A few weeks ago, Lucy Waverman commented on Twitter that she still has home milk delivery and I realized that I haven’t had a milk man come to my door since I was about 10 years old.
Why not? We still use milk on a daily basis and I’m always running out to buy more.
What about you? Do you use home delivery grocery services like Grocery Gateway or do you reserve delivery for pizza night? Likewise, have your delivery habits changed in the last decade? Mine have. Where I used to have groceries delivered often, now about the only things we get delivered are mail and an occasional Swiss Chalet dinner when life is too hectic to cook or shop.
The picture above, by the way, was taken a few years ago on a trip to New York City. I’m standing outside Farway market on Broadway and that little cart is one of many the store uses to deliver grocery orders around the the upper West Side.
Do you buy some things as ‘just in case’ items? You know, like just in case you have unexpected visitors and you need a wheel of cheese. Or, just in case your kids have friends in and you need chips and dip?
If you do shop with these kinds of thoughts in mind, are you being honest or are you are buying them because you want to eat them?
For me, it’s about wanting to eat them. Seriously. In the grocery store I can be a big fat liar to myself. Case in point: the Dufflet chocolate cake pictured above that I bought for the freezer just in case someone drops by sometime and demands a dessert.
When did I defrost it? On a Saturday afternoon when I had a chocolate craving. We actually did have a house guest staying with us that weekend, but he was out.
So there. Now you know my deep, dark, chocolate secret.
For a food writer, I have a perverse love of empty pantry shelves and wide open spaces in my refrigerator. Our test kitchen develops about 600 recipes a year for our various editorial and corporate clients so we have a huge pantry management issue. (In fact, we have a team member whose business card title is Pantry Manager).
A side effect of having to cope with so much food is that I’ve developed this weird desire to have an empty refrigerator. I just love to open the fridge and see an empty shelf. It’s become synonymous with having no work to do. Weird, but true.
Perhaps that’s why I liked this post about saving money by using up your pantry supplies. Saving money, earning money – just two sides of the same cookie, right?
Keep up with Bread Chick’s pantry management experiment by following her Pantry Plan tags each week.
