On the 30th Day of Shutdown, my pantry gave to me…

I meant to post over the weekend, but blood-wolf-etc lunar eclipse disrupted things (see photos on my Facebook page!)

First off, apologies. My niece chastised me for getting the day count wrong in my last shutdown post, but hey, I looked it up. Everyone has a different date. Or no date. Or the news articles are days old or full of pop-up ads. But I think I got it right this time. 30 days. Bigger mile-marker.

I won’t rehash the news. Read my first post, if you like. We are lucky enough to have savings, and pack pay was approved. Eventually. In the meantime, we’re trying not to run through that savings. It’s made us take a closer look at food spending, something we can easier control than the mortgage.

Obviously, no eating out. No going to Starbucks, buying a hot chocolate (or tea, if I’m feeling the diet) and sitting in the corner to write for hours. We have tea in the cupboard that’s already paid for. In fact, we had a lot of food in the cupboard that was already paid for.

And freezer.

I was reminded of section in a favorite clutter-clearing book:

I’ve read Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston several times. It’s currently out on loan to a friend, so I can’t look up the exact passage but here’s the gist. Kingston recommends completely going through your pantry and using up all of your on-hand food. One reader wrote that he got down to 6 cans of stuff he didn’t like and gave them to a food pantry before he restocked with only the food he would use in a week.

I decided we had good reason to attempt it.

We’ve had turkey soup from Thanksgiving leftovers, corn casserole, burritos, frozen fish, spaghetti, lasagna, bean salad, and bacon & pancakes from one of the six boxes of Trader Joe’s pumpkin pancake mix that I love and hoard. A scone mix and 2 loaves of frozen zucchini bread were welcome finds. We are making sure to eat everything before moving on to the next meal, something we often don’t do because we are ‘bored’ of leftovers.

This is a good habit, one we should have had all along.

An inventory of the refrigerator and pantry also revealed habits I hope to change.

Can you make that out? We have 9 jars of jam / jam-like stuff on hand. Sadly, that’s matched to only 3 jars–half-filled–of peanut butter. The flip would have been better.

This was not the only over-purchase:

11 bottles of dressing. In my defense (slightly), 3 of them are balsamic vinegars and 2 are for a quinoa salad recipe.

5 bottles of mustard. 2 of catsup!

3 cans of spray whipping cream. +1 shelf-stable box. And 2 half-cartons of heavy cream, frozen.

3 bags of raisins.

You get the idea… But on the positive side:

I will be able to forego Starbucks for quite a while.