Food

I am absolutely fed up of cooking three extra meals each day that I’m home. I’m likewise fed up of doing the dehydrating bit, particularly when poor time management has seen me dragging myself out of bed in the middle of the night to tend to the drying process.

With time running low, we thought yesterday that it was time to take stock. All of the meals were laid out across the floor in neat lines, which were then sorted into date order to make sure that we eat the oldest first.

The reality on the floor was then compared to the records, at which point we found that reality didn’t match the spreadsheet (see Alan, I’m not that precise with my records!). There was the mystery of the missing six batches of chilli (since found) and I must have forgotten to add some of the pasta sauces into the records, so some weeks we’ll be eating pasta more than once.

The outcome of that exercise was to confirm that we now have 98 meals prepared. It’s not quite my target, but I’ve conceded that with another two it will suffice (i.e. I really can’t face cooking any more and I’m sure that Husband will be glad to be free from the extra washing up too!).

Then I set about the task that I’d naively thought would be simple: splitting the meals up into resupply parcels. It was at this point that I realised that it wasn’t just a matter of divvying the meals up, but that a bit of thought would be required as without first working out where we would be able to receive parcels, I couldn’t work out how many meals to put in each parcel.

Head-scratching over the itinerary in a plan that looked to be workable (the most dehydrated meals that we’ll be carrying at any one time is six).

Finally, with a plan in hand, I had to decide what we would want to eat in each batch of meals.

So we now have 11 parcels of food. One is going with us. One is being posted before we go. One is being hand-carried to us by my cousin. One is being picked up by us as we pop home for a day as we pass by the Midlands. The next one will be waiting for us at Ma-in-Law’s for when we pass by. The other six will be posted out to us by our Logistics Manager (that’d be my sister).

Another job off the to-do list.