Vic, of Vic's Market

I got out of work a couple of hours early today and so I am doing what any reasonable person would do. I am making brownies and thinking about food in a pensive way.

I know what this seems like, and it is true: I didn't eat lunch and I'm waiting for my co-habitator to return before I eat dinner. General hunger, however, is not the root on this pondering. Sadly, just as I often think about hairbrushes and linens, I have a tendency to over-think food, or more specifically, the food in the home and the implications of hospitality. (That last sentence could have been an essay title. Food in the Home and the Implications of Hospitality. I've still got it, alright.)

I suppose that my time would be better used explaining than tooting my own ex-literary horn. I'll explain, as best as I'm able, the origins of these excessive thoughts. You see, whenever I get the yen to eat some brownies (or other baked good of your choice), I have to actually make a trip to the store to get the supplies. Today's last minute trip to Vic's Market (11.00, Vic is such a scumbag) was for eggs and vegetable oil and, inevitably, brownie mix. And every time I have to make this fateful trip, I wonder to myself why I don't have these very mundane items at my house. Or better yet, why I can't prevail upon my miserly self to buy more than one brownie mix, or a slightly larger serving bottle of vegetable oil, to prevent this very trip in the future.

I guess I'm just not much of a preventative shopper. I make one weekly trip to Trader Joes (I hate people who plug TJ's almost as much as I hate how TJ's doesn't have any ketchup, so bear with me as I make a point) and gather the essential items for weekly eating: bread, lunch meat, strawberries, lettuce, cheese, pizza dough and sauce, milk and cleverly-named fibertastic cereal. I never venture into anything more adventurous.

All of this is very economic (again, Vic is a scumbag), but often leaves me with a sense of unease and no refried beans on the occasion of a spontaneous burrito. My unease derives from the fact that I was raised in a house where culinary hospitality was one the the cardinal virtues; the sort of place that never (ever) ran out of family-sized cans of refried beans. Thus my impulse a few months ago on the eve of a visit from my mom to buy two bottles of wine. Not just one to serve her with pretended aplomb but two, in case another wine drinking event ever occurred. (This is momentous, since we generally don't have an alchy around the house beyond a few stray Bud Lights in a box in the garage and a conspiciously aging and untouched bottle of whiskey in the freezer.) When I bought that extra bottle of wine, I felt prepared for any wine-related situation.

Whenever I get thinking about this sort of business I tend to recall this short story that I read a few years ago. A young couple is featured in this story and the wife is always purchasing fresh food and stockpiling/preserving it for the spontaneous guest or event. Over the course of the story the couple gets pregnant and the baby is still-born. Afterwards the wife never cooks anymore but they eat all of the stuff that she has stored up for a whole year until she leaves the husband. (Note: If this sounds like your short story, sorry about the smashing butcher job I did on the synopsis.)

I know that this story is probably about things that you can't prepare for (death) and can't preserve (certain ill-fate marriages) but I like to think about it when I think about food. What a nice and reassuring thing to be prepared at a moment's notice to turn out a bitchin' spread.