Addicted to food shopping

I can barely close the doors of our upright refrigerator-freezer. I was looking for something this evening and what I found shocked me.

In the freezer, we have eight dozen Korean dumplings; bread from two or three bakeries, free-roaming chicken, grass-fed steak, frozen wild salmon, uncured beef hotdogs and other items I didn't bother cataloging. Still, when I was at Costco yesterday, I bought wild-caught flounder from Iceland for tonight's dinner, part of the $100 or so I spent on food. I just looked at recent activity on the credit card I use for food shopping and found that me or my wife visited food stores nine times in a 10-day period. Not good, even though I get a 5% credit card rebate at supermarkets, and that doesn't include restaurant visits.

We need to get more organized and make food purchases only once or twice a week. That means a weekly visit to Costco and ShopRite, and periodic visits to Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Fattal's, wine stores and so forth. Tomorrow evening, my wife plans to make soup, but I will be eating leftovers: the vegetables from Jerry's $6.99 takeout dinners that we had Tuesday night; the okra and tomatoes I picked up at H Mart and Fairway in the past few days; the Murray's chicken coated with chili spices we had last night; the sweet corn I got at Costco yesterday...

With all this food around, you'd think I wouldn't eat out. But because I had a two-for-one coupon, I met a frugal friend at Angelina's in Hackensack for the $7.95 lunch buffet today and ate way too much, including three salads, mussels, chicken francese and rubbery rigatoni with vegetables. I should have skipped breakfast, but didn't, preparing hot 10-grain cereal with blueberries and a slice of toast with yogurt cheese and smoked wild salmon. And the cloudy weather gives me the blahs; when the sun doesn't come out, I can't drag myself out of the house for my daily 2.2 mile walk with weights.