The State of the Resolution

So it's been six days since I began eating only what was left in my refrigerator. I did get some fresh milk because I was out, and had Glinda bring bread home because my loaf of rye had gone moldy. (That's the downside of no preservatives.) But this is the easy week. The end of the month is going to be difficult.

But along the way I rediscovered some old friends. Glinda's bread is a nice, hearty whole grain with oats, and that's exactly the sort of bread I like best for salad sandwiches -- usually tuna or egg. So today I rescued the celery that's been in my fridge for nearly too long, and used it and a bit of sweet onion to make tuna salad. I kept it simple, tuna, Miracle Whip, sweet onion, celery, a touch of lemon. Perfect lunch.

And for supper, vegetable juice with lemon and Worcestershire sauce (One of my guilty pleasures; I love that stuff!) with home made croutons and Greek yogurt. One of my favorite meals. I ate it while I watched "Desert Hearts" which I haven't seen in ages.

It's sort of nice to think about what I can make instead of what I can open and heat up. It's a nice change from the lousy way I eat because I'm too lazy or tired or busy to bother. I even want to bake some bread this weekend, though it hasn't always been a highly successful process for me. Witness one of my experiments with no-knead bread. Yes, it does rise!

I'll be interested to see what remains in my cabinets at the end of the month. I expect condiments to be well represented because there's only so much mustard pickle or jalapeno-stuffed olives you can eat at a sitting. But what else is going to remain? Cereals, probably. I tend to try a lot of different ones and then get bored with them. And since I'm eating more hot cereal, the cold ones are sitting there getting stale. Eaten or not, they'll probably be tossed at the end of the month.

Herbs and spices will remain as will oils and vinegars. Tea but probably not coffee. It's not that I drink more coffee; I'm really much more a tea drinker especially in the winter. But I have so much tea and I only buy coffee when I need it.

I'll probably be out of flour after the first batch of bread; I never did restock after our Christmas cookie-making orgy, but I will have way more coconut -- dried toasted and grated into a kind of semi-solid butter called "Coconut Manna" -- than any human being really needs. I'll be out of nuts and seeds unless I manage to make another batch of breakfast cookies. Dried fruit too, probably. And I know I'll have a lot of beans and grains because I buy them but don't often use them. Good intentions and all.

Good intentions are why my freezer is filled with fish and vegetables when the frozen meals are long gone. Really this exercise is showing me just how crappy my diet is. I once said to Glinda that I was rapidly becoming one of those old women who lives on coffee cake, and I wasn't kidding.

I really am determined to see this through. I'll wait until I really am craving fresh produce and then I'll buy just a bit. If I'm lucky I'll learn a few lessons on how to buy less and stop anticipating cooking orgies I never get around to. If I'm really lucky I'll learn how to eat better. Or at least get a start.