The Clear Out Challenge

It has been a long time, yeah, yeah, yadda yadda. Maybe I will write something serious soon. Have been avoiding it as a lot of things seem to have been going wrong. Trying to move on to more positive things.

My roommate moved to Boston last week. She is working on a PhD in Psychology and has to do an internship and she got one at Harvard, or a hospital affiliated with Harvard. Point is she moved to Boston, she doesn't live here anymore and she left a lot of food. Obviously she couldn't take all the refrigerated and frozen stuff with her so I inherited it. Now I have to figure out what to do with it, and I have decided to embrace it as a challenge and write about what I do with her food. Additionally, I will probably be vacating this dwelling at the end of August so I need to clean out the kitchen as much as possible so I don't have to move too much stuff. Heaven knows the kitchen hardware I own is massive enough! This challenge sounds kinda pointless but amusing too. Getting rid of the roommates food shouldn't be too hard as she and I do have some overlapping food habits, but where we diverge it could get interesting. For example, she is a snacker and I am currently overwhelmed with the amount of snack food in the apartment because I had bought some things recently like vege chips and Ritz pretzel cracker things. Also, there are a lot of frozen vegetables, yikes. And soda. I never saw her drink much soda but there was always a few liters around, probably from or for parties. Now there are at least four partial liters.

Today was pretty much day one of eating any of her food. For breakfast I made a smoothie using some of her mango sorbet. For lunch I defrosted some of the pita triangles she had in the freezer and took them along with me to Montrose Harbor for my tanning session, with some red pepper hummus she left. Pita and hummus is certainly an overlap in our diets. For dinner I used some of her pasta sauce and pasta to make some sausage and penne concoction with some vege protein sausage I bought at Woodman's yesterday and some pasta sauce I had in the fridge. I also cooked some of the mixed frozen vegetables from the freezer. Ick. I think I will make a chicken pot pie to use the rest of those vegetables, I can't eat them straight. I had a glass of wine that she left too. Well that was today. We will see what happens tomorrow! I already made dinner and didn't use anything but my own stuff, maybe a side dish?

Eventually this might get more interesting as I go buy ten ingredients to get rid of one ingredient in a cupboard!! Or if I start making really odd things. I do have some condensed milk, pumpkin, and some coconut milk to get rid of so there is hope.

A minimal view of lots happening

Whew!! It has been a long time and a great deal has happened. Soon after my last post I moved out of my apartment in Shorewood while working a temp job at the Milwaukee Center for Independence in the payroll department. Eric, thankfully, was able to watch over the moving process at the end of June, though there were several hitches in the process. Namely a car running into the moving truck and some problems with the storage space I had reserved which led to finally obtaining a larger one further away. The larger size was probably a blessing as most people know I have a lot of stuff. At the end of June I had an interview in Chicago with the Census Bureau for a job with the Census Coverage Measurement department. It was pretty cool going to downtown Chicago and seeing all the hustle and bustle of business people in the midst of rush hour. The interview seemed to go so so as it focused quite a bit on supervisory skills which I only really have in the classroom. I did the best I could, and I guess that was good enough because I got the call on July 13 to start work for them on July 27... a mere 14 days later. So, I gave notice at the temp job and trained my replacement (a whole other story), found a place to live, and made hotel reservations for the first week of work which turned out to be training in Oak Brook, Illinois, site of the permanent Regional Office for the Census.

So now I am living in the area of Chicago known as North Center, living on the third floor with all kinds of locks between the outside and the inside of my apartment, parking on the street, riding the "El" to work and back, and settling into life here. There is a lot to get used to. While grocery prices are good here in comparison to other densely populated metropolitan areas like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (I saw an article about it recently), they really do suck. I need to take a serious trip to Woodman's, but then I also do not have much storage space for the items I would purchase. My cupboard is full as it is from the stuff I had in my apartment cupboards! It would help if it would get cooler so I can really get to some cooking and get back into the swing of things in that arena after quite a bit of time without frequent cooking- well without any real cooking to speak of. It is going to take some time to get more settled because there are still three weeks of Kilties to go so I am not able to move stuff back and forth between Milwaukee and here like I might want. Hopefully I can get more organized and clear some stuff out of here once Kilties is over.