keeping house and doing the grocery

Living alone has introduced me to some major responsibilities I used to just overlook and not meddle with: keeping house and doing the grocery. From Cebu to Manila, I have had a chockfull of insights, a rather thick collection of realizations to sweep into my undomesticated self.

You see, in terms of practical skills in the kitchen, or even basic knowledge on what needs to be stocked in the medicine cabinet, I am as empty as my grocery cart.

I now live without a refrigetrator and i realize that this is not just a vain appliance, an updated version of the Post-Spanish status symbol that is the dripping nievera, that makes water and everything cold. God, how expensive it can get to not have a fridge! its absence force-feeds me to Jollibee, McDonalds, Chowking, canned food and fake food that guarantee me real fat. its absence has made me forget how vegetables taste like, and makes me buy fruit and milk in quantities good only for a day. Imagine how much money i waste because of my refrigerator-less existence.

the grocery is another playground so confusing for the non-housewife.

just like free brainstorming, it's always fun to come up with a grocery list. i always start with the long, delicious list of a Stepford wife, but as the ghosts of rent, fare, utilities, and taxes (ooh taxes!) come haunting, the list becomes a sad, short stanza, even a couplet, on a post-it.

now which should go into the grocery cart?

as i didn't have a can opener yet (i benchmarked on the one we have had back home for as long as i can remember-- a knobless lever made at the sugar mill), i looked for easy-open cans. i was happy to see sausages in EOCs, and they come in exciting flavors, too. for a few weeks, that's what i stocked my psuedo pantry with, but for a time, no matter how they came in dollops of honey mustard or chicken stock, they tasted like pity. i started to curse every tinned food that relied on the teet of the dashing can opener that when at a distance i saw a row of gold EOCs on the grocery floor, a new brand i hadn't discoveredyet, and finally a new alternative to my sausages, i was ready to kneel in thanksgiving until i realized it was Alpo.

so i delayed the purchase of a can opener no further. i grabbed the first that i found not anymore considering my standards of an ideal can opener.

then i was welcomed to the aisle of canned everything. tuna, meat loaf, corned beef, sardines, even squid, each of them coming in an army of brands. Which do i choose? the safest of course would be those brands which my Mom buys. hmm. moms are such strong influencers and opinion leaders that no matter how defiant kids grow up to be, when they start living away from home and drive grocery carts on their own, all choices would be those brands their moms crammed the cupboards with.

but what brands does my Mom buy? the only thing i remember is that for meat loaf, she buys Victorias. :S

Dizzied by these tin soldiers on an overwhelming stand of shelves and not at all excited with opening cans with my new can opener, i dropped the simple machine, grabbed a pound of cheese, a loaf of wheat bread and went home.