Cheeseball Emergency

Six months ago, my life was full of food emergencies. Cookie emergencies. Cocoa emergencies. Sandwich emergencies. Ice cream emergencies. Cheeseball emergencies. Regardless of the snack food involved, these emergencies always found me responding to hormonal and emotional crisis with the nearest available snackfood. I was the Krishna of the Cookie, the Diva of the Dagwood, the Champion of the Cheeseball.

Oddly enough, this week I find myself championing the cheeseball, for you see, this time I don't need the cheeseballs, the cheesballs need me. Yesterday while I was pushing the animal cookie container onto a top shelf after the kids' snack, I happened to notice some startling information staring me down. You see, the animal cookies live next to the cheeseballs, and as I craned my neck upwards, I could see that the cheeseballs had only a few more days to live. Specifically, shelf-safe D-Day is Saturday.

I really never thought I'd see the day that snack food at our residence would go out of date before it was eaten. Used to be, we could get snack food on sale, finish it, and make it back to the store for round two before the sale was over; but apparently we're turning over a new leaf here, because it seems our cheeseballs have been much neglected.

So, since I don't want the hu-snack-a-tarians out on my lawn with “Save the Cheeseballs” signs, we have responded to Cheeseball Crisis with Code One force. As everyone surely knows, cheeseballs cannot be properly consumed without rootbeer. So, on Monday night we drove directly to Bi-Lo and purchased Diet IBC even though it was not on sale, and believe me, at $3.79 for a six pack, the true tight wad only commits this kind of financial faux pas under the most dire of circumstances. Then we headed home, and applied ourselves to the problem. I suspect we'll be working on it for a few nights, but best-case scenario, no cheeseball shall perish stale.

I wish I could say that we are not going to make a habit of doing this to our snack food, but I'm afraid the descent into late night vegetable snacks and the regular abstinence from should-be controlled substances is already begun. I give you situation one: the cookie canisters. If you've been reading me since December, you realize that no cookie had a chance when it ran into me. Now, Grandma makes cookies and fills three containers for us every three to four weeks. With this retired cookie monster out of the picture, it takes three to four weeks for all those cookies to disappear.

Case the second. At the beginning of April, friends came into town and I hostessed a friendly ice cream social at our house. For this occasion, my husband picked up three ½ gallons of ice cream. We had about eight adult guests that night, but there was still some ice cream left in each container. What was left of those containers lasted until our friends' next vist FIVE WEEKS LATER. I don't know if I should be making this public, but the mint-chocolate chip ice cream got freezer burn!

So excuse me while I do my good deed for the night. I'm gonna pop open a rootbeer, use my last two points of the day, and usher another 22 cheeseballs into paradise. Cheeseball emergency diverted!