I have a fatigue, an extreme tiredness: I cannot seem to call forth, from the deep well of my soul, the desire to painstakingly craft a weekly menu. Typically, I do these things on Saturday and then head to the store — along with the rest of Richmond (Carytown Kroger for life!) — on Sunday evening. Recently, on Saturdays I find myself either sleeping or drinking beer and then sleeping. I wake up on Sunday and imagine my surprise when nary a menu exists!

This is not good! Especially when your pregnant wife is happily eating tater tots every time you turn your back.

You can usually tell the level of my menuetic apathy by the level of side dish complexity.

Side Dish Complexity vs. Apathy*

Luckily, I save all my menus from previous weeks. This makes the process of culling recipes from your mind so much simpler in that you don’t; you cull them from a bunch of text files saved on your computer. This hardly leads to a week full of extravagantly new tastes and sensations, but it gets the job done with minimal work. And while your pregnant wife might yammer on about chicken making her want to barf you can rest assured that your foetus is getting the protein it needs to grow a toe or something.

* it took me about four times as long to make the chart as to write this entry.

I look through the Kroger Carytown Weekly Ad so you don’t have to.

Items of note:

• 1/2 gal of Kroger milk - $2
• but why buy that when you can buy Private Selection organic milk for $2.99!
• Kroger brand frozen vegetables - $1 (I’m not sure this is a great deal, plus they didn’t have artichokes, which I needed, but if you’re low on peas or whatever, go to!)
• Private Selection organic canned beans - $0.66 (make some hummus, best snack ever)
• Various kinds of Hunts canned tomatoes are on sale for various prices, but stop by the natural section also, because a bunch of Muir Glen tomatoes are on sale too, and they taste way better (and are better for you)
• Private Selection “salads” - $3.33 (i.e. those corn-boxes of spinach or arugula that Ross is always on about)
• Ground turkey - $2.50 (there must be a turkey surplus, because this keeps going on sale, but I’m not complaining - I just keep making various kinds of turkey burgers
• A bunch of the Kroger brand pasta is on sale too

Produce:

• Strawberries - $2.50
• Blueberries - $2.99
• English cucumbers - $1 ea
• Avocadoes - $1 ea
• Mangoes again - $0.50
• Bartlett pears - $1 ea

Things I have learned today:

1. Buying the reduced priced Tyson boneless, skinless chicken breast (”manager’s special”) (”buy this now bc the sell-by date is tomorrow”) on weeks when I don’t actually need BSCBs saves me a bunch of money. I just throw it in the freezer and it saves me trouble and cash on my next trip!
2. Firefox doesn’t think “arugula” is a word.

When I make dinner I usually spill about a third of it on the counter and a third of it on the stove top. This, understandably, pisses Valerie off. Before, back when the bright ray of environmental knowledge had yet to light upon my life, I would grab about six hundred paper towels and valiantly sop up whatever I could. This cost us a lot of money and, more importantly, the souls of a thousand trees.

So we bought a billion towels! My mom picked up 60 white cotton towels at Costco for 16.95$! That’s 0.28$ per towel! Those Seventh Generation paper towels can cost as much as .02$ per towel, and they only last once. You can reuse these cotton towels hundreds of times.

Of course a modern urban socialite like yourself doesn’t need 60 towels. Splitting a pack of towels like this with three or even six people would leave everyone with plenty for only a couple of bucks.

Sharing bulk packages like this is the way to go.

I have these really nice steel All-Clad pans that are a pleasure to work with; they were a wedding present and probably cost 1B dollars. I assume that if my stove was not a piece of shit I’d have lots of pleasant memories of gently sautéing this or that. But truth is my stove slants, the burners suck, and my life is filled with other similarly first world problems.

Also, did you know that Teflon® is a health risk when heated to over 500°F? Not that you are going to ever cook anything at that temperature, unless you suck at cooking, but still.

Plus the afore mentioned All-Clad frying pan is like 14 inches in diameter and is really way to big for when you want to fry an egg. So many problems. Solution: I bought a cast iron pan. It cost 17$.

AND IT TOTALLY ROCKS!

Listen people. First, if you care, the cast iron distributes the heat so evenly that my shit stove no longer burns bacon on one side. Hurrah!

Second, and more importantly, you just wipe the pan out when you are done. That’s it. It is actually against the rules to use soap/detergent on a cast iron pan. If, by some chance, you forgot to flip your grilled cheese because you were enthralled in The Wire and now it’s formed a molecular bond with the bottom of your skillet, WORRY NOT. I just boil some water in the bottom of the pan*. Boom, problem solved. Read more about caring for cast iron cookware.

Cheap, reliable, easy to clean. What more could you ask for?

* Don’t pour cold water in a hot pan, you’ll crack it.

I cook and Val cleans. This is the way it has been since man first cleaved meat from bone with flint tools. And so it will be forever, amen. To make her life easier, and because I simply must watch The Wire while I cook and cannot be bothered to make sixty trips to the trash can, I use a garbage bowl.

Yes, I got the idea from Rachael Ray. Yes, she is unnecessarily effervescent.

The jist is: throw your “garbage” into a “bowl.” When the bowl is full dump it into the trash. Seriously, it makes cleanup a lot easier — not that I would know anything about that.

Incidentally, I have this set of nesting stainless steel mixing bowls that I got at Costco. They are among my most used kitchen-y type things. They work well for garbage bowls, popcorn bowls, or silly hats.