The Boy Scout Motto

What's in your cupboard?

Mine's pretty empty right now. I prefer to do my grocery shopping when no one else is at the store (ie, at 4am or so), but I've been waking up too late each day this week. I'm barely making it to workout on time...so I either need to shop when there are crowds, or hold off until the weekend.
The question I have to ask myself is whether I can scrounge together enough meals from my meager kitchen remnants to stay alive until then.

Of course, asking this question made me think about what I consider the essentials of life. What are the grocery items that I always want to have available at home? What sorts of things appear in my shopping cart week after week?

I'm trying to eat healthier and lose weight, so salads and green smoothie ingredients should be on that list. But I can live a day or two (or one hundred) without a salad. Whether I could survive without chips and salsa, though, is another question entirely.

By the way, the photo above is from Homeland Security's disaster preparedness website (ready.gov.) They actually have a page to help you handle solar flares. Oddly, though, there's nothing there about being ready for full-scale Martian invasions, or even how to defend against ET abductions (and associated orifice probing.)

Their food list is pretty generic, and reasonably consistent with my own grocery list. Canned foods, peanut butter, crackers, and "comfort food" (which I assume includes Peppermint Patties and ice cream.) I also consistently try to have a good supply of nuts, energy bars, oatmeal, and some sort of biscuit mix. I guess I'm pretty much a model citizen, Homeland-Security-wise.

But I do need my chips and salsa, my Wint-o-green life savers, and my bag of chocolate chips. I also like to have some skim milk, various kinds of beans, and something red and chewy -- like Swedish Fish or Twizzlers. And of course, pepperoni.

I still have enough of those things to make it to the weekend, so I'll hold off going to the store. Heck, there's even a pack of Ramen noodles I can resort to if it comes to that. Since I'm planning to play tennis after work tonight, I'm hoping that the tortillas, applesauce, and cole slaw in my lunch sack will fuel me up for the workday AND my time on the court, with enough energy left over to shower and hit the hay without feeling the need to raid the fridge.

The good news is that I've had a reasonably healthy week so far. I'm on track for a good result at Monday's weigh-in. The only setbacks have been my monthly "Big Bopper" breakfast at Gunther Toody's, and the unexpected Klondike bar I was forced to eat yesterday when the power went out and a quick-thinking employee enlisted help to avoid a tragic meltdown in the company kitchen.

The bad news is that my neck is still honked up from the Cottonwood Pass debacle. I'm not sure if I'll be on the bike this weekend or not. I'll keep you posted, and I'll attempt to include a fun little celebrity trivia puzzle in the next post. For now, I'll simply urge you to eat healthy, and to follow your government's suggestions on how to prepare for Gozer, the Borg, or a zombie attack. Have a great day!