A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

YOU'D BETTER COME ON IN MY KITCHEN, BABE, IT'S GOING TO BE RAINING OUTDOORS: I'm working on a list of inconsistently-available urban staples -- the things that are so essential to one's comestible (which is not to say culinary, because that would imply cooking) existence that if they weren't conveniently available, one probably would drive substantial distances every couple of weeks to pick them up. Mine:

• Indian take-out
  
• Newman's Own pineapple salsa.
  
• Sweet Baby Ray's barbeque sauce. It's possible that I've never used catsup with Sweet Baby Ray's in the house.
  
• Spicy tuna bowl. Sounds like the going rate to have this made to order up here is about $3-4 above the regular price in LA. Must ... not ... overdo it.
  
• Drive-thru McDonald's or Burger King or something, so that you can get a soda while the kids are asleep in the car. We've identified the nearest drive-thru to our house as about four miles away, with the second-nearest about eight miles away and the third-nearest about thirty miles away.
  
• Cut mango. Cut fruit is so expensive, but with mango it's worth it to avoid the hassle of trying to get the meat off the pit.
  
• Low-carb flour tortillas. They taste like uncooked dough. Mmm, uncooked dough. I wish I knew about these in law school, when I was broke and eating a ten-pound bag of potatoes every three days.
  
• Freschetta sauce-stuffed-crust four-cheese pizza. Before my doctor told me to cut my cholesterol, we used to eat this once a week. Our grocery store would frequently not stock it, so whenever they had any we would buy like five of them and hoard them in our freezer.
  
• Fat-Free Pringles, with Olestra. Now that we know, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell and Eric Schlosser, that Olestra does not cause loose stool but does taste like old-fashioned beef tallow, which you can't get anymore, what excuse is there not to cook in it? Also, I'm happy, but also a little sad, to report that after several years Pringles has corrected its packaging so that it reads "50% fewer calories" instead of the comfortingly ungrammatical "50% less calories."

What can't you live without?