The art of procrastinating on food

Does everyone have major grocery purchasing aversions like I do? I've become the queen of substitutions for recipes -- assuming I even bother with a recipe for dinner -- in order to avoid stopping by a store.

In the last month, my significant other and I have achieved a new all time high or would it be stooped to a low(?) in avoiding food shopping. Today we had a conversation that went something like this:
I could eat a spoonful of peanut butter for breakfast.
Oh, you're out of cereal? Don't we have bread?
No.
Hey -- we have tostas. (Spanish pre-toasted crunchy bread slices. Think melba toast.)
Perfect, peanut butter, jelly, and tostas.
I've still got cereal.
Perfect.

This conversation took place on the way to get something out to eat for lunch, so the leftovers in the fridge could be lunch tomorrow.

Everyone does avoid the store on occasion (don't they?)  but we've really turned it into a game the last few weeks. I find great satisfaction in raiding a kitchen that seems to have nothing in it and coming up with dinner. Granted it's going to be dinner with not all the ingredients but dinner it will be.

It's funny there have been times in my life when this substitution or avoidance was due to financial constraints, but this time it's just shear stubbornness or laziness. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it's "vacation" month in Spain and everyone is either at the beach or wishing they were, so my own personal take is avoiding the reality of grocery carts.

Now, if I'm honest this month of avoiding the store has had to necessarily require visits to the corner shop in our village. It tries to do an impression of a grocery story but it really only has two aisles and a VERY limited selection. I would say most US convenience stores are probably on par with the selection. So we have picked up a couple more liters of shelf milk there, a couple lemons, some lunch meat and bread when we decided to have sandwiches all last weekend, uh toilet paper, and a few odds and ends. We also buy a lot of random things that just accumulate in the cabinets that have aided this creative non-food-buying marathon.

I know we are probably spending too much buying the odds and ends like this rather than breaking down and going to the big store, but we've been one-upping the sensation  that you need to go to the store for a couple weeks now.

So last Monday we were going to grill and had thawed all the meat in the freezer. A freak storm came up that was glorious and humid for a few hours of relief in in our high desert, but no grilling. Hmm, but we do need to eat. So eggs to the rescue -- we had a revuelto frozen package and voila dinner. Revuelto is a veg mix of some sort that you mix with eggs in Spain. Tuesday we grilled all the thawed meat and proceeded to eat it for the next couple days. Thursday on the way to work with the last two burgers in a bag for lunch we laughed and said okay we have to go tonight that was all fun but time is up.

Oops. It's a holiday and the grocery store near us is closed. Now we could have driven 30 minutes and shopped elsewhere, but not us. We decided to push it further. We discovered some forgotten fish fillets in the freezer which my hubby creatively turned into fish curry with some also forgotten cranberries.

Enough fish curry for lunch on Friday! I had a revelation that I still had a lemon and could reproduce that lemon pasta dish minus the chicken. I mean really if there's rice and pasta in the house, you can keep the game going awhile, right?

Saturday we walked to the corner pastelleria (pastry shop) and got goodies and a liter of milk for breakfast and we're (eureka!) invited to a barbecue for dinner. So we have not achieved this non-shopping streak without the help of others and restaurants to be fair.

Breakfast is going to be our undoing I think. It's going to have to be this week. Or we could make a couple more stops in the corner store to make it to a full month of non-shopping. Like I said, we've still got rice.