Do you spend time looking at other people's grocery carts when checking out? (Or should I say, do you check out other people's carts?) I do. Just as much as I am prone to be distracted by other people's conversations (I think we call it eavesdropping) in restaurants.
I did the same during the flurry of grocery procurement prior to Nemo. I wondered what the person in front of me was doing with all that fennel. And they probably wondered why I needed so many bananas (good question). As with many others, I now have a well-stocked freezer, though we also did enjoy a few great meals: roast chicken a la Thomas Keller (nothing simpler: salt! that's it!); Pork Chops Normand (also easy and scrumptious, see Silver Palette); and a huge brunch of eggs, hash browns, sausage, and toast). I never made it to the George School sticky buns, whose recipe is here--sent to me by two of my classmates after I posted my mid-storm plea on Facebook.
The Boston Globe has a nice round-up of how people passed the time in the kitchen, cooking in the dark, in the fireplace, and, normally, as did I -- no power loss here.
Blizzards of activity heated Twitter kitchens.