Shopping at Home

A quart Ziploc bag labeled “greens” with something dark and dried up inside.  A plastic container with a cracked lid from Triple S marked “chicken broth.”  Honkin’ big bags of almonds, pecans, and walnuts from the big box store.  Separate bags of grocery store frozen veggies.  A humungous bag of mixed frozen fruit from when my stepson was living on smoothies after his accident.  Corn from two years ago (from a crop that I remember as being particularly starchy).  Blackberries bought frozen from farmer Greg.  My last Triple S meat order—plastic shrink-wrapped packages spilling willy-nilly—where I over-ordered everything, including dog bones.  A soup which only I liked, so I froze small portions for lunches, then never thawed them.  A precious package of wild-caught smoked salmon from Trader Joe’s, saved for a holiday or brunch.  Ten (!) loaves of bread from half-off Sundays at Pekara Bakery. Cheesecake cut into squares, left over from my son’s birthday. More Ziplocs with shredded yellow squash and zucchini mixed together, a perfect soup filler.  How will I ever be able to empty all of this out enough to defrost my freezers, or even one of my freezers?

How long do things last, I ask myself?  Well, if you turn to the internet, anything over a year old should be tossed, six months for meat or prepared foods.  But I know that a few years ago I managed to turn some ancient, frost-covered raspberries into a delightful jam.  And big veggie soups can disguise that a vegetable has gone from frozen to freeze-dried.  Corn seems to last forever, especially for corn chowder.  Hmmm…

I’m a terrible food hoarder, as I’ve mentioned before.  While others are scouring Pinterest or Houzz for bathroom remodels or wreath design, I am drooling over photos of pantries.  In my current house, in a wonderfully remodeled kitchen, my cabinets have overflowed to the basement. Our basement pantry sits under the front porch, approximately 2’ x 5’, four shelves and a covered floor.  

Having this in the basement forces me to exercise a bit to fetch what I need

In it:  cereal, juice, hot chocolate dry mix, Trader Joe’s backups of ketchup, mayo, tartar sauce, cornichons, capers, roasted red peppers, mustard, jams, canned fish, quinoa, rice, couscous; wine, several different bottles of hard alcohol, liqueurs and mixers which we almost never indulge in; pasta, dried beans, canned tomatoes, canned pumpkin, canned sauerkraut, canned beans, canned coconut milk; boxes of protein bars, fruit cups, juice, crackers, graham crackers for my son’s lunch; on the floor are boxes of La Croix, San Pellegrino, chicken stock, vegetable stock, and beer. And these are not exhaustive lists, by the way.  I forgot about oil, nut butters, popcorn, vinegars, flour, sugar, salt…Move to the back room and you’ll see two chest freezers and an old secondhand fridge (whose freezer door has long been frozen completely shut, who knows what’s behind it…?). 

What's inside the mystery freezer?  We may never know...

Just one of my freezers, filled to the brim

The fridge stashes our backup of local eggs, bulk yogurt, almond milk, and our recent haul of apples from Wolfe Orchard. 

I used to live in an apartment with a tiny kitchen and a single refrigerator with a miniscule freezer.  I had one small cabinet containing canned goods, pasta, cereal, baking goods, and spices.  Soon after my husband moved in—and before I started needing to store breast milk—we bought a cube-proportioned chest freezer for the basement; it was almost never full.  I’m not sure at what point of home-ownership or married family life that I went over the top to start over-storing food.  In this post in my other blog about Surviving Winter’s Worst, I talk a bit about my food hoarding tendencies.  I’m not sure if I have a fear of the zombie apocalypse, or if I just hate endlessly running to the grocery store, but whatever it is has resulted in having to go through my storage areas every once in a while and throwing out stored food long past its glory.  And I hate throwing food away.

A friend recently posted on Facebook her family’s intention to go shopping at home.  They would try to use only ingredients they could find on their shelves.  The first example was a minestrone soup and a big cheese bread; they had every ingredient except for the yeast.  I took this a challenge; how long could I go without going to the store?  I would perhaps allow myself one ingredient per day (celery and lemons never seem to be there when I need them, for example) to buy at the store, but everything else would come from home. I just did a big box store run for perishables, so I should at least be able to go a week without buying food.  I will not even go to the farmer’s market—gasp!  I will post my progress here!  My creativity will be kindled, my frugality at a peak, my family will be inspired, and hopefully my freezers and fridges and shelves will be cleared out in no time! 

And then I can fill them up again. After all, the holidays are coming…