caveat emptor

Every Thursday we read through the flyer for our favourite grocery store and plan our week's meals & lunches based on sales or specials.

This week was "Buy One Get One", and we are huge dorks so every time that comes up we do a gleeful little "It's a BOGO!" dance. We stock up on items that we use often (canned tomatoes, bread & bagels for the freezer, that kind of thing) and pat ourselves on the back with obnoxious smugness because we are super-savers.

We have three young children. We take our entertainment where and when we can find it.

*ahem*

Anyway, this week there were several items we planned to stock up on - and then, in the produce section, navel oranges. Buy six, get six free.

Husband was excited. He loves citrus fruit. "Six free oranges!" he said. "We could get a dozen! It works out to 33 cents an orange!"

(See? Dorks.)

So I bought twelve oranges. I selected them carefully, making sure each one was unblemished and heavy for its size. And I made a mental note to wipe them all down when I got home.

Flashback time!

When I was in high school band, we conducted a citrus sale every fall, as a fundraiser. Oh, how I hated the citrus sale. Have you ever tried to sell a (quite expensive) crate of oranges or grapefruits, sight unseen, for delivery two months from now? It is not easy. Then, when the oranges finally arrived, they'd come on the back of a huge truck. The music room was on the second floor, so the truck would back up to the door and we band types would form a bucket chain up the stairs in order to move in all the 5 & 10 pound boxes.

We then had to open every box, sort through the oranges - removing any that had spoiled on the trip - and then wipe down all the remaining pieces of fruit individually. Mould spreads. It spreads particularly fast on citrus fruits. Oranges rot from the inside but mould from the outside, so wiping off the fruit helps it survive longer.

You know where this is going, right?

I forgot to wipe down the oranges when I got home. I was shopping late on Friday evening, and by the time I got home all I could do was have a cup of tea and crawl into bed while my husband put the groceries away. Since Saturday morning, for every orange that has been eaten, one has been tossed into the compost, mouldy and squishy, completely wasted.

So the BOGO oranges? Not really such a good deal, after all.

***

This week, the kids have suddenly decided they like ham & cheese sandwiches again, so it's back to those. California strawberries were on sale this week, and they have actually been a pleasant surprise - not as good as local, in-season berries of course, but quite tasty and properly ripe. I've been chopping those and mixing them with plain Greek yoghurt and a squeeze of honey. Cheesestrings, apples or bananas depending on the kid, dried cranberries, mangoes (also BOGO) and carrot & red pepper sticks have been rounding things out.