When I noticed an actual half-empty shelf in our refrigerator at home, I briefly considered running to the supermarket. But then I thought:  This is a perfect opportunity to empty the larder, so to speak, because my wife and children are out of town for a week. So rather than rotely replace what’s missing, I figured I could find out what’s buried at the bottom of the refrigerator, its freezer, the freezer in the garage, the pantry shelves, and the kitchen cabinets. In other words, I’m going to eat my way through our stores without replenishment.

Progress so far:

Day One.

Breakfast consists of coffee, half of a leftover steak, one of five remaining slices of sourdough bread, and one egg (leaving me with five). Thank God there’s plenty of coffee for the week.

Later, I come home from leading my Saturday playwriting workshop  and have a bit of leftover rib meat, and a bowl of cantaloupe already cut up by someone (my wife?) and left semi-forgotten in the refrigerator. Already, I can see more shelf space.

My friend Larry comes over at 6:30 and we go to see Ben Gazzara speak at a John Cassavettes retrospective. (More about that later.) Many many hours later,  post-midnight, when the show is finally over, Larry suggests we go out for a drink. I leap on the idea:  “Hey, let’s go drink at my house. It’s free!” “Free” because it’s already been paid for. We get back to my place and I start mixing gimlets. I also dig out some snacks:  cracked-pepper Triscuits that I didn’t know we had, some sliced peppery salami that I didn’t know we had, and an assortment of cheeses from the Hotel Amarano, where I hosted a reception five days earlier. Larry dutifully eats his share of all that stuff. A couple of shakers later, I’ve emptied the big Rose’s lime juice bottle and the big vodka bottle and now I’m making drinks using the little lime juice bottle and the little vodka bottles that drunks carry around in their pockets for emergencies. (I have them for an utterly different reason, I assure you.) I now start making a list of the groceries we will eventually have to buy — say, on Sunday, after my family returns; the list contains one item:  “Vodka.” I also start smoking a very big cigar in our living room, but because my wife doesn’t read this blog, I’m secure in knowing that she’ll never know. The dog looks at me askance. Larry leaves at five minutes of four in the morning, the booze now exhausted, and the topic of a “Star Trek” convention gone wrong exhausted for the moment. I go upstairs and read a bit and discover that I’ve got only two half-beefsticks left. Uh oh.

Day Two.

I get up and start coffee brewing. I crack an egg into a frying pan and reach for another — but I drop that egg onto the floor. Now I have only three eggs left for the week. I’m starting to feel like the father in “The Road,” who scavenges around the loft of a barn searching in vain for something, anything, to eat, briefly considering trying to mash down some hay. He would probably pick up that egg and fry it. But I throw it away. I also have the last bit of rib meat from last week, plus the last of the blueberries and the last of the blackberries, and another piece of the sourdough bread. I add berries and eggs onto that shopping list alongside vodka. I never really noticed these racks in the refrigerator before, but now they stand out like the spine of a fish stripped of its flesh.

For lunch — which might more appropriately be called dinner, given when I’m having it — I decide to try my luck in the kitchen cabinet. I find a can of lentil soup, crack that open, and eat half of it. I also pull two fillets of white fish out of the garage freezer to defrost for later.

Over dinner, while watching the thoroughly ludicrous and uninvolving NBC show “The Event,” I eat what else I’ve scavenged from around the house:  four tiny red potatoes I found in a bag by the fruit bowl (?) and then boiled, and the two fillets, cooked in a lemon butter caper sauce that I make and am quite fond of, the lemon plucked from my tree and the capers plucked from a little bottle I found on the wrong shelf. I top the entree off with a bowl of pineapple drawn from a thick rectangular storage container I found tucked in a deep corner of the refrigerator. We’ve still got a bottle of cheap-ass white wine in the refrigerator (Golden Gate Chardonnay, a full 74 cents a bottle cheaper than Two-Buck Chuck, so take that, Trader Joe’s), so I knock off a glass or two of that. For far too long, the intelligence of the American public has been berated, and I know this now for a fact, because I am watching “The Event” in the knowledge that statistically no one else is watching this show, and I take some comfort in that; that is, until discovering that they’re watching “The Celebrity Apprentice.” I catch one minute of that, in which Meat Loaf evidently has given bad driving directions to Jose Conseco and Gary Busey and now they’re lost somewhere in New York. Gary Busey makes buggy faces at the camera — he’s now too old and historically too besotted to do much physical damage.

More in the days to come, about what I’ve found to eat in my house, and if and when I’ve eaten in.

And I polished off the can of Smokehouse Blue Diamond Almonds while writing this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 13th, 2011 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.