How To Spend $280 at Costco without Even Trying

I am my father's daughter. To try to induce me to come visit him from college, he would always call on Saturday afternoons: "Emily, if you come home now, you can come to Costco with me." This was actually more tempting than it sounds as my father's usual penny-saved-penny-earned mentality flies out the window as he walks in the warehouse door. Printers! Office Supplies! Clothes! DVDs! Books! Garden Implements! Baked Goods (never mind that there were only two people at home to eat twelve jumbo muffins)! Fruit! Jalepeno Poppers! Snacks! A kid in the candy store, my dad.

Last night I went to Costco to purchase some more Jackson Perkins roses (Sixteen Candles and Queen Elizabeth) and Adobe Photoshop Elements. That equals $100 worth of goods, for which I paid $280. As a bonus I got

• Forty-eight string cheeses (to be fair, I eat at least one a day)
• Six peppers: two red, two yellow, and two orange (these always look so good but at least some always go bad)
• Six bags of pasta (that serve eight people per bag)
• Two packages of spinach cheese ravioli
• A jumbo carton of peeled garlic
• Two containers of Cetaphil facial cleanser (even though I still have half a container)
• Jalepeno stuffed olives (a sucker for gourmet olives, this one)
• Two pounds of spinach (better get cooking or this will end up in my next almost-rotton-vegetable primavera)
• Six rawhide bones (untested--and turns out Huck only likes them so-so)
• Forty-four uncooked tortillas (I froze half immediately)
• A large carton of feta crumbles (I need a half cup for this recipe I've been meaning to make. There are at least three cups in this carton)
• A large wedge of amazing blue cheese
• Dried basil (A steal: only $2.88. You can't expect me to pass that up)
• Eight cans of organic canned tomatoes (which I could have purchased for a dollar less with basil added had i forgone the organic. am sucker)
• Forty-eight cans of Friskies cat food (need my year's supply)
• Dried cherries (for my cereal, but I currently don't have any milk)
• Salsa (but no chips, and I don't have any at home)
• Twenty-four diet dr. peppers
• A large carton of grape tomatoes
• Some rice stuffed in grape leaves
• A multi-grain baguette (of which I ate a hunk on the way home)
• Some lovely sushi for dinner
• An InStyle magazine (I subscribe to the Economist, the Atlantic, Harper's, and the New Yorker, but considering the frequency with which I purchase InStyle, I should really subscribe to that too.)

Almost-Rotten-Vegetable Primavera

Food goes bad at my house. There are just two of us and I love to cook, but my schedule doesn't always allow me to make dinner. It's rare that I go shopping and use up all of the vegetables and herbs that I buy before they go bad (but conversely I nearly always use some of the vegetables!).

Tonight I cooked up some tortellinis, ten days past their expiration date. And I made a sauce with an onion and garlic clove that were both starting to sprout green from their stems, mushrooms that were several shades darker than when I bought them, a spare stem of broccoli from a casserole I made a couple of weeks ago, a small zucchini of which I could only use half because the bottom was already turning to mush, some spinach that was starting to show signs of slime, and some basil for which I paid $5 three weeks ago, and from which I salvaged about seven leaves. Then I poured in some vegetable broth that I opened 2 1/2 weeks ago (though the box said to discard seven days after opening) and some cream that expired last week. I added some flour to thicken.

It was surprisingly good. Zach claims he could tell that the veggies weren't as fresh as usual, but I really don't think I would have noticed had I not fixed the dinner myself.

Sometimes I do make real live dinner, particularly on Sundays after church. We never used to make anything, but the last year since Jeffery started coming with us, I've felt a pleasant obligation to feed him something other than Indian food leftovers from Saturday's night out. Last week Jeffery slept in and didn't go to church, but I went and retrieved him from his house so I'd have an excuse to try a tomato-olive compote I found online (I think on Martha Stewart).

We cooked the frozen salmon using the broiler on our oven. I made Zach do the heavy lifting on that part, but it involved olive oil, about 15 minutes of cooking and a switch from broil to bake halfway through. He also made the sticky rice, which he bought from the Asian market and cooked in the rice cooker he bought from Costco a couple years ago.

I made a side dish of asparagus and the tomato-olive compote to go on the fish. First I sauteed half an onion and 4 slivered cloves of garlic in 2 tablespoons of olive oil (extra virgin from Costco), and some salt & pepper for about five minutes. Then I added a can of diced tomatoes (even though Alice Waters swears you should buy whole canned tomatoes for better flavor), 1/2 cup chopped Kalamata olives, and 2 tablespoons of capers. It was delicious if I do say so myself. And beautiful.

Overbooked

Not posting is a vicious cycle. I keep thinking I'll just quit blogging, but I know I'll come back sometime. May as well stay here.

This semester is INSANE. I'm taking six more credits than I need to graduate, doing insane amounts of law-review editing, and about a month ago I got a part-time job. I feel like I haven't slept since. This week is spring break and I'm mostly working and hoping to catch up on some reading for class.

Today, after planning and teaching a lesson on mediation to a class of mostly apathetic high school students, I did some research for my new part-time job, and then took Huck up City Creek. It was lovely. Huck used to be afraid of water but now he splashes away. He was mostly pretty good, but got a little crazy around a rambunctious bulldog (the same kind of dog that bit him at daycare a few months back) and an old lazy middling size dog named Scooter.

Anyway, hope to post a little more often.