Beloved and our food stocks

[sparkindarkness]

These past few weeks I have been extremely appreciative of my habit of stocking up vast amounts of food and freezing it. Fruit and veg in season? Buy a tonne and freeze it! Tomatoes in cheap? Make a huge vat of sauce that you could bathe in! If I don’t have enough tinned goods to survive an apocalypse and at least a full cow’s worth of frozen meat I get worried.

It’s a family trait, you will be judged if your stocks are found lacking for the next apocalypse. If there is going to be rationing initiated tomorrow then we’re set up to be the ultimate black market. There is a huge competition to see who can store the most food in BULK. All the family will envy you because you have found pickled onions in gallon vats.

Of course this leaves you with a dreadful dilemma at times. Because if you find a secret supplier of gallon jars of pickles, you are torn between displaying said jar and making it clear to the whole family that you are an awesome hoarder deserving of awe, acclaim and worship – AND hiding said jar so you are not forced to reveal your supplier. Because that would be bad, because they would then buy the vat of pickles or the metric tonne of cabbages or those towers of tinned goods on sale. They would steals our hoards!

There follows awkward conversations where the collected family desperately tries to force out the secret supplier of the pickly goodness and the dance of trying to answer as vaguely as possible. “Uh, I got it in town. Where in town? Oh, one of the markets. One of them. Somewhere. NO YOU CANNOT TOUCH MAH SACRED PICKLES!! GET BACK!” It can be very very very fun to watch.

Of course, this will not stand – the family knows you have a secret pickle supplier and will watch you. Suddenly shopping trips become Mission Impossible style runs with everyone trying to be stealthy while carrying gallon jars of pickles or a brace of whole turkeys. Followed by other relatives crying “That’s Jane, with pickles! FOLLOW her, stealthily!” *queue the theme tune*

It surprises me that more family members aren’t arrested for shop lifting.

But I digress. Yes, I have huge stores of food, I cannot fight my family training and when there’s an apocalypse I can be sure that I will have more pickles than anyone! Ensuring the end of the world will contain a lot of indigestion.

On the plus said, it has spared me Beloved having to cook most of the meals (defrosting and reheating is easily within his skills. Sorta.) – and while he has an interesting idea of how to defrost things (either 3 days left in direct sunlight, or 1 hour in the fridge) it hasn’t put too much of the cooking burden on his less than skilled shoulders and culinary disasters are limited.

The problem is it reminds me yet again just how totally domestically inept Beloved is. Including freezer stacking. So when filling a huge great chest freezer, what goes on the bottom?

Soft loaf of bread. Cake. Delicate meringues.

And what goes on top of them? A full frozen turkey. Sacks of roast vegetables. Half a damn cow. Lead bowling balls. 8 tonne weights. Anything he can find to squish them all to wafers or crumbs.

Ah, I despair of that man sometimes. *Pokes deformed bread*

Comments

[urocyon]

That sounds very familiar indeed. I've had to reign in my food-hoarding impulses to some extent, though, especially with small storage spaces ATM. Bit of a delicate balance, that: trying to stock enough in that famine doesn't seem imminent, but there aren't towering stacks of tins and half the refrigerator contents falling on you when you try to get something out. ;)

Sympathies in the squashed food department. It's possibly a good thing that mine doesn't even think to put food away most of the time, since the results are just about what you describe. :/