i try it!- danger in the kitchen laboratory.

if this blog post had a subheading, it would read: why leaving it to the professionals is sometimes the right thing to do.

so, during the SWAPmaine event a few weeks ago, the lovely keriann of mainely mara, turned me on to the starbucks black iced tea lemonade. HOLY CRAP. new heights of refreshing-ness! since that time, i think of drinking nothing else.

i’m not a coffee drinker, so the amount of time i spend at starbucks (which is inconveniently located multiple blocks from both my home & work) has always been fairly minimal. however, since SWAP day, i have been making any possible excuse to scoot my ass down to exchange street, all for the privilege of paying like $4 for something that tends to take me roughly 10 minutes to consume.

YET I CAN’T STOP.

the crack like pleasure that it affords me, appears to make the $4 surcharge fully worthwhile.

but $4 is expensive, and the $15 giftcard i had left over from xmas lasted almost about as long as it takes me to drink one of these fuckers. so in the spirit of practicality (starbucks is far) and frugality (starbucks is expensive), i decided that i would just gather the ingredients to make this mystical beverage, and assemble it myself in the kitchen lab. just think of all the dollars i would save!

HOW HARD COULD IT BE?

as it turns out, REAL HARD.

i spy- poop factory.

never having been a dog owner before, i had no prior understanding of how much poop a 9 lb. puppy can generate. while we were preparing to bring home our little bundle of fur and teeth, we did a 2 week stint of dog sitting for the boyfriend’s parent’s evil scotty dog, but she never produced more than 2 poops a day. maybe it’s just our dog, or maybe it’s a puppy thing, but puppyface here is generating on average 4-6 piles of fun every day. needless to say, we tore through the stash of newspaper bags i had been hoarding from work in about a week. then we figured we could downgrade to plastic shopping bags, but were quick to find out (don’t ask-too horrific to recount) that they we not structurally sound, and too often came with holes already in them. so this weekend, we broke down and decided that we needed to go to the pet store and actually buy poop bags.

i’ll probably do some long winded post someday about how dogs are fucking expensive ($16 for flea drops! $20 for a bag of food! $90 vet visit!), but for today, i’m keeping the subject to poop only. doggie waste removal is an expensive proposition. we didn’t even go to the fancy pet store! we went to petco, and bought a package of 8 rolls (120 bags total) of petco brand pet waste disposal bags. $11.99!! it hurt, but we felt like we didn’t have a choice.

and then, we went to marden’s. sure, i talked shit about the new marden’s last time. and the women’s clothing still blows, and all the shoes are still made out of leather… but then i spied them from across the room- 4 packs of “bags on board” brand poop bags in fashion colors FOR $1.19 for 4 rolls. i bought 10, and have been plotting to go back and buy up the rest. that’s 600 bags for less than the price of 120! i felt a little guilty going back to the petco to return my purchase (it hadn’t even been an hour), but i gave the sad eyes to the cashier and told her that my boyfriend had given me a hard time about spending the money and not using shopping bags (sorry to throw you under the bus boyfriend!). but i’m trying to to feel too bad about it, because chances are those few rolls of bags they do have left at marden’s won’t last long, and the ones i just bought are not likely to even last a full year. petco will have my waste bag dollars soon enough, because if that dog knows anything (and it certainly isn’t how to stop biting my achilles tendons), it’s how to poop.

getting wasted.

for me, busy pretty much always equals lazy. i tend only to the most pressing items on my checklist, and everything else just falls away into the land of half-assed-ness (a woefully untidy land filled with frozen pizzas and unpaid bills). as most of you already know, this last week was fucking nutsuo for me. well, one of the big things that i’ve been copping out on is grocery shopping. i haven’t even been glancing at the deals, and i vaguely remember something called a “grocery list”, but i couldn’t tell you what it is or why people use them (maybe i should google it?). anyway, whenever i go to the grocery store sans planning, things fall apart in a huge way. i somehow managed to get all the way to the checkout line before i realized that i had not thrown any dinner food in the cart.  i had however grabbed a weirdly disproportionate amount of cheese.

every week, i clean out my fridge when i put my new food in, and i’ve noticed over the last few weeks of freestyle grocery shopping, that i’ve been throwing a lot away. basically, not planning ahead, not sticking to my budget, and not being more aggressive about my couponing= refrigerator disaster! DISASTERRRRRRR! we’re talking expired food in sealed containers- never to be touched by human hands (wasteful!), or 1/8 consumed and then swiftly forgotten, only to grow a topography of mold so vast that would impress the national institute of health (wasteful AND unsanitary!). let’s just say that in this household, i make a lot of jokes about how i’m growing a new boyfriend in old containers of sour cream.

but it made me think. there are so many things that i repeatedly buy, and repeatedly waste. the prices may be low, or they may be wrapped up in good intentions for my health, but i’ve decided that in the interest of the health of my bank account, i’m placing the following 8 items on the no-buy list:

1. baby carrots: whenever i’m trying to lose weight, i always buy a bag of baby carrots. they seem convenient, healthy, easy to prepare, and otherwise perfect in every way… except for one thing. I AM NEVER IN THE MOOD TO EAT BABY CARROTS. NEVER!!! thus, they are sentenced to get slimy in their protective sack while they languish in my crisper drawer. there’s probably a purgatory somewhere full of baby carrots that i’ve inadvertently killed.

2. greek yogurt: firstly, shit is expensive. at roughly $4.99 for the big tub, i have somehow yet to learn my lesson that even though i enjoy it sometimes, i don’t enjoy it enough to be harboring 17.6 ounces in my fridge every week. why am i plagued with such horrible food denial? it’s been 32 years of waking up and not wanting to eat fresh fruit and greek yogurt for breakfast (which is what i assume skinny people eat- i’m more of the eggs, cheese, and heavily buttered toast school). why would this week be any different?

3. anything “southwest” style: i really need to put together a little southwest style donation box for the food pantry. my cupboards are choked with soup and rice mixes and god knows what else… cheap isn’t really that cheap when i hate the product, and  it’s taking up valuable cabinet real estate.

4. any vegetable that i don’t have definite plans for: hell hath no fury like impulse produce. unless it belongs to a specific meal, i need to learn to back the shit away from the zucchini just because it “looks good”. instead, i need to remember that it will look much less good when it’s forgotten and turning into brown goo in the back of my fridge (behind the food that i actually do eat, mostly cheese).

5. hummus: i buy this to go with the baby carrots. clearly, it does not make them any more enticing to me, it just gives me another product to throw away.

6. fruit out of season: sometimes i’ll really be craving grapefruit or pomegranate at the wrong time of year, but i’ll buy it anyway even though it’s super expensive, a little shriveled, and has probably spent at least a week on a boat being shipped in from some tropical island. what i’m really craving is FRESH fruit, but my tiny dinosaur brain doesn’t understand that. those pathetically dried up examples of fruithood are never going to look/be appetizing enough to make it into my mouth. my house is merely a pit stop on the road to wasted fruit hell.

7. lip gloss: i have a drawer full of lip gloss (no joke, it’s like a fucking arlington national cemetery for discarded lipcolor in there), yet i still wear the same one every single day. seriously, when did i get so stupid?

8. underpants: in one of the true hallmarks of extreme laziness (if there was an olympics of laziness, i think i could win. although, i bet everyone would be too lazy to show up to the competition.), i have occasionally (i mean often) been known buy new underwear rather than do laundry. this isn’t exactly a grocery item (although i have on an emergency basis bought some extremely ill fitting hanes her ways at the grocery store), but it is ridiculous, and i should really still knock it off.

writing this list has filled me with great shame. please tell me i’m not alone! maybe it would help if i slapped brightly colored price tags on all of my food, so that when i’m reaching for something more desirable (like butter or cheese- 2 things that never get wasted in my house), i know how much money i’m wasting in neglected produce? ooh, or better yet, i can draw sad faces on all my healthy food, and give them little speech bubbles that say things that make me feel guilty for not eating them…