cereal, crackers, lots of condiments, pickles (they were on sale so we have 3 jars of them at the moment), a random bag of frozen peas and some English muffins. We have peanut butter, does that count? Is the grape jelly a food group or just a condiment? Hard to say.

I guess technically the cans of tuna and vegetarian vegetable soup are substantive food, but, a sole small can of tomato paste is not. Ditto for the out of date waffle mix, because we don’t even have a waffle iron. We have toothpicks-a whole jar of them in rainbow colors. We also have paper muffin tin liners, flour, and baking soda that is likely past it’s prime, but, for real, I’m going to bake something from scratch? What shall I make, frozen pea and peanut butter muffins?

Dan would say I’m being too dramatic; we have plenty of food in the house. He counts the frozen soy dogs, which I guess is fair, but I only count them if we have buns to put them on. He’ll also remind me that we still have one precious bottle of unfiltered artisan olive oil from our trip to Italy last year. So tonight for dinner it’s pickle muffins and soy dogs, with a side of olive oil and withered artichokes on toothpicks.