Eating Down the House.

Yay holidays! The Mister and I are off work for the next two weeks. Most people who own their own businesses don't get to do that, but we are extremely fortunate to have a staff that will carry on pretty much the same whether we are there or not.

This week we will be home, but doing stuff around the city that we don't usually have time for, and next week we will go to a rented cottage. Because we are going away and out so much, we are engaged in an activity I call "eating down the house", which involves eating as much food that is already here, rather than getting any more groceries. That way, when I go to do the big shop for the cottage, I won't be duplicating stuff, or leaving a fridge full of stuff to spoil until we get back. (I'm finding myself singing "Eating Down the House" to this tune in my head. It's getting very tedious.)

We've been doing pretty well, cobbling together respectable meals with what's here; you'd hardly know we were doing it, up til now. But now it's been a week since I bought anything, and it looks like tonight's dinner will be chickpeas, eggs, cucumbers and popsicles.
When we do shop for the cottage, it's a nutritionist's nightmare. For one week of the year, I let the kids (and myself) eat pretty much whatever they want, any time they want. There's no need to ask if it's okay to have Pringles at ten in the morning, for that one week a year, it is. You want pudding and licorice for lunch? Go right ahead. One morning, when Thing 2 was about 6 or 7, I came out of our bedroom to find her sitting on the couch watching a DVD and eating vanilla icing straight out of the can. Mostly I was horrified, but a part of me was really impressed that she could even stand it.

After a couple of days of the nutritional free-for-all, they tend to start looking for salad and apples. It doesn't take long for a body to tire of sodium, guar gum, and Red Dye #2.
But "eating down the house" takes some discipline; it's not easy to sit down to a meal of yogurt and granola bars. It just makes next week's menu of "everything fun" that much more appealing.