There are some things that everyone should know about me. One of those is: I don’t panic at the thought of being snowed in. At least, not as long as there is electricity or some sort of heat source. And running out of food is not usually an option here. Despite how many times my children utter the words, “we have nothing to eat,” there is always something to eat.
However, after the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s holidays, the pickings were getting a little slim. Since the cupboards needed to be replenished and since the weather man kept talking about some sort of Arctic Blast, I decided to make my way to the grocery.
And it was A-MAZ-ING. Just one little hint that there might be snow and that people might be stuck at home for more than 12 hours and food was flying off the shelves like crazy. Now I don’t know what it’s like in your little corner of the world, but where I live people get a wild hankering for French toast every time the white stuff flies. I know this because when the television mentions snow, there is a mass exodus of milk, eggs, and bread at the grocery store and French toast is the logical choice for those ingredients. Sometimes extreme amounts of toilet paper are purchased too (but this makes sense to me). I suppose it could be worse…a friend of a friend runs a grocery store and whenever there is a chance of snow, they run out of beer and pop-tarts. I can’t even imagine how disgusting those two would be together.
Anyway, I went to the grocery. My mother-in-law had already told me that there had been a run the day before and the only bread left was wheat, but I just assumed they would have restocked by the time I got there. I. Was. Wrong.
There was wheat, wheat, and more wheat; various kinds of buns; and some store brand that didn’t pass the softness test.
Luckily for me, the Snow Day Preppers weren’t after the same food that I was. I scored big in the produce department. Not meaning that it was on sale…just that there was plenty of it. They even had rutabagas–which, by the way, no one at the local Kroger store seems to know how to identify or what to possibly do with. I go through the same explanation every single time. I’m considering cooking up a batch and handing out samples.
There was an adequate amount of milk and I was out, so I was glad of that. Weirdly enough, there was a shortage of half-and-half, heavy cream, and sour cream. You know what that means. Yep, fancy French toast.
I bought a few other items there and headed to a different store to buy meat. People were waiting in line in the meat section, but I never did figure out what for. There seemed to be plenty of selection on the shelves. I mean, I guess it’s possible that they were selling rib-eyes for 99 cents a pound, but I didn’t feel like waiting around to find out. So, I picked the meat I wanted, headed over to the frozen section for some boneless, skinless chicken tenders, and then ran to the bread section. Decimated. Like, fifty-dollar-televisions-on-Black-Friday-GONE! I might be exaggerating a little. There were a couple of loaves left, but it was a brand I don’t like and there were some little old ladies circling like buzzards on road kill. I don’t mess with little old ladies.
So I left two grocery stores without bread and I refused to stop anywhere else. I can only handle so much disappointment in one day people.
Let me be totally honest here…we had bread at our house. There were some almost-stale hamburger buns, two fresh packs of hot dog buns, three frozen loaves of some kind of grain bread, frozen focaccia, frozen croissants, and if you count tortillas as bread, we had those too! What we didn’t have was white sandwich bread. I’m not sure why that seemed like such a big deal really. Spizzie and I eat a lot of egg sandwiches for breakfast and she enjoys the occasional bologna on bread. Super Trooper does love his peanut butter, but he eats it with crackers more often than not. Funny Bubby doesn’t eat many sandwiches, because he spends most of his days at the Mother-in-law’s. She keeps a freezer full of frozen pizzas, so why would he stay home? And Sunshine Boy won’t eat a sandwich on plain old white bread. He prefers sub buns or some other kind of fancy loaf. What I’m trying to say is that there was no real need for any other bread, unless we were planning to have toast and oatmeal. And we were all out of oatmeal.
Still, this lack of a sliced loaf seemed a little stressful to my household. So I assured them that I had yeast and flour and I could make fresh bread if need be. But I didn’t. I did, however, make hot dogs and use the buns. I made fajitas and used the tortillas. I made hibachi chicken and rice one night, so we didn’t need any bread. I had plenty of veggies and fruit and snacks and leftovers. The one snow day stretched into four (it was more the icy road conditions—the snow was a little sparse) and I never did buy any bread. So my poor kiddos never got their French toast. It’s all good though…they had cinnamon rolls instead!
[…] No Bread In the Basket: One Family’s Tale of Survival Without Snow Day French Toast […]