Food Bank

Stephen and I just celebrated 8 months of marriage. I know all married folk can verify the strange time speed once you say “I DO;” you know the one where you blink and it’s already 6 months, then 8 months, then one year? Yea, that one. But in all honesty, I have really tried my hardest to enjoy the first 8 months because I knew this would happen.

We have experienced so much in the last 8 months of marriage, more than the average couple I’m sure. We’ve already talked about the expired hamburger meat, and the burning the flesh off of my fingers, but let’s talk about the good things for a second.

1)      I have learned that my father will still give my husband “the eye” if he does not open my car door or doors in general. This has rendered me completely incompetent on how to open my own doors. Thank goodness I haven’t locked myself in the car yet.

2)      No Matter what, he will always carry 10 grocery bags while I carry the bread. If I’m lucky, he will let me carry the eggs too.

3)      He knows spiders scare me and even though he shares the same fear, he still kills them for me.

4)      He is so sacrificial when it comes to letting me do what I want. He does it with a humble heart and never only sometimes complains.

Alright, enough. Let’s talk about the stuff most newly wedded couples never tell you.

1)      You are poor and you will form a refined taste for rice and beans

I’m going to stop right here and tell a little story with good morals at the end so pay attention love birds. My mother volunteers at a local food bank that allows people to drive up and have the food placed right in your car for you. MERICA! So nice! Well, my mom calls my husband and tells him that there will be plenty of food if he wanted to come grab a few boxes. This is sweet music from the lips of Jesus because my mother has taken home some of the food that is left over and there are lots of good food. Yay cupcakes! Stephen drives an hour to get to this place waits in his car and then receives the food. My mom tells him there are extra boxes and he can have more if he wanted it. He ended up with four boxes of food which is great because I know there has to be cupcakes in one of those boxes!

I call Stephen on my way home from work to find out what the boxes contained. He was acting like he just watched a marathon of Honey Boo Boo or something; sort of zombie like. I asked him what was wrong and he tells me,

 “Courtney, we have so much food…”

“Babe, it’s no problem, we’ll cut up fruits and veggies and put them in bags and freeze them.”

“No, no…you don’t understand. We have sooooo much food.”

“Stephen, it’s fine! We’ll figure it out, I’ll be home in five minutes I’ll take inventory and we’ll work it out”

“Okay. Just come home and see for yourself”

I walk up the stairs to our apartment and I open the door trying to get to the cupcakes and then I see it.

Mountains of food in our living room just sitting there next to my husband as if they were both expecting this reaction. To make the rest of this story short, SOMEHOW, these volunteers at the food bank managed to pack all of this into four boxes.

·         7 dozen eggs (on top of our two dozen already in the fridge)

·         4 grocery bags of fresh, farm grown squash

·         5-6 stalks of bananas

·         8 grocery bags of fresh, farm grown green beans

·         2 grocery bags of apples

·         13 different styles of breads

·         20 TUBS OF WHIP CREAM

·         2 birthday cakes and one pie

The only good thing that came out of this is we managed to snag 5 containers of cupcakes! I packed up a few boxes and we took stuff around our complex and just gave it away. And we gave some to Stephen’s parents. But the moral of the story is,

*Only get one box of food from the food bank…unless there are no cupcakes then try another box.*

Kitchen Woes

Having my own kitchen is great! I think I’m a pretty decent cook and I try to include healthy choices in my meals. Like the other day for example, I made mac and cheese AND chicken and cheese puffs for my husband and my brother-in-law for when they got back from working out! It’s calcium and protein people, come on!

The only thing about having your own kitchen in your own apartment is you have to clean the mess yourselves. No more relying on mom and dad to “find” the mess and clean it up for you. One thing my mom used to do is put tin foil on the drip pans to your stove to make easy clean ups. Changing them out a couple times in your life a month allows for a cleaner fresher kitchen!

So that’s what we did; we started the daunting task of putting tin foil on the drip pans on our stove.

How do we do this? I think I saw my dad yanking the burners out first, but that sounds like a one way ticket to becoming a star on Emergency ER. So we become primates; touching the burners, pushing, yanking as if we are seeing a stove for the first time. And VOILA! The burner comes out!

Now the drip pan comes right out and I carefully cover mine making sure it was covered completely and making nice neat holes in the foil to insure proper heating. I look over and see farmer Joe Stephen just threw the tin foil on top and put the burner back on. Cool.

Now I notice that putting the burner back on the stove is just as difficult as getting them out. You have to align the burner to where it sits in the drip pan just right. Apparently there is a “Nook” on the drip pan that you have to set the burner in…the nook that is currently covered by tin foil.

Once you get the burner back into its socket in the stove, it then becomes lopsided and uneven and you have to try to fix it. Stephen did a great job making his pretty even, but mine looked disastrous.

I reach over to see why his is so leveled and mine is more unbalanced than the mind of a mentally ill patient and then I hear it.

Ssssssssss

No, this is not the sound of a snake; this is the sound of my skin being seared off. Stephen had secretly turned the burner on to check to see if the burner was connected properly and then secretly turned it off again without telling me the burner was hotter than Mordor. (That was a Lord of the Rings reference for the nice people who don’t know what Mordor is.)

What DOES one say when they experience the same feeling as a steak going on a grill?

A lot of ugly words that I managed to keep in my head. It was all I could do to only say:

“Ow!”

And of course, “Ow” is just an uglier way of saying:

“Golly gee, I have burned the dickens out of my fingers and I seem to be in a terrible amount of pain!"

It wasn’t just the fact that I burned my fingers by touching a hot stove top, it’s that I PUSHED down on the stove top to see if his stove top was leveled.

The cold running water was glorious! It was sweeter than the sweat of Jesus running on my fingers! My only problem was if I even thought about taking my fingers out from under the running water, my fingers remind me that I just burned the flesh of my fingertips. We just moved into this apartment about a week ago and we don’t have a first aid kit around. We don’t have Band-Aids or Neosporin or the smartest of all, an aloe plant so running sink water was the best option.

Three hours later, I’m still standing at the sink weeping because I’m exhausted and I want nothing more than to crawl into bed and slip into a coma. I would also like to be able to take my fingers out from under the water without the feeling of fire running across my fingertips.

Stephen was great, he stayed up with me the whole time and even went to the store to buy aloe gel. That didn’t help because even the store bought gel has alcohol in it but the poor guy tried so hard to help.

Lesson number one:

Always let your spouse know if you turn the burner on and then turn it back off

Lesson number two:

Buy a first aid kit (including an aloe plant)

Lesson number three:

Don’t touch the burner or your fingers will look like this.

*The pictures are over the course of two weeks. The first picture is an hour after it happened. The next picture is four days after, and the next two are sometime during the next week

In The Beginning, There was Marriage.

I never thought about, as I was walking down the aisle of the little chapel we got married in, that I was going to live the good life. Ah yes, the good life, living with my groom, waking up to him every single day and blah, blah blah. It turns out, I was walking into the beginning of a sitcom. Oh, you read correctly, a sitcom. A life where you never know if you will wake up with an elbow in your nostril. Yes, this is the life I have stepped into ladies and gentlemen and there is no turning back; no way out it’s great!

“Oh, golly gee, this must be another gal who is going to be giving marital advice,”

No.

If you are looking for relationship advice, run away now.

Alright, before I begin, I love my family a lot. I get tons of entertainment from them and laughter is the key to a long life right? Cool, so a little bit about Stephen and I, we are newlyweds of about 8 months and we just moved into our own apartment three months ago. Previously, we were residing at his parents’ house; but that is for an entirely new blog. Our experiences of newlyweds living on our own for the first time has had some challenges as any newlywed will tell you, but our experience would have been more suitable for a sitcom show.

Now, where should we start with our adventures?

Well, we could tell you about the time we forgot to buy a shower curtain for our new apartment and had to use a tarp the first day. That was interesting.

 

Or we could start with when my husband tells me that he is going to cook up the hamburger meat we left in our refrigerator 9 days after it had expired.

That’s a good one to start off with. Picture it, 3 weeks earlier.

My husband and I go on our first grocery trip together and we are realizing more and more as we put things in our cart that we have no idea what we are doing. There was a lot of:

“Do we need this?”

“What does that do?”

“Why do we need baking soda AND baking powder?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Babe, can I get this?”

“No”

“Look at this box of pop tarts! Man of Steel is on the back! CAN I HAVE THIS?”

“Fine.”

 

 Needless to say, it was a fascinating experience that should have been captured by discovery channel and posted on the “marriage in the wild” episode of Nature.

Okay, you know how I said I would not be giving marital advice? I lied.

Lesson number one:

Do not go grocery shopping when you are hungry.

Lesson number two:

If you decide not to listen to lesson number one, do not go grocery shopping when you are hungry AND poor.

Lesson number three:

Do not go grocery shopping when you are hungry, poor, AND tired because your husband gets cranky

If you do not listen to these three very important lessons, I can honestly tell you that I feel no sympathy for you. I understand you, but I do not have sympathy for you.

Anyways, fast forward a few weeks later when the ground beef you forgot was in your refrigerator is currently 9 days old and your husband announces,

 

9 days expired and my husband is making hamburgers! Also, let’s take note that he is making these death burgers at 9:16 in the morning, folks. I will say, the appliances in our apartment are extremely powerful and work at twice the power of a regular appliance. This does NOT mean that our powerful refrigerator is going to prevent the beef from going bad after 9 days.

I’m happy to report that Jesus saved my husband from contracting a terrible stomach virus and all is well in our household.

Another lesson to remember when it comes to 9 day old beef:

“Do as I say and not as my husband does.” It may not always work out in your favor.

 

What are your thoughts? Would you cook beef that has been expired for 9 days?