Being the children of restaurant owners means that people always cook for you. For my family, this meant Chinese food was available all the time, not just standard Americanized fare, but traditional and regional foods, because for their own meals, my parents and the cooks always made more traditional stuff.
Not only did my sisters and I come to expect food to magically appear before us, but we also used the cooks to do our culinary bidding. We would call my parents and ask them if they could please put broccoli, mushrooms, fried tofu and chicken in curry sauce, and then please bring the result home. Could they make me an omelet of those weird black wiggly mushrooms and sauteed broccoli with garlic?
We also never had to go grocery shopping for any real staples, like eggs, or produce or spices. They were always in supply in the walk-in refrigerator, and we didn't a dozen eggs in the fridge, we had 30.

As a result of this sheltered existence, Cyndy and I, who have since moved out of our childhood home, have cripplingly little knowledge on how to shop properly for real groceries, and one trip's worth of food typically lasts us around three days.
Then we starve for the next four, until we break down and start over again.
Kendra tried to help us by telling us to stock up on canned goods and pasta and the like, but alas, we almost never eat those things. American pantries elude us. The only times we went to the grocery store were to buy pancake supplies or ice cream.
We'd go to Costco, and spend hundreds of dollars on Dunkaroos and chocolate chip cookies. We only ever understood how to buy sweets, and too many jars of pickles.

A typical conversation at Costco went like this:

Dad: Are you sure you can eat that whole cake?


Dad: that's a really big cake. I don't think you guys can finish it.
Mom: don't let them buy the cake.

Karen & Cyndy: we need the cake.
Of course we never ever ever finished those cakes. We would eat a single slice, be repulsed by how much thick sugary frosting was everywhere, and forget about the cake. And then we'd move on to dunkaroos, and leave my poor parents to deal with the mess we'd made. It was a blissfully terrible system.


Cut to modern day, when Cyndy and I are left to do our own grocery shopping. We've never been able to shop for a whole week's worth of food. In the past three days we've been to three different places to buy very specific food, including dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets, and there's no end in sight. If you knew what a child I truly am inside, you would be appalled.


-Karen