My family has never been financially in a good place, but especially when I was still very young. From what I understood my grandmother had a friend who owned a blueberry farm, and one day my mother brought home a giant thing chock full of blueberries. Deal was we could wash, package, and freeze them. Then we could have blueberries all year.
We went to work, though my help at that age was largely superficial, but we filled most of our freezer and all of a rolling cooler which was going to my grandparents. All washed in the colander and packaged in ziploc.
The other thing my parents would do was make enough dinner for the whole week. They both worked, my dad had 3 jobs at somepoint, and I often went with my mom to hers. So when we all got home it was easy to just nuke whatever had been made rather than make it then.
This week’s dinner was mac’n’cheese and hot dogs, yum right! Except no, my mother forgot to wash out the colander and it was all blueberry flavored. One week of blueberry flavored mac’n’cheese was enough for me to grow a healthy distaste for blueberries.