Stuffed To The Gills

Luckily we’ve been regularly donating food, through recognized programs, for the past few months. Money for specific items, not food from our stores. Perhaps it’s a feeling that everything’s OK for a while. Earlier this year, I wrote about eating from our pantry and winnowing down foodstuffs in case we had to move. Last minute, before we left, I brought up a student neighbor and gave her three beef filets from our freezer. As they were individually frozen they were small and got pushed to the back and there was no way I was going to toss them out and no way we could take them with us on our journey.

Full Frig

This approximates what our frig/freezer looks like today. The freezer is the worst. The ice maker takes up at least 1/3, dog food 1/4, bread 1/4 and the rest frozen… stuff. Our organic delivery schedule is changing but we keep up the milk in glass bottles, apple and orange juice. Our pantry is pretty well stocked, too, but a lot of it is herbs and spices, flour and sugar and tea. Perhaps we should take a lesson from earlier this year and start seeing how long we can go on current stores.

Oh, today, the company who delivers milk and juice et al sent us a complimentary pumpkin pie, which I found a spot for in the freezer. I’ve never liked pumpkin pie, but am sure a neighbor will. We’ve 5# of pecans from NE Texas from Jim’s folks, ratatouille left over from summer, cranberry bread for bread pudding, ten-grain bread for toast and sandwiches, store-bought pound cake for trifle. Oh, and a new bakery opened up down the street so I bought a fresh loaf of Pumpernickel bread and Jim won’t eat it so I’ll take a slice or two at a time out of the freezer for me.

For Christmas, I ordered a rack of lamb, even though I now remember at the farmers’ market a few weeks ago I bought a “culotte” of lamb that needs to be thawed and used. No, I’m not a hoarder. Perhaps a bit of it has crept in not knowing what our first winter in this climate will be like. I have boots and coats and hats and gloves for mix and match depending upon the weather, and Jim just got his used AWD sedan that will be great once we get snow tires. We’re pretty much set to go but I worry about blizzards and power outages and all the stuff we had back in TX (OK, there it was hurricanes instead of blizzards).

And we probably have 1/5 of the stuff Jim’s mother has on hand at any given moment, and there are only two parents at home now. She shops her own freezer. One time we visited I opened the large chest freezer in the mud room and found a black plastic bag, huge and filled! I was trying to find a place to put our dog’s frozen food and just hoping this wasn’t a dead animal or something like that from the farm. Turns out it was filled with local pecans that needed to be shelled and picked. Now that’s an operation to see, Jim’s Mom and Dad as a well-oiled machine cracking and picking the pecans. The few I was able to do looked dreadful and it took an hour for me to get a quart bag with skin and shell and it was useless.

I admire people who can amass food for any contingency, such as Margie, Jim’s mother. I’m more of a day-to-day planner unless there’s a special event or weekend or week when we have guests. Also people who know more than anyone else about a given subject, whether it be catching a fish, cooking a fish, raising Angus beef, picking pecans, excising my dog’s hips, creating a dance company or setting up the financial wherewithal for a home for Alzheimers patients. Writing a poem or play, composing an opera, building the first Mercury spacecraft or first bicycle or airplane.

In the future, I’ll try to do better at things I do better than most, and those I do not. This year has brought us so many changes it would be tough to make a New Year’s resolution right now. Can I make Zoe wear dog booties? Who knows, as Margie has sewn four of them to keep her paws from being eaten by salt on the sidewalks/roads so we’ll see, that’s a resolution I may be able to keep. Cheers, Dee