I just ate saltines...


...for breakfast. Actually they were pretty good. They weren't Ritz or club crackers...but for a store brand saltine...I can't complain. Crackers have become quite a staple here in my kitchen since everyone else slowly moved out and I'm living alone.

First I stopped cooking meals nightly since my son never bothered to come home and eat anyway. Then I just bought a shitload of Hot Pockets. I still have some in the back of the freezer in case I have a dinner party. When the kid finally moved out, I stopped shopping for anything but strawberries and yogurt. Those are all gone so I've been eating a lot of crackers lately.

Crackers...what a versatile food product. You can eat them with jelly, peanut butter or both. And Fluffernutter crackers are one of my favorite dinners. I just love crackers! You can dip them in whatever you have...yesterday I had them with thousand island dressing. Crackers are a must have in any well stocked kitchen...you can even take cheese and stick the suckers in the microwave and have melted cheese on crackers. Bam.

I have plenty of crackers but when I run out of them, I'll boil all the different types of pasta that I have in the cabinet. I could toss any condiment that I want on noodles and enjoy an Italian/Hillbilly meal. If I remember right, my grandmother said she used to make salad with dandelion leaves. That and the pasta...Bam Bam.

I wonder how long I can go without grocery shopping? I've never been able to test that because there were always hungry people living here. Now I'm alone and I don't have to worry about feeding anyone else but myself. And if I want to eat a can of pumpkin and Rice-a-roni for dinner...it's my business.

Of course I'd end up eating canned beets before June ended. Oh, and that orange marmalade that I got for Christmas...in '06. (It's OK, I haven't opened it yet.) I accumulate a lot of oatmeal so I'd be set for breakfast. And speaking of mornings, when I run out of Folgers Coffee I could drink the Postum that's WAY in the back of my cabinet. (And of course I'm still waiting for my Pussy to get here...I'll let you know when it does although the marketing person told me that it might not get past Homeland Security.) There is so much food in my house that I never eat, I don't know why I even bought this crap.

When I married Rick, he had a box of "meat product" hamburgers called Patti-O's. For well over 2 decades, I made fun of that box of soy burgers. So how I ended up with a bunch of fake meat burgers, I do not know. I actually thought that I could pawn them off on my hamburger-eating son. But he's gone and the Patti-O's remain. Damn it...I guess I have to eat them.

If they're too bad I can always just feed them to the dog. But he can be awfully picky...maybe I can use some of my powdered brown gravy to flavor it. I have 50 packages of gravies of some sort, about 30 boxes of muffin mix and 57 boxes of Jell-O. I don't know why I buy Jell-O, I never make it. Not 57 boxes anyway. They'll probably be in that cabinet when I croak. I'll bequeath them to the first person who goes to the comments and asks for them. Upon my death, some lucky bastard will get 50 boxes of old Jell-O. On my word as a lady.

The other day I told you guys that I love to shop with coupons and once I had a coupon for two bucks off a can of Country Time instant lemonade. I don't like instant lemonade but with the coupon and the sale, the can only cost me sixty-six cents. So, how could I pass that by?

The stupid powdered lemonade sat up there for God knows how long before I found a way to use it. You see, I don't care for very tart or very sweet drinks. I like tea with very little sugar. I also like a hint of lemon. When I go out for lunch I order Arnold Palmer's to drink so I just started sweetening my iced tea with that powdered lemonade. It's not bad, actually.

Damn.....I digressed again, didn't I?

So let's see, what other meals could I come up with using the foodstuff in the back of the cabinets and fridge? OMG! I found a BUNCH of useless stuff. I wasn't doing anything else so I just lined a few of them up for you:

I wonder if pumpkin and cranberry would go together well? Ya think? Aw hell, I could just drink the rice wine and forget about it. I bet that doggybloggy could look at this counter full of rejects and come up with a gourmet meal, but I just ate crackers for breakfast so don't pay any attention to me. You know...I did have some oatmeal for a snack last night...maybe I'm OK.

Oh! Oh! Oh! I almost forgot! Check this out...back in the 80's I ran out of Aunt Jemima Pancake mix one morning so I had to make them from scratch. I looked in my cookbook and found the recipe for homemade pancakes. The recipe for pancakes is basically eggs, oil, milk and flour. Guess how you make Aunt Jemima Pancakes? Eggs, oil, milk and the mix. (Of course that was before Jemima invented Just Add Water pancakes.) But it annoyed me when I looked at the Aunt Jemima Pancake box list of ingredients. There were a LOT of words, but basically they all said the same thing...flour.

I had been paying a LOT of money for a box of flour that was supposed to be making life easy for me and I was being jipped. I always remembered that and never bought Aunt Jemima Pancake mix again. Then, last night it happened again.

I went to make myself that oatmeal yesterday and when I did, I looked on the side of the box to get the general quantities. I don't bother measuring so I don't usually read the whole box but I should. If I had, I would have seen the directions for microwaving "real oatmeal" as supposed to "instant oatmeal".

With real oatmeal, you put the oatmeal in a bowl, add water and cook for 3 minutes.

With instant oatmeal you put the oatmeal in a bowl, add water and cook for 2 1/2 minutes.

I've been buying instant oatmeal all this time when all I had to do was scoop a bit out of the Brady Bunch sized box that I let rot in the cabinet. I could have been eating that all along. Damn...they got me again.