The Unbalanced Breakfast

February 28, 2011

I spent the weekend on a not-skiing trip with the missus and a few friends.

(You may have read something about it already.

I know, I know — this is becoming “the trip that keeps on trippin’.” Fear not. This is the last post about it. Cross my heart and hope to shush down a mountain.)

One of the most difficult things to strategize for a getaway of any length is what I call the Probable Individual Gorging equation — or the PIG equation, for short.

Solving the PIG equation involves predicting as accurately as possible how much food and beverage is necessary for the trip, based on which people are likely to eat and drink which consumables how often and with how much gusto.

The variables you plug into PIG are myriad, different in every case, and each comes with a degree of uncertainly. For instance, what’s the ratio of men to women attending? That can often — but not always — indicate what proportion of, say, beer to wine may be needed. Is anyone vegetarian? On a diet? Coming off a bad breakup? How about pregnant — and just exactly how pregnant are they? You might not need booze for them, but if you run out of pickles and ice cream, everyone on the trip could die in a murderous rage.

So then you wouldn’t need any food for the last few days. Maybe crackers for the survivors, but no real ‘meals’, probably. These are important considerations.

The most maddening thing about the PIG equation is that almost no one gets it right, ever. Or anywhere close. The more people attending, the longer the trip, and the more the shopping list is split up between attendees, the less and less likely it is that the appropriate amount of eats and cocktails will make it to the party. Attend any ‘potluck’ kind of getaway lasting longer than a week or involving more than six people, and you can expect to either schlep home (or toss) enough extra groceries to open a small 7-11, or you’ll run out of beer on the first night because you thought Bob was getting beer, but Bob thought the twins were bringing beer, but no one knows why because the twins don’t even drink beer, and Joe brought beer, but only enough for himself and we could all drink Susan’s case-ful of pisswater white wine she brought, but why in the world would we do that to ourselves, and what’s Susan doing here anyway because I thought she and Scott broke up already and nobody was friends with her first, and let’s just get wasted on Scope or something now because no one wants to drive out to the store again this late, and why do I even hang out with you people when you never do anything right and I hate each and every one of you with the searing hot fire of a thousand suns?

(Your mileage may vary. But Bob’s kind of a douche, so probably not.)

I tell you about the PIG equation to tell you this: our recent trip was for two days and nine people, and we split the shopping list four ways. Disaster, she is on the wind.

I don’t know what other people lugged home with them, exactly. I do know this — we agreed to buy the supplies for breakfasts. Breakfasts which — someone with a PIG calculator should perhaps have foreseen — no one ate. Neither morning. No people. It was breakfasta non grata in the beer chalet all weekend.

“We’d make the Big Bad Wolf look like Mother Theresa, if some little piggy ever got a glimpse of his friends’ parts stuffed into every corner of the chill chest.”

So right now, as I type, we have in our refrigerator seven cartons of eggs, enough milk to feed several hundred head of juvenile steer, and the bacon… oh, the bacon.

How many little piggies went wee wee wee!!! all the way to the slaughterhouse for this bacon? It’s impossible to know. We may have euthanized an entire little village of piggies for all of the bacon currently sitting in our fridge. We’d make the Big Bad Wolf look like Mother Theresa, if some little piggy ever got a glimpse of his friends’ parts stuffed into every corner of the chill chest. We’re like porcine Jeffery Dahmers. It’s gruesomely delicious.

And I’m not one to waste food. So if nine people aren’t going to consume all this breakfasty goodness in two days, then by god the two of us will gobble it down in nine days. Or until the milk goes south, whichever comes first.

At any rate, the next week of meals around here will be all-breakfast, all the time in an effort to whittle down these extra supplies. It’ll be bacon and eggs, BLE (bacon, lotsa egg) sandwiches, bacon quiche, egg salad with bacon bits, and eggs Bacon-dict morning, noon and night — all washed down with glass after glass of milk-staching moo juice.

Maybe we’ll mix it up and go dessert style with the eggs and milk. We could bake a cake — and then frost it with bacon. Or a nice bread pudding, with a side of bacon. Or three sides. Who’s counting, at least until the refrigerator door has the room to close again? I’ll be seeing bacon and eggs in my sleep. And possibly on my pillow, if I don’t start taking breaks between glasses of milk.

So that’s our week ahead, thanks to a predictably faulty PIG snafu. If anyone’s hungry for breakfast food this week, don’t head for your local diner. Stop by Chez Charlie for all of your bacon, egg and milky needs. We’ll leave the PIG on for you.