Baby Fruit

As I've mentioned once or twice, the Mild Wife are being pretty conservative about social distancing and our risk tolerance for going outside. The rule of thumb has basically become, "don't." There are still a few items here and there that require braving the outdoors, but unless it's strictly required, we either don't do it or find a way to do it from the comfort of our home. That list of items we don't do outdoors anymore includes, as we've discovered, grocery shopping.

We were fortunate that we had just gone grocery shopping a week or so before the quarantine orders started to come down, so we didn't run out of any of the essentials. Still, we knew we had to refill our pantry eventually, since we didn't exactly buy six months of supplies when we went grocery shopping. So, we started trying to get items in bulk where we could. Rice and beans were among the first items that we managed to find, so we were able to provide the staples for our "struggle meals" and keep building from there. I won't bother repeating all of the individual items from the previous post here, but suffice it to say that it was an adjustment but we were lucky enough to keep ourselves fed.

As the virus has continued to rage, though, companies seem to have adjusted and supply chains are starting to normalize a bit. The Mild Wife and I are still being very risk-averse about going outside, but that does mean that we have a few more options when we do our grocery shopping. Amazon has a few more delivery windows than it did before, and there are more items in stock now, on average, than there used to be when all of this first started. So, we've started to order a few more things to add some extra nutrition to our pantry.

Now, it's worth noting that we're still looking for items in bulk where we can. It's generally helpful to buy things once and not have to worry about it not being in stock the next time, so we look for items that we know we will eat lots of and then we ration them out over a few weeks. That plan got us through the first few weeks, so we're going to stick with it.

The one interesting downside of this, though, is that we sometimes adjust the type/variety of the item in question in order to fit this plan. For example, we were looking for more fruit in our lives, so we figured we could get some canned fruit. There are a few different types of fruits that come packaged this way, and the nice thing about canned items is that they don't need refrigeration in order to stay edible.

Ultimately, we settled on pineapples, for two reasons. First, we've definitely consumed canned pineapples before, so it didn't seem like much of an adjustment. I wouldn't be surprised if you've had them before, too. They're just an item that sort of show up on tables as part of a balanced diet from time to time. The second reason, though less important, was that we plain like pineapples. They're just tasty, and I'm not about to complain about tasty fruit showing up on our doorstep.

So, we hopped on Amazon and found a pack of 12 cans of pineapples. As it turns out, Amazon has a few options there; you can get them crushed, sliced, or cut into chunks. I didn't think much of it, and since the "crushed" option was cheaper, I voted for that. The Mild Wife didn't care too much, either, so we settled on that. We put in our order, and 12 cans of crushed pineapples showed up a while later.

However, the first time we opened one of them, we quickly realized the difference between those various options. Crushed doesn't really mean that it's in smaller chunks, as the picture on that Amazon page seems to imply. No, crushed means that the pineapple is really crushed small. It's less of a solid item and more of a mush. You know how parents tend to give their babies and toddlers things like apple sauce when they are first learning to eat solid foods? These pineapples had a consistency more akin to that than to actual, solid pineapples. We had purchased pineapple sauce.

It's not like we were about to return 11 cans of unopened pineapples, and we still liked the actual fruit, so we decided to keep it. It does make me feel like a little kid whenever we have some pineapple for dessert, though.