Groceries: A Photo Essay

Last night, Torsten and I found the most domestic of ways to spend a Friday night: we got a Zipcar for two hours and used the time to go to both our normal grocery store and the local Whole Foods. It was great. Friday night at eight or nine is the best time ever to go grocery shopping--the store is totally empty, parking is easy, and there are no lines anywhere.

First, let me outline our past system of grocery shopping: We've been shopping every day on an as-needed basis for whatever we decide at four o'clock that afternoon that we're going to have for dinner. I leave work first, so I go and sometimes Torsten joins me. I buy however much I can manage to carry and often end up taking the bus home to prevent my arms from falling off.

We have limited storage in our tiny, walk-through kitchen, so the former system involved a strategy of "shove the newest thing in the cabinet/fridge/freezer wherever you find space, pushing older stuff further back to rot." I have to say, it was a charming and efficient use of space.

But now that we've joined Zipcar, which is the best thing ever because it allows us to use a car when we want or need one without having to actually own one, and it's not that expensive because gas is included, and they are parked all over the city so you don't have to go to the airport to pick up and return them, and also you only have to be 21 to drive them so there's no extra $25 daily fee for being under 25, we've realized that we can pay $8, use the car for an hour, and DRIVE to the grocery store to do a full week's worth of shopping. It's like we're adults around here or something.

Anyway, so last night was our first attempt, so we figured we'd hit up both a normal grocery store and Whole Foods. First, though, we realized we had better clean out all the crap in our cabinets (actually, it's "cabinet," singular) and fridge to make space for everything we'd be buying. The fridge had some moldy cheese and liquid vegetables in it, but otherwise wasn't so bad. But oh my god, we had not cleaned out the cabinet... ever. It was horrible. The worst was a bag of hard rolls that had been there since April, and had turned into dark brown gelatinous mush resembling mud or maybe puke. It was completely unrecognizable as anything that once resembled bread. It was awful.

I didn't plan this blog entry ahead of time, so I didn't think to take "before" pictures, but really that's probably for the best, since you would all run screaming from this blog, never to return. But I did take some fun "after" pictures, and even though I know all you people with big families who fill cabinets and pantries and chest freezers and two fridges with food for everyone for a week will probably snicker, we felt that we made off very well. We planned out the (healthy!) meals we're going to eat and purchased all the necessary ingredients, plus extra things that we use a lot, like chicken broth and Fresca (the diet soda of choice for both of us). So, I give you photographic evidence of how organized we now are.

First, the cabinet:


Next, the fridge:



And then, the freezer:


I also bought flowers at Whole Foods, because usually they're really good quality. One of the bunches was:


And the other decidedly was not: