Shopping for time

During the summer, I’ve got a relatively low cooking (that requires heat) threshold in the house. We eat a lot of salads. We eat a ton of sandwiches.

It’s simply too hot to heat up the kitchen with an oven and stove going, therefore anything hot prepared at our house in the summer either comes off the grill or out of the Crock-Pot.

The low-maintenance prep means that we have a little more time to spend in the grocery. Another change: Usually I buy groceries in huge volume, but summer’s schedule has us making fewer trips where we just dash in for one or two things we’re going to eat that night. Somehow, the grocery bill doesn’t seem so monumental when it’s broken down into smaller increments.
Although one of these days I’m going to walk out of there spending less than $20, and I’ll keel over in the parking lot.

This past Sunday saw us with lots of time on our hands. Dad was in New York, so the three of us tooled around town doing a great job of doing nothing.

We swung by the Golden Springs Winn-Dixie (still in the middle of its facelift) and strolled through the produce section. Lots of stuff caught the eyes of my littlest shoppers.

Fruit salads. A whole line of organic stuff (they’re determined to relieve me of more of my money and have definitely picked up on the organic trend.)

They lingered at all the vegetables they’d seen on TV that are now available on a regular basis. And, once baseball winds down, we’ll be cooking with frequently.

In the end, they grabbed a big bowl of fruit, already cut up. While I tried to convince them of the savings that would come about by buying all the elements and then cutting them up ourselves, they weren’t having it.

“But this way we can just go home and grab two forks and dig in,” the 8-year-old put it with clear, boy-inspired logic. “Look at the time that’ll save.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

Sure enough, they sat down, the bowl between them, grabbed two forks and jumped right in.
Dinner, done.