zonkered.net

Or maybe it’s just me.

I order groceries every other week or every three weeks, depending on how many days I can subsist on tv dinners and/or my default dinner of beans, rice, and sausage tossed together with onion and garlic in a skillet.  I order them because I have no car – otherwise trust me, I’d be headed to my beloved Trader Joe’s on a weekly basis.

It’s a crapshoot to see what I’ll actually be getting out of a given order (see what I did there? switching up the gambling metaphors!) although I can usually make some guesses.  Basic produce items like celery hearts, carrots and lettuce? These are the things that are most likely to be out of stock.  Seriously, I have not received a single head of lettuce in my six months of ordering groceries online.  But sometimes there are glitches that make me wonder what in the hell they were smoking when they put together my order.

Like this week.  I ordered six tv dinners and some frozen vegetables and received…nothing out of the freezer section.  Nada.  Zilch.  As my father put it when I called to wish him a Happy Father’s Day “OH NO! What will you EAT this week?!” (he can snark all he wants – I’d like to see how much cooking he’d do if he got home at 8 pm every night.  Hell, he wouldn’t even cook if he lived alone).

As for the question of what I’ll be eating, well.  I may be trying to set the record for longest-lasting batch of tacos this week.

If your major dinner decision is whether to put black or red beans in your rice and sausage skillet thing.

Yeah, I should probably cook something else this week.

So I have a food blog that I started last July.  It’s mostly pictureless, because I can’t take a decent food picture to save my life, and is full of my frequently and infrequently cooked recipes.

I haven’t posted to it since mid-March.  I’ve only posted to it five times since I started my new job – because I don’t cook anymore.  I get to work at 9 am, and I leave usually around 7 pm.  I might go to the gym after that, or I might go straight home but due to my commute the earliest I get home is around 8 pm.  At that point I don’t want to cook, so I end up only making myself dinner a couple of times a week.   Most of the time anymore dinner is either a Lean Cuisine tv dinner, or its a panini I bought at Grand Central before hopping on the train (and if its a panini, its always the ‘Milano,’ a tomato, mozzarella, and black olive pesto sandwich.  So good.  My addiction to brine-y olives is almost as bad as my addiction to vinegar).

The lack of cooking kind of makes me sad.  I like cooking, especially baking, but it seems like I just don’t have the time anymore.  I could move into the city and shorten my commute but then I’d have to deal with an even tinier kitchen (plus, New York City tax, which is yuck)  so I’m likely to just become a weekend cook.  I’ll probably get used to the idea in time.

Kind of want brownies this weekend though, so maybe that’ll be the goal.  I haven’t stuffed the boys at the office full of chocolate for a while.

I know it’s Starbucks, and my expectations of a natural-looking beverages should be limited, but my green tea latte looks less like something made from tea leaves and more like…distilled nuclear waste.  Or something.

Next time, stick with the chai.

Someone needs to explain to the “chefs” at Pret that porous sandwich bread is not the best medium for a hummus sandwich.  Learn to love the tortilla, people.

I’m thinking eating stuffed jalapeño peppers for lunch was probably not a great idea.  Also, I am getting really sick of all this rain.

I don’t actually have a list of foods that I couldn’t possibly live without, but if I did, salt and vinegar potato chips would definitely be on the list. I spent last night munching on a bag, and every day at lunch I get a small bag with my lunch at Pret. At my last job in White Plains, I used to do the same thing at Quiznos (but Pret’s chips are inarguably better).

But it does make sense, because I am the person with seven different vinegars in her pantry, who always adds an extra splash or two (or three) of cider vinegar to hot german potato salad, and whose lunch order at Pret includes not just the chips but a chicken, mozzarella, tomato and basil baguette with balsamic vinegar.

Clearly, I’m a little obsessed.