FreshDirect is My Hero!!!

 FreshDirect is a magical, magical thing.

For those of you who are scratching your heads and wondering what I'm talking about, I'll explain. FreshDirect is an online grocery store. You can select your groceries online and they'll be brought to your doorstep the very next day!

There are several outstanding things about this service--you can get fat without leaving the house, you can run errands in your pajamas, and you won't get those annoying wrinkly marks on your arms from carrying plastic bags from the store. But the most brilliant part about FreshDirect for those city dwellers who don't live in elevator buildings is this: The delivery people will climb every single step and bring groceries right into your apartment. This means that there's no need to lug 50 pounds of flour, milk, and eggs up to the fifth floor! It's a food pyramid miracle!!!

But FreshDirect isn't all hearts and flowers. There are some drawbacks. First of all, it's no Wegmans. But nothing is, really, so we can just move on from that one. Secondly, the entirety of your neighborhood grocery store isn't available to you online, and the items that are available are priced slightly higher than other grocery stores. Sometimes there are only one or two varieties of a particular item to choose from, and there are no generic or store brands. For example, until very recently, I was unable to purchase my beloved Sunkist orange soda through FreshDirect. And they still don't have squeezable Welch's jelly. But as I've learned on HGTV's Property Brothers (my new favorite show!), if your checklist is too long, you'll never find what you're looking for.

Now let's go back to that part about FreshDirect carrying my groceries all the way up my 97 steps. It truly is a wondrous thing. But is that convenience worth the higher prices? I ended up with this compromise: I use FreshDirect to purchase canned goods, soda, frozen food, and other annoyingly heavy items. I'd rather pay a little more to have someone else do the heavy lifting on those. Other than that, I shop at the grocery store.

I'd love to go crazy and order hundreds of dollars of FreshDirect supplies in one fell swoop, but the unfortunate thing is that no one in Manhattan has storage. Thus, I order just enough to fill my (one) cupboard, my sections of the fridge and the freezer, and my under-the-bed food crate. (It's true. I really have one.)

Yesterday, my cupboard was as bare as Mother Hubbard's. And now, thanks to FreshDirect, I could host a twelve-person dinner party.

If I had a dining room, that is.