Creating a well stocked home
Keeping a stocked pantry with basic foods is one of the best ways to save money on foods. It's a combination of keeping all the basic ingredients as well as keeping quick fix foods on hand for those unexpected times that always pop up.
If you're just getting started it's nice to have a purpose, something that keeps you going and motivated. It can take awhile to fully stock your home kitchen but it's worth it!
My motivation is the memory of walking through Walmart in spring of 2020 and seeing empty shelves, freezers and the haunted look on everyone's faces. Knowing I had 3 kids at home and another on the way at that time and I wondered how long those empty shelves would last. I never want to be in that position again, I want to know that even if the shelves are empty for a couple months I can still live off what I have at home.
Another thing to decide on is how much you have room for, and how many months or years worth of inventory you want to keep on hand.
My goal is a year's worth of most of our foods that we eat. You may just want enough that you don’t have to fight the crowd when they're calling for snow.
A good tip for knowing how much you need is to start writing on the containers when you buy it or open it so you have a good idea of how much you’ll need. An example is flour, I buy in bulk and a 5 gallon bucket (about 25 pounds worth) will last about 3-4 months depending on the season. Or we eat about 5 bushels of peaches in a year or 60 quart jars so I try to buy that much when they're in season. We buy boxes of blueberries from Hickory Ridge Orchard. I know that we eat about 70 pounds in a year's time so that's how much I keep in the freezer.
Also knowing how long a box of dishwasher tablets lasts you, or even a package of toilet paper and laundry soap.
All these are based on your family and what you buy and how you can store your foods. Someone who doesn’t can isn’t able to keep ripe peaches for more than a week or so. And if you don’t have freezer space you can’t store meat or blueberries long term.
This also applies to your meat. You can plan ahead once you know how much you can eat in a year (or a month if you sign up for subscriptions). For us since the seasons are different for when we process animals. That means we don’t constantly have a years supply of each type of meat but we always have something in the freezer.
It's likely you already have a good idea of how long most of the things last in your home, especially those most used items. You know if you need to buy them each week or if it's seasonal how much you buy then.
Another way to think about how much you will need is thinking about how much you might use in a week. Like when I am canning green beans I like to get about 50 quarts so we can have them once a week, even if we don’t it gives us plenty. Or something like rice if you use 1 cup of dry rice per meal then you need 52 cups of rice to plan for a year, and if it last 15 months instead of 12 then that's no big deal, you just have extra and it isn’t going to go bad.
Next we'll talk about how to get started next time you go shopping without it being overwhelming.