mousetrap, from billaday's flickr stream
Warning: the following contains scenes of a pest-control nature, and no actual recipes, either. The gentlest of heart among you might want to look away now.
A couple of weeks ago, I received an unexpected guest. The guest did not make himself known to me by the usual means of a Facebook message, a text, or even a phone call. I was not aware that he’d raided my larder until I picked up the bag of dog treats to give September a reward, and noticed that my hand rose rather more rapidly than might’ve been expected. Think of the feeling you get when you step down onto what you think is the last step of a staircase, from what actually was the last step of the staircase. Now, imagine it in reverse, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. The bag was empty. In its corner, a hole had been chewed, through which the treats had been extracted. A hole just big enough for the head of a mouse.
Immediately, I tore the kitchen apart, and found what I most dreaded. Mouseshit marked a mouse trail along the back-splash of my counter, in much the same way as discarded fast food wrappers mark the edges of our nation’s highways. Mouse or man, you shall know them by what they leave behind. I’m not the most scrupulous kitchen-cleaner around. You won’t find me going over each crevice with a bowl of bleach and a toothbrush, like a deranged dental hygienist in her time off. I do like to keep things neat. I wipe down my counters. I spray down the stove with spray-cleaner after I cook on it, and do my best to return it to a reasonable facsimile of its pre-cooking condition. I don’t leave dog food sitting around, unless it’s in a sealed bag. A sealed bag that turned out not to be mouse-proof. In the bottom corner of the mylar-foil, zipper-top dog food bag that I keep in the cabinet precisely and cleverly sized to hold no sealable container manufactured anywhere in the world, I found another little hole, surrounded by little silvery aluminized mylar shreds. I’m all for the circle of life and everything. I recognize that, whether it’s personalities or creatures, it takes all kinds. But not only had this mouse failed to pick up after himself, he’d violated the sanctity of September’s kibble and her liver treats, and that sanctity must be preserved.
I have a shopping problem. So it is safe to say that spending only $50 a week on food is going to be a challenge for me. You see, I can easily drop that much a day at Whole Foods buying organic peanut butter (I usually put back two jars a week), six different flavors of Kombucha and twelve different kinds of greens—eight of which will inevitably end up in the compost heap when I don’t have time to use them before they go bad.