Eat like a man, but keep the emergency room number on speed dial

I had my first single dinner yesterday. Not the first dinner I’ve eaten since being “re-singled,” but the first that was typical of what a single guy eats.

The Former Lovely Mrs. Taylor used to shop for groceries every week, whether we needed any or not. She would clip coupons, peruse grocery store circulars, find the best deals.

She “stocked up.”

When she left, months ago, the food remained, and there was a lot of it. Since then, I’ve mostly eaten at restaurants, when I remember to eat at all. When I did eat at home, I would just pull something from the cupboards, heat it up and chow down.

The easy-to-prepare stuff went first. Microwave pizza, burritos, White Castle sliders … these lasted about a month. The various bags and boxes of Fritos, barbecue potato chips and Cheese Nips – the sort of thing you eat with microwaveable food – lasted about the same amount of time.

Then a couple months back I started emptying the freezer. Hamburger, some chicken breasts, even the fish that had been in there since the kids were little; this stuff got me through another month.

If I could thaw it and grill it, it got eaten.

A while back, I noticed the cupboards seemed less crowded than they had been in the past. All of a sudden, I could locate a can of refried beans without digging around in there for a half hour. The creamed corn was no longer buried behind boxes of Louisiana Style Rice & Beans and stacked tins of kippers in mustard sauce.

I made Hamburger Helper. The box had been in the pantry since the Reagan administration. And like the Reagan administration, it was dry and hard to swallow. (You Republicans know this is a humor column, right? So no hate mail, please!)

I ate the tins of tuna and kippers in mustard sauce. I ate the creamed corn. What was left wasn’t always what I was in the mood for, but it was food.

Then yesterday after work I decided to whip up an early dinner before going on my nightly bicycle ride. I hadn’t eaten lunch or breakfast and was pretty hungry.

But like Old Mother Hubbard, when I went to the cupboard, it was bare. I tried the box of Saltines in the back, but what had once been white, crisp crackers had transmuted into something resembling an eighth-grader’s science project. At any rate, it didn’t appear edible, except by bacteria, apparently.

I checked the freezer. Behind the ice trays lurked a mysterious lump of gray-green stuff that might once have been a Johnsonville brat.

Wrapped in waxed paper and frozen to an ice cube tray were six slices of pastrami. On the bottom shelf was a zip lock bag containing four small pieces of freezer-burned garlic bread.

I placed the pastrami – which now had the consistency of shoe leather – atop the slices of garlic bread and topped it with some shredded cheese (which, amazingly, had not turned green). This I baked in the oven for 20 minutes, until the cheese melted and the other components thawed.

I actually drank a nice glass of Pinot Noir with this culinary repast. I needed the wine to wash away the taste of freezer burned meat and stale bread.

It wasn’t good, by any stretch of the imagination, but it didn’t kill me, either.

Tonight, for the first time in over 20 years, I’m going grocery shopping by myself. If I have to eat like a single guy, I’m at least getting some TV dinners and Ramen noodles.

Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.