Stocking Up 101: Stuff {Storage, Part II}
Written by biscuit on July 19, 2008 – 10:05 am -Part I can be found here.
Okay, I should be at the farmers market this very moment, but I’m leaving town for a few days tomorrow evening, and I don’t see the point of buying food I don’t have the time, room or means to handle before and during my absence. And my plans to run over to the peach festival and get a bushel or two? Good gawd almighty, what was I thinking?
Oh sure, I could just go for it and hope for the best. But I have a tiny refrigerator (for the purposes of energy conservation — yes, it does make a difference), and I’ve been keeping the air conditioning set at 80-85. Combine those two facts with a mess of ripe produce? You do the math! Besides, I’m working on a big coop order and need to be putting my energy into storing all those dry goods when they get here.
This time next year, I’ll have all this figured out — maybe.
The good news is, I have almost enough cabinet space now. The bad news is, I thought I could never get all of them full, but I was wrong. Not that they’re full yet, but getting close.
This is why everyone should have at least one zomg, it’s TEOTWAWKI, civilization is crashing down around our ears, and I’ve got to prepare! guides, or a good Fanny Farmer or somesuch.
My current favorite TEOTWAWKI guide has a couple of suggestions for storage: an in-home grocery store for foods you normally eat, and dehydrated and freeze-dried foods.
Let’s talk about doing an in-home grocery store.
If you have a pantry, you have the basis for an in-home grocery store. My current TEOTWAWKI guide, however, suggests shelves instead of cabinets — something I don’t have in the kitchen, but do have in the laundry room right next to the kitchen.
This makes perfect sense to me. Cabinets can be hard to manage, especially if you’re relatively short and many of your cabinets are high up, as is the case with me.
With shelves, it’s possible to see what you have with just a glance, especially if the shelves aren’t too deep. It all seems so obvious, but it’s good to point out.
The guide also suggests storing nonperishable versions of whatever foods you normally keep in the refrigerator, if they’re foods you commonly eat. This is where all of Kate’s tips on dehydration can come in handy.
Speaking of which, if anyone here has ever made jerky, I’d love to hear about it.
Another suggestion: keep is simple. Don’t buy volumes of weird foods for your in-house grocery store. Instead, make the bulk of the foods those you normally eat — unless your idea of normal eating is a beer and some Cheetoes, of course. Which brings us to another principle: strive for wholesome eats. Store the foods that will sustain you, should push come to shove.
And don’t forget condiments, spices, dried herbs. Just because a massive ice storm has hit and brought down all the electric lines and blocked roads for miles around and there’s no getting in or getting out besides which it wouldn’t help you much because all the food at the groceries stores has either been bought up or spoiled, thanks to conditions, doesn’t mean you have to suffer without your beloved Rooster sauce or green Tabasco.
Once you get your pantry going, rotate, rotate, rotate. Foods go bad, even canned goods, so be sure to keep an eye on those expiration dates. If you actually use your pantry, this shouldn’t be that much of an issue.
Just be sure to replace what you’ve eaten. If you get in the habit of eating out of your stores and shopping once or twice a month for the specific purpose of restocking, this shouldn’t be an issue.
While working on your pantry, or in-house grocery store, the TEOTWAWKI guide has a list of questions you should ask yourself:
1. Under what scenarios do you anticipate the need for using food reserves?
2. Will you be mobile?
3. Will food preparation facilities, supplies, and fuel be available?
4. Have you determined the length of time you desire the system to sustain you and your family?
5. How many people will be depending upon your food?
6. Are there special nutritional requirements?
7. How important is ease of preparation?
8. Have you considered your budget?
9. How many calories do you require per person?
A final suggestion for this week. The guide also strongly advises keeping your in-house grocery store (or pantry) in your living area because doing so deters rodents and other critters.
Having lived through the mousecapades at the old place (gad, sometimes I think rural areas are nothing but mice), I can testify to this one. When I first moved out there, I’d had hopes of root cellars and turning one of the sheds into a big food storage facility and omg, it would be so easy and convenient and free up all that space inside!!
Hooboy. I don’t think so.
Besides, one principle of the in-house grocery store {or pantry} is making sure your stores are not subjected to extremely hot or cold conditions. That way, there’s less chance of spoilage and degradation.
Not to mention, in-house means … oh, never mind.
Now, Kate’s written quite a bit about pantries, including here, I think. But I can’t find her posts at the moment. A bit later, I’ll run over to dKos and get some of her’s and tvb’s (the founder of What’s for Dinner?) posts on pantries because I know they wrote about them there.
For now, though, I got to — you know — mow.
Posted in Economy, Food, Frugality, Stocking Up 101, TEOTWAWKI |
Another hitch interfering with my going to the farmers market and peach festival this morning: I just discovered my property here is about a quarter acre or so bigger than I thought.
And the grass there is really high.
Makes my purchase price for this place an absolute steal — but it means even more mowing. Argh!
Jerky is on my list of things to do. Since today’s list alone is three pages long, it might not happen immediately, but I will do it and write about it (with pictures!)
I’m very big on pantries. As I’ve said before, there have been times just this year that I was literally unable to leave the house long enough to get to the store (24-hour nursing a bedridden accident victim is so not my calling), not to mention a couple of budgetary disasters around the same time. If I hadn’t had my in-house grocery, we would have been in deep do-do for a while there.
Two major pieces of advice:
1. LABEL EVERYTHING. You think that you will remember what that jar contains when you dry it and put it away. Six months later you pick it up and you see that it’s dried and green and once was leafy and you’ve been an herb-dehydrating fool all summer. Um - parsley? Mint? Oregano? When there are dozens of jars of dried green leafy things, you will NOT remember which one this is. Label it!
2. DATE EVERYTHING. I keep a handful of Sharpies in the downstairs pantry area and another handful upstairs in the kitchen. It comes in the door, I mark the date on it before I put it away. This helps tremendously with biscuit’s stern stricture above, ROTATE YOUR STOCK.
True story: Last year while looking for something I reached up to a box on the top shelf of one of my kitchen cabinets and triggered an avalanche of Jello and Jello pudding mixes. I picked them up off the floor and started sorting through them as I repacked the box. I was stunned to see expiration dates of 1990 and 1992 on many of them. I had moved those packages when we bought this house in 1994 and promptly forgot that they were there. Rotate your stock!
You are for sure The Pantry Goddess!
The TEOTWAWKI guide suggests color coding everything with those tiny round stickons.
And your Jello story reminds me of my mother’s stocks.
It’s why the guide’s suggestion of shelves rather than cabinets is such a good one.
I keep those little bright colored round labels and a sharpie in my kitchen junk drawer for labeling stuff. The other thing is stuff in the freezer, that I must label because it keeps longer and is harder to recognize what it is sometimes. What it is and the date.
Thanks for this series and the pantry suggestions, guys, it all helps organize our lives.
Thanks, Scotia!
Sometimes I think *I* write them more for my benefit than anyone else’s.
I’ve never been a particularly organized person, after all.
So it really helps me to put it down in writing, and to do some research along the way.
Along those lines, I swear, I must be the only person who’s never had the good sense to buy those round label thingies! Then again, there’s my organization issues …
I only have them because of garage sales in the distant past and figuring out how to “use them up!”
Labeling and dating is extremely important. It is not a bad idea to take a Sharpie and write on the ends of cans what is in them, even if they are store bought and have paper labels on them. Just let the hot water supply hose to the washing machine rupture and see how long the paper labels last.
One caution about a laundry room, in addition to the one just above. In many cases the water heater is there, too, and, except for very cold climates, may make the room to warm for optimum storage conditions. And if things are in glass, dark helps a lot. Warmest regards, Doc.
The dollmaker who owned this house for some — er, from 1959 until this year would be 50 years! — completely rearranged all the rooms in the house.
::blink::
So the water heater is in the middle of the house. And the laundry room is where one of the back porches used to be (I presume).
I think. Unless there’s another water heater in here, which one friend of mine swears there is. Danged if I can find it, though!
Go to your power panel and turn off your primary water heater, or turn off the gas to it and let it cool overnight. Then turn on hot water taps.
If most are cool and one or two are hot, you have a second heater, unless it is on the same circuit, and you should be able to see that if there are two, rather than one, leads screwed into the power panel. If you are on gas, then just turn off the gas to the one that you know is there.
Next morning, see what is hot and what is not. Warmest regards, Doc.
Ohh, cool idea, Doc.
The house I moved into in 1998 had the WEIRDEST wiring I have ever seen. Plugs in the same room were on different circuits. Ceiling lights were off center of the rooms, water was routed really strange to the back bathroom that was right next to the other bathroom that was next to the kitchen, that all backed up to the input lines. The landscaping was also weirdly planted. Trees 3′ from the house, no flowerbeds at all. One garage door GLUED shut. I found a dissicated squirrel standing on it’s hind legs with it’s arms upstretched in the attic insulation. Scared me to death! ICK! I feel like the dollhouse lady’s sister and brother-in-law lived there!
The wiring was odd in this place, too. First strike is that it aluminum, which can be a disaster waiting to happen, but I ameliorated that threat.
The second is that whatever jakeleg electrician the renovator used did not understand wiring, so I had grounds carrying current, neutrals that were hot, and hots that were neutral.
I fixed all of the problems, and now do not worry about burning the place down (with me it it!) so all is well.
IF anyone out there has aluminum wiring, common on houses built in the mid to late 1960’s, you are in danger unless you have taken measures to compensate. Let me know if you have, and I will point you towards some resources that can keep you alive, and preserve your property. Warmest regards, Doc.
Wow, about a third of my former house was wired with the extremely strange aluminum/copper wiring. I didn’t know what to think, but the period 73-74 was when the builders used this in housing in this area. Weird!
I was careful with it and replaced as much as I could. (You don’t want to know why I didn’t replace all of it!).
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