Thanks to Ooten Aboot:
… who explains: “I understand the point of bread pudding is to use perishable ingredients (e.g. bread, milk and eggs) before they perish. I don’t understand why A & J would keep perishables as their ‘snow provisions’. Suspension of disbelief will only stretch so far.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
I think it is possible that Janis is referring specifically to the eggs that Arlo is holding and has on the table. There have been a lot of references in the comics (and editorial cartoons) about enormous increases in egg prices. Perhaps Janis had laid up a secret reserve just in case. Yes, eggs are perishable, but they will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator.
P.S. For example, yesterday’s “Moderately Confused“:
Maybe the provisions have been around awhile and are reaching end-of-llife. Or, judging by the yard, maybe there’s no more threat of snow.
What I want to know is, who made the snowman in the yard?
The cliche is that when snow is coming, there’s a rush on bread, milk, and eggs at all the grocery stores, especially in places that don’t get a lot of snow (A&J live within a day’s drive of the Gulf Coast, IIRC). The snowman is melting, showing that the storm has passed, so it’s okay to use up all the extra Snow Provisions they bought, but Janis is worried that it might snow again soon.
Whenever there’s a chance of snow here in the South (NC), people run to the store and buy milk, eggs, and bread. No one know why since they are perishable. People joke that if they get snowed in (it doesn’t take a lot for that to happen here), they can always make French toast. Instead, Arlo is using those provisions to make bread pudding.
Dvandom has it. People in the US tend to panic buy milk, eggs, and bread before a snow storm. The first panel shows that it didn’t amount to much, thus Arlo using up the “provisions.”
And of course . . .
I find these funny, as I lived in BlizzardLand for almost 60 years, and now live in HurricaneVille.
In the northeast we have French Toast:
https://www.universalhub.com/french-toast
O.My.Dog, what is that accent? I can’t even watch these
You can fail to suspend your disbelief all you want … but we do it anyway. Here in New England, reports of upcoming nor’easters and blizzards are called “French Toast Alerts”, because everyone will buy bread, eggs, and milk. Even people who don’t normally have bread, eggs, and milk in their house.
Those videos have an upper midwest accent (parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota …)
Like Charlie Berens (who also works with them), and Frances McDormand as Marge Gunderson in Fargo.
Buying things you never would buy otherwise because a storm is coming seems to be normal human behavior.
My housemates and I had a yard sale, and one of said housemates told me to go to the bank and get several rolls of nickels, dimes and quarters so that we could make change if necessary. So I did.
Everything we had for sale was priced at multiples of a dollar.
It wasn’t until after the sale that I realized what should have been obvious.
It’s annoying when the evening before impending snow falls on my usual shopping day.
Storm prep is underway at Breaking Cat News:
https://www.gocomics.com/breaking-cat-news/2023/02/7
Interesting. I had thought the bread and milk thing was mostly in New England, and had its roots in the Blizzard of ’78, which happened 45 years ago this week.
I think it’s fairly widespread anywhere the roads might be rough for a few days.
I’m impressed by how freaked out reasonably prosperous people are by the price of eggs rising to the point that … an omelette for one person costs as much as a dollar more! (Seriously, a dozen eggs is still under $5.)
Maybe where you are. The cheapest dozen I’ve seen in the past two weeks was 4.99, on sale. The average price (for standard, non-organic, non-pasture-raised, not fancy eggs) is about $6.50, or a bit over twice what it cost before Christmas.
On the other hand, apparently wholesale prices have dropped a lot in the last week or two, and retail prices may be coming down in the not too distant future (4 weeks or so, said the article I saw). So the precious-egg thing will be just another temporary weirdness soon…
OK, so eggs are $6.50 a pound where you are. (Where the heck? They’re cheaper here on expensive Long Island.) That’s roughly 50 cents an egg. Two egg omelette, total cost, $1. So … the cost of the eggs for that omelette can’t be more than $1 higher than before, and that’s if eggs used to be free.
Sorry, $6.50 a dozen.
California, Bay Area. And yes, that omelet is not, in itself, so that expensive – but it’s doubled in price in the past two months. Less how absolutely expensive they are, and more how relatively.
Though I go through a dozen eggs in less than two weeks, just for breakfast (no baking). It’s a chunk of money, even absolutely. Especially since eggs are cheap protein, compared to meat – and suddenly less cheap. Still considerably cheaper than meat, but less so.
And, of course, the media habit of “OMG something changed! The sky is falling!” clickbait reporting.
Oddly, at the supermarket regular large eggs are about $4.15 and the free-range organic ones about $3.80. I got some of the latter when they were on sale 2/$7.
Yeah, I noticed that now at Costco their white eggs are the same price as the brown organic ones ($6.49/2 dozen, which hasn’t changed for the organic ones). Limit two per customer.
For ethical reasons, I can’t buy organic products. (They use about 20% more land and other resources to produce the same amount of food, and the “organic” insecticides are actually more toxic than the petroleum-based ones they avoid.)
This is the orientation video shown to people coming to southern states. The first time I visited North Carolina, there was a snow storm that shut everything down, and all weekend, people kept telling me “This never happens here.” Then I moved to North Carolina, and nearly every year, there was at least one snow that shut everything down, and I told visitors, “They’ll tell you this never happens. This always happens.”
I think this strip would have worked better by moving the panels around.
Panels 1 and 2 (bookends): throwaway panels remain the same.
Panel 3: “What are you making?” “Bread pudding!”
Panel 4: “Bread pudding? You don’t make that very often!”
Panel 5: “It isn’t often I have all the ingredients handy at the same time!”
Panel 6: “Arlo! These are our snow provisions!!”
Panel 7: (Exterior view of the house and yard, with the small amount of snow melting. Arlo’s voice from inside the house.) “They are?”