With a new baby on the way, we are shoveling tons of money towards our HSA to prepay the thousands of dollars the hospital room will cost. We did take a hard look at birthing at home, but I’ll speak more about that in a separate post. Our food budget has been slashed to make all the ends meet, and we’ve decided to challenge ourselves to skipping a week’s worth of grocery shopping once a month, probably until August. I’m not sure I’ll have something interesting to report each month, but if I do, y’all will get to hear about it. The “rules” are pretty simple, we pick one week and don’t buy food. Whatever’s in the house is fair game to eat.
Astute readers may notice that I said “we.” Budgeting is not easy, as most of you know. For those readers that may be struggling in this economy to keep financially solvent, I’ll share a bit of advice about budgeting. In our house every adult gets equal say in the process. It doesn’t matter who’s bringing in the most cash in a particular year, every adult contributes (works our butt off might be closer to the truth) so every adult gets a say. It’s been my experience that budgets made without the cooperation/input from everyone inevitably fail. From a SHTF perspective, having all the budget info residing in the head of one adult is a recipe for financial disaster if that one person doesn’t make it home someday. It’s not something you “set and forget” either, spend some time every month to see where you’re succeeding and where you’re failing and have dialogue about both. Nuff said, back to the pantry.
Doing this challenge in January is a bit harder than when we’ve done it in the past, namely because there’s nothing fresh coming out of the garden or being gleaned. We do have various “fresh” foods in cold storage of course, but we lean much heavier on the canned and dried goods. We’re eating up some of the older stuff (~2 years old on avg) so this is another bonus to the challenges. We don’t have any fancy can holders that keep our cans sorted by date, you know the ones I’m talking about, the 300$ a pop FIFO jobbies. We have old fashioned shelves. :-D And, we’re busy people, sometimes the pantry goods get put away properly, sometimes they don’t. :-D So, eating up the dusty stuff is beneficial, both to our budget and to our stores. As we come out of this lean time at the end of summer, we’ll can a bunch of fresh garden goodness and refresh the stores with that bounty.
The first week went really well. (Don’t they always?) There was one little surprise, with the canned fruit. Apparently my fruit loving toddler was talking Daddy into fruit snacks from the stored cans in the basement. This has been going on since the fresh local fruit (except for apples) petered out in the fall. He does eat the apples, and he does eat the frozen stuff, but every other day or so they were bringing up a can of something for him to eat in the afternoon. Not a bad thing certainly, he’s a growing boy and canned fruit is better than any number of things he could be asking for, but I was a little surprised at the level of the fruit stores. Mostly because said can would be empty and gone by the time I got home and I just wasn’t aware that it was happening. It doesn’t help that we had a terrible year for local fruit production in 2011 and my three main gleaning sources were almost fruitless, so I didn’t get much canned in the that category. We’ll need to keep a close eye on that as we do these challenges, it won’t do to completely run our shelves dry of canned fruit. Shouldn’t be a problem though.
What did we eat? Potatoes, baked, fried and casseroled with freezer beef and freezer cheese. Pasta with white sauce and tomatoes/garlic. (Oh, apparently I’m especially terrible about rotating pasta supplies. Good to know.) Sweet potatoes, mashed. PBJ on home baked bread, with the aforementioned fruit. Storage apples, eaten as is or in smoothies with bits of other fruit that were going downhill. Whole wheat choc. chip cookies, (you do store choc chips, right?) Toast, oatmeal, and spinach/egg burritos for breakfasts, with freezer OJ. Weekend breakfasts of nutty whole wheat pancakes. Since we follow the eat what you store and store what you eat philosophy, I’m betting Rowen didn’t even notice a difference. Although, he did ask for pizza once, and was disappointed to get casserole instead. :-D
Thoughts on pantry living or budgeting food costs? Do chime in!
-Calamity Jane
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{ 9 comments }
This is a great test of anyone’s SHTF plan. It’s hard to implement as the whole family has to buy into it. I’m preparing for testing this very thing in the coming weeks. My kids will be slightly surprised ; )
Kudos to you for trying it out Jane.
What I do is write the date on top of the can and try to rotate it out after two years. So far the fruit still tastes like fruit, but, the beef in a can does taste metallic. Since we have pasta all the time, rotating it out is not hard.
One thing I have trouble with is the shaker cheese, it does not have a long shelf life, so if I want to keep it any amount of time,it goes into the frig. and I watch for blue mold.
My kids have been pretty good about not raiding the stores of the candy and such and we rotate the hard candy pops and such out every year.
Hey John look for pouches for some of your meat. l have Turkey in pouches and ate some 2 days ago and then found out they expired a year ago but they were great no funky taste or anything. l envy you to get candy that makes it to stores mine barely gets out of the car. lol
We went 7 weeks with very little shopping. Some produce here and there and milk, but that’s about it. Maybe spent $50 all tolled during that period. It was an unplanned event, which made us feel even better that our stores worked very well for us and that we really could have gone much longer.
We made our own bread and ate only from what we had. (I think there may have been a couple times during that, that we ordered cheap pizza.)
It was also fun to finnaly get back to the store to replenish with new goods.
Oh and yes, plenty of chocolate chips on hand.
Nice to hear you’re trying to eat out of your pantry… it’s a really interesting test, especially for kids. Heck, why not go “all the way” and cook a few meals using nothing but your grill, solar oven or whatever?
In some ways I envy cultures who still use only a few ingredients. Makes food prep a lot easier… I’m trying to figure out my personal “basics” so I don’t end up with a meal of canned tuna, canned pasta sauce, canned pineapple, and Ritz crackers.
Lately I keep thinking about how for my mother, supper was confined to maybe a few choices, and she always had those staples – biscuits or rice, or potato, meat, a couple vegetables. No pizza, no tacos, etc. It was pretty bland!
But now I think 80% of American food shopping trips are because we’re “bored” with what we got the week before. Sometimes I think the adults are worse than the kids, even more tempted by advertising, since we want what we want and we’re used to getting it now…
Thanks for adding the chocolate chip part though – I always forget wheat flour doesn’t improve morale as much as goodies (how much do you manage to sneak in, btw?) And you could always use the individual chips as scrip – worth their weight in gold, lol!
P.S. : this is the right time of year to prep the food stores, but looking at the snow outside… as Wicker 37 mentioned, the test might be unannounced. Anyone just starting food prep might want to wait till spring to “experiment”! take care, all – izzy
The two non-candy favorites for the kids are Beef Slim Jims and the top favorite are David Sunflower seeds in the buckets that contain 66 packages each. The neighbor kids seems to like them the best too. I originally bought two buckets with the idea of eating one to test and save the other 10 pounds for SHTF supply. But, they kept asking for them so I had to resupply.
I might try going sunflower seeds again after I decrease the squirrel population a bit.
Been wondering if I could use all those empty sunflower shells for something, that the kids do not eat.
On a side note, you have to pay $thousands to give birth? As a non-American, things like this always make me blink. No wonder some people are into home birth. You’d think they would want to welcome a new future tax payer into the world.