Grocery Shopping
Thursday, June 26th, 2008The other night, after being confronted with a refrigerator full of nothing but beer and condiments, I was trying to plan a trip to the grocery store. For me, this is typically a very haphazard thing and occurs in one of about three distinct situations. Usually, I’m either:
- Broke and trying to save money by eating frozen burritos and oatmeal for a week
- Shopping for a specific recipe (my Christmas Cheeseball of Awesomeness, for example)
- Or I have some type of craving.
But recently I’ve become somewhat interested in keeping a stocked kitchen. This happened for a variety of reasons, which I won’t detail here, but there was a problem. I knew the limited subset of items I liked to have around, but past that… I had no idea what a well stocked kitchen could contain. Enter my mother, who in her infinite wisdom and forethought gave me a (very complete and thorough) Betty Crocker cookbook when I moved out of her house. The specific cookbook I own details the items that should be present in a well stocked kitchen (it is by no means exhaustive, but it is pretty thorough, as you’ll see).
Using this as a basis, I dragged Jon to the grocery store to help me fill out the list. It was quite a lot, if I’m honest. Probably $150 worth of food which I subsequently had trouble cramming into the meager cabinet space of my apartment. This was great… I had things around and could make whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted without having to leave the apartment. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long.
I had reached a point where the things I had left weren’t really usable without something else. Rather than make a trip to the grocery store, I’d usually just go pick something up from a local restaurant or even do without on occasion. For whatever reason, the other night, I decided it was time to restock. Remembering what a chore it was to copy down the entire shopping list from my cookbook, I decided to make an electronic copy so that I could print one out whenever needed, cross off what I already have and head to the store to get the rest.
This, as you may guess, was slightly tedious and time consuming. But, I did it and I think it’s pretty useful so I thought I’d share it with you. It’s just a generic list of things you’d likely want to keep around, and I hope you find it useful. There’s both a 3 column PDF that’s perfect for printing out and carrying with you to the store and a plain html list (after the break, hit the “read” link down there) that you can copy and paste into whatever you intend to use.
