We have a
lot of food in our consumables closet.
After two years of eating through our stash we still have shelves
full of coconut milk, karo syrup, canned blackberries, mango jam,
popcorn, chocolate chips, brown sugar, peas, corn, lard, olive oil, Pam spray,
cocoa, cornstarch, almonds – whole and sliced, chicken stock, coconut, contact
solution, shampoo, sugar, and an untouched gallon pail of gesso. Two years is a long time, but evidently not
as long as I thought it would be.
I’ve
thought about various things to do with all of this bounty and finally decided,
in the name of shipping weight to
try and sell some of it off. So for the
last week various friends have showed up at our door with boxes and bags and
hiked up to the third floor to shop from our overflowing shelves.
The first
thing to go, oddly enough, was the peas and corn. Despite being available in Baku, everyone
wanted good old American peas and corn.
Next was the lard. That you can’t get in Baku. The Pam was very popular – so popular in fact
that I sold it to a selected few friends and didn’t even advertise it to the
wider embassy community. The chocolate
chips also were much in demand, and all of the macaroni and cheese is very long
gone. I’ve even managed to sell a
fifty-pound bag of popcorn.
Every
time a satisfied customer leaves with another bag filled with sugar, coconut
milk, and karo syrup, I feel a sense of triumph. That’s got to be at least twenty pounds! Good for a shelf of books or a bin of
toys. And then I remember that it’s
another twenty pounds of sugar, coconut milk, and karo syrup that I have to buy
again and ship to Dushanbe. But, such is
the life in the Foreign Service.
In the
end we won’t be able to sell everything (I’ve had at least three people ask me
what you actually use dark Karo syrup for) and so I’ll just cross my fingers
and have the movers pack it up. In the
end, we’ll probably have plenty of weight left over and I’ll regret the
three-liter bottle of olive oil that I sold at a bargain price. But I’ve become slowly adjusted to the
financial hemorrhaging that comes with each departure and arrival. In the end, we won’t go broke over food sold
to friends and neighbors. Hopefully.
1 comment:
So have you kept enough records of what you bought and what you used to make the process more streamlined/realistic this time around? It seems like such a tough job to estimate those things! I'm glad you've been able to sell some of it off.
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