It started with the NNJG Christmas party. A huge quantity of Mexican food was cooked for it. Forty or fifty people were in attendance, and there was enough food for at least twice that. I did a bit of the setup, and for every minute of preparation I had two of three minutes of stuffing myself full of nachos, salsa, chili, and queso dip. There was a designated margarita blender, and all the beer and soda you could drink.
None of that was even the main course. Aluminum steam trays full of beef, chicken, rice, beans, vegetables, and one huge tray full of vegetarian taco meat threatened to collapse the serving table. Feliz Navidad.
The grotto store was being liquidated this day, through tricky trays. 15 or 16 shoeboxes were loaded with grotto items, everything from gloves to T-shirts to flagging tape. You tossed tickets into cups by the trays you wanted, and winners were picked at the end of the night. I bought five bucks in tickets, and put them in the cups of a couple different tricky trays. I picked a couple trays everyone wants (the carbide spare parts) and a couple no one really cared about (a pair of gloves and a sticker).
I won twice. The first win was for a pair of gloves, a helmet mount, a bumper sticker and a helmet mount. Not many people bid on this one: my one ticket gave me odds of 25%.
My second win was for the carbide parts. This was the Holy Grail of tricky trays. This stuff was collected over the years, from the few people in the country that use the mighty carbide lamp. All of a sudden, I'm owner of the best carbide salvage yard in New Jersey.
Half the grotto immediately looked over my haul with all the subtlety of Gollum in a jewelry store. I sold a couple items from the stash for five bucks, so I officially broke even. The rest of the carbide stash is gravy.
Speaking of food, most of it went uneaten. That's not a comment on grotto appetites, just on the proportions of the food available. The table was still in threat of collapse, and that was just from the leftovers. The beef and most of the chicken found quick homes, along with enough taco shells to holster that much Mexican meat.
No one was looking at the poor veggie taco meat, though. It sat unloved next to the equally unloved refried beans, looking for all the world like boxes of soil. The carnivores had come to eat this day, and they wanted no part of soy in wolf's clothing.
I've always liked veggie taco meat. Most veggie burgers are like eating particle board, but Mexican spices make everything edible for me. I'd eat my own finger if you put some chili on it. I looked to see if anyone wanted to split the huge tray with me, but no one did. I hate to see food wasted, so I took the whole tray, ten pounds� worth.
I grabbed all the other food no one wanted. So add to that ten pounds of soy five pounds of refried beans, a steam tray full of vegetables, two dozen or so taco shells, a bowl of Mexican shredded cheese, a tray of rice (see a non-meat pattern here?) and one tray of chicken (mixed with peppers and adjacent to the all-vegetable tray, which is the only reason why I think it survived immediate consumption). In total, I walked away with about thirty pounds of leftover Mexican grub. Not to mention my two tricky trays.
I also got a Christmas present (a neat keychain LED light) but I had more than enough loot without it.
Back at home, I played Tetris with my fridge contents until I got all the trays in there. Four aluminum trays stacked on top of each other in the upper rack of the fridge (where sensible people put milk) and the double-wide tray full of the soy meat covered the bottom shelf. I'd have to eat this food as quick as I could, before it went bad. It was all so spiced, though, it could be toxic waste in there and I'd come back for more.
I forced myself on an all-Mexican binge. I had a dozen large tortillas, so I made burritos for breakfast. Pilings of Mexican goods in a plastic tub became lunch, and chicken with more tortillas became dinner.
I ate this way for two or three days. Needless to say, I became a volcano. I'm glad I live by myself; anyone else in the house would have to get an oxygen tank. If I had the slightest curiosity of caving with a methane fuel source, this was my shot.
I also baked a lasagna. All the ingredients from this were also leftover, thanks to me making an earlier lasagna and realizing ricotta and mozzarella are much cheaper if you buy in bulk. This freshly cooked lasagna went straight from the oven to the freezer. I might be able to look at it in February.
I brought some of the meat and the shells to my brother�s house during a Christmas get-together, hoping to unload it. I didn't use the world's best selling technique. No one seemed interesting in eating their tacos when I said it was week-old refuse from cave dwellers.
Subtracting what I ditched at my brother�s along with all I had eaten in my three-meals-a-day fartastic diet, I only had fifteen pounds of food left.
A last minute work trip to Memphis stopped this gastrointestinal torture. Exit soy meat substitute, enter slow-cooked ribs and fried chicken. With the portions Memphis gives you, I would have gotten doggie bags, if I didn't have a 1000 mile plane trip to survive.
I came back just in time for the office Christmas party. It's held in the office over lunch, and there's always way too much food. This year there were deli-made sandwiches. There were literally twelve or thirteen sandwich halves for each person in the office. Everyone ate their share, and then the rest got divvied up to go home. My share of the loot was six whole sandwiches (12 halves): two tuna, one turkey, and three ham and cheese. The ham and cheese probably would have gone first, if it hasn't been buried under so many platters of turkey and roast beef that everyone was bursting before they got down that deep. I hadn't yet eaten my first of these leftover sandwiches when Christmas arrived. Two weekends ruined by snowstorms and the Memphis trip gave me all of twenty minutes to get shopping done, but I somehow managed to get one thing wrapped for each family member before the drive to Mom's house.
Mom's house turned into a youth hostel with six twenty-somethings suddenly living there (four kids plus two significant others). Christmas food is about 75% desserts. Sugar cookies, candy canes, pumpkin pie, cakes, brownies. Mom had no intention of keeping so much food around the house once we all left, so she declared it would all be thrown out if we didn't take it home. I hate to see food go to waste, so I drove home with cookies, brownies, cake, and half a pumpkin pie.
I put the desserts on top of the sandwiches in my fridge, which themselves were occupying the tiny ledge of space not already ceded to the Mexicans.
I had just enough time to plot a rough eating calendar of the next few weeks when I had a belated Christmas dinner with my Dad. Naturally food was given to me at gunpoint. This time it was just an Entemann's cake, that I was able to refrigerate in the car thanks to a cold spell. That got put in the break room at work, so I could focus my eating on more pressing matters.
Dad was moving at the end of the month, so everything from his current apartment was being consolidated. Yep, more leftovers to fill my car with. Thankfully, this time they weren't the stuff you can eat. I grabbed classic junk you'll never use, like a slide projector, sheet music, and scuba flippers. Seven or eight bags of clothes for Goodwill took up my entire back seat, and a life size giant panda toy took up the entire passenger seat. (I'was tempted to drive into the Holland Tunnel with him during a weekday morning and see if he counted as a passenger.)
After New Years, the food-preparing events calmed. I was finally able to put some dents in the food. Desserts went first, naturally, and then some Mexican if I wasn't too full from the pie and brownies. Sandwiches were distributed at lunch (although if I could do it again I'd eat the tuna instead of last, when it smelled like whale vomit). I made several rounds of tacos, and two big pots of chili with the last of the veggie meat and beans. The methane caving dream is still alive.
In all, I went a month without having to eat any of my food, thanks to other people's leftovers. I feel like that little bird that picks the food particles out of the crocodile's teeth. If the crocodile gets his teeth cleaned in the process, who's getting hurt in the deal?
I can't help but think about how much stuff Americans are all burdened with (particularly food). In the span of a few weeks, I got a middle schooler's body weight in Mexican food, pie, and ham sandwiches, not to mention flippers, a slide projector, and enough carbide parts to run a repair shop for a 1926 coal mine. And I wasn't even trying hard.
There are billions of people in the world without the pleasure of having so much stuff they've run out of room for it all. The third world doesn't have many self storage centers. If only we could funnel all our unwanted garbage to them, the world would be harmonious. They've need the taco meat a lot more than I do (and maybe the carbide parts, depending on their mining technology). If anyone wants to charter a container ship to do this, let me know.
In the meantime, I'll keep on acting like a lamprey/Dumpster diver around my friends and family. I'm doing my part to keep the landfills empty. It also happens to be how a cheap bastard lives.
P.S. If anyone has a carbide lamp they're looking to fix, I'm your guy.