I bought half a gallon of mayonnaise yesterday.

I had been resisting doing this, because, well,  there’s something about just looking at that much mayonnaise that can sort of makes me sick to my stomach.

It just seems wrong to own that much mayonnaise.

But we needed it.

I have been trying to resist for months.  I’ve been buying mayonnaise in packs of three and trying to keep some on the ready in the pantry, but it just couldn’t be done.  I would think we had plenty of mayonnaise (I mean, how could we not?  I had just bought three packs of it!) and then I would go looking and there would be none.

Truly, the only decision was whether to buy the half gallon of mayo or just give in completely and buy the gallon size.  Because, as you may have guessed, we have teenagers in the house.  Teenagers who clearly, given their druthers, would eat mayonnaise on their cereal.

I personally need about 3 ounces of mayonnaise a week.  I think that would be sufficient to get my wife and three kids through our average weekly allotment of sandwiches.  But I would say that the teenagers we have staying with us (and I am 100% serious here) probably average a mayonnaise intake of 10 ounces a week.  Each!

If you’ve done the math, you’ve realized that this half gallon of mayo isn’t going to last us as long as you might have thought.

When we offered to let these three former students of mine stay with us, we knew that there would be some expenses.  Clearly feeding, housing, clothing and transporting three 19 year olds is not cost-free.  But I truly had no idea about the expenses on the grocery front.

You see, I tend to cook too much food in general.  Somewhere along the way I became paranoid about not having enough food at meals.  And not just enough food for everyone to get some, I wanted to make sure that there was enough food for everyone to have as much as they wanted. 

You want seconds?  Thirds?  By all means, we have plenty!  Hey, someone needs to eat these last couple of pork chops!

So I wasn’t real worried about dinner.  I just figured that I would cook slightly more than my neurosis normally commanded me to cook and then we would have plenty.  And, by in large, this turned out to be true.  We did have an incident last week where we ran out of mashed potatoes after everyone had eaten seconds and I thought to myself, “oh, I hope Jessie didn’t want thirds.”  But this is more the exception than the rule.

What’s killing me are all the other meals and the meals between meals - primarily because there’s a fair amount of unpredictability to them. 

You see, teenagers are not like normal people.  They do not wake up, have cereal, go do some work, eat lunch, do some work and then have dinner, watch tv and then go to bed. 

They do most all of those things, (except for the “work” part) but in a completely random order.

One of our teens is in college, but only two days a week, and the other two are trying to find jobs, with no skills or education in a down economy (really, really hard).  So they tend to sleep till 3:00, then get up and make a big ham sandwich with lots of mayo for breakfast and then microwave it.  (I don’t know if it’s just me, but there’s something about microwaving mayonnaise that makes me really uncomfortable).  Then they’ll watch some TV, come up eat dinner, do some dishes, then make another big sandwich and then watch some tv and then come upstairs in the middle of the night and eat 6 bowls of cereal, wash their hair with orange juice, take whole bags of chips and feed them to the squirrels, fry baloney to wear as homemade yarmulkes, make popcorn to string as decorations, pour out gallons of milk to create a waterbed for the dog…..

I don’t know what they do, I just know that I go to bed and there’s food and I wake up and it’s gone.

I would say that in an average week, we consume:

5 gallons of milk
3 gallons of orange juice
4 boxes of cereal
5 loaves of bread
4 pounds of ham
1 quart of mayonnaise
2 cases of soda
8 bags of chips
6 gallons of sweet tea
9 pounds of bananas
6 pounds of apples

That doesn’t mean that we always have that much food to eat, but if we did, I think that’s how much we’d go through.

Scratch that.  We’d go through far more bags of chips if I could afford to buy them.

The bizarre thing is that if you removed the teenage component, I’d say you could divide that list up there by 5 and that’s how much my little family would go through - 1 gallon of milk, 1 loaf of bread etc.  (heck, you could divide the mayonnaise intake by 10 or 20.

It’s gotten to the point where every time I’m at the store, no matter what store it is (grocery store, target, gas station) I buy a gallon or two of milk, a loaf of bread, and any cereal or chips that are on sale.

There are upsides of course. 

I never have to check expiration dates.  “Heck just throw it in the cart.  It doesn’t matter if the milk expires this afternoon, we’ll drink it!”

I also am pretty much free to buy everything at a warehouse club without any fear that some of the food will go to waste.

“I see that sour cream is available in a quart size.  Well, I guess we better pick up two of those!”

We buy things in bulk that I’m sure nobody outside of restaurants and families with septuplets would ever buy in bulk, such as a gallon of parmesan cheese, quarts of ricotta, 5 pounds of dried pasta.  5 pounds each of peas, corn and green beans all at the same time. 

And it’s true, things don’t go to waste.  Well, that’s not completely true, the black bean sweet potato burritos I made were not received well.  Apparently I forgot to deep fry them and stuff them with meat.

That is one of the funny things about feeding these teens from Mississippi.  I give the kids credit for trying new flavors.  I grew up in the south and I know for a fact that most southern cook’s spice rack consists of both salt AND pepper, but that’s about it.  So, kudos to these kids for trying (and often liking) basil and béarnaise sauce and cumin, but I do feel some pressure to balance these exotic tastes with meals that they may like.

I feel like my eternal challenge is to create interesting, palatable meals that appear to just be meat and potatoes.

I remember one time Aloysius was eating a roma tomato, olive oil and basil pasta I had made.  I asked him whether he liked it and he said:

“Yeah, but you know what would really make this good?  - Some chicken!”

I’m just glad he didn’t say mayonnaise.  We can’t afford it.