Paying for the Pantry

The biggest thing I have to remind myself of when it comes to a pantry is:  patience!  I want the pantry to be in place yesterday, but it takes a while to put one together, and even a pantrynoob like me can comprehend that.  At first I was utterly overwhelmed by the various sales papers, coupons and blogs I would read by women who seemed to have this down to a fine art.  I’m still not going to be able to get the hang of running through the checkout with a bunch of coupons and a couple of bags of absolutely free products in return, but I have figured out a few essential components to putting together a rather glamorous little pantry.

What do you eat?  It does no good to run to the store for that 10/$10 poptart sale if you don’t actually eat the stuff.  Ditto for stockpiling cans of cheap tuna when tuna sandwiches make you gag.  The biggest lesson I learned is:  don’t put your pantry together based on what you think you *should* eat; put it together based on what you actually *do* eat.  For me that means pasta, rice, tomato sauce, chicken broth, yeast for making pizzas, and that sort of thing.  I sat down and made a two week menu of those sorts of meals that I consistently made and enjoyed, and I looked at what ingredients in those meals were nonperishable and set out to hunt for those.  Same for things like paper towels, toilet paper, and supplies like those.  Seems simple, but I found myself chasing after a “good bargain.”  But if you don’t use those things, it becomes waste.  And waste is never a bargain.

Is it ever on sale?  If it’s not, you’ll need to just plan on picking up one or two of it periodically as you go to the store and putting one back.  If it is, then that’s what you comb the sales papers looking for.  While I do look at everything in the sales paper, I’ve noticed many of the sales and coupons are for crap I don’t use anyway.  So I skim them so I don’t get distracted/overwhelmed by pictures and colors and numbers.  I also pay attention in the stores I like to shop in as to what they put on sale periodically.  When I see the peanut butter go on a big sale, I don’t think twice about grabbing some extra.  If pasta goes 5/$4, I grab it.  Maple and brown sugar oatmeal boxes?  Yes please!  (Be sure to check expiration dates on some things.)  But I have to first know what I eat, and then pay attention to the store and see what’s been put out for quick sale.  Some weeks there is nothing.  But some weeks it’s great.

Making little packages out of big ones:  This is something that applies to buying food in the same way as making big meals that you then freeze in smaller portions.  If I buy a family size pack of chicken tenders, I can usually get five meals out of that of about four or five strips a pack.  I put them into Ziplock bags and I toss them into the freezer.  Olive oil is another good example.  Buying a giant can is ounce for ounce cheaper.  Decant some into a pretty glass container, and it looks lovely as well as being cheaper.

How much can you spare and when?  I took a look at my budget and realized there was a little money in there for occasionally “overspending” on groceries.  If there is nothing on sale or there is no room in the freezer to stuff things in there, I don’t overspend at all.  But if I have a spare $20 that trip and I see a cheap deal on roasts, for example, I grab several of them and throw them back.  It makes the upfront bill a bit more costly, but over time I have a variety of things to pick from at any given point, and I’m never really “low” on things like meat.  I also realized that even though I’m paid twice a month, the majority of my big bills kick in during the first 10 days of the month.  So extra groceries aren’t really an option then.  But that second pay, whoo-hoo!  Some spare change can definitely be dug out then.  In order to know that, though, I have a regular date with my bills, a day or two prior to every single pay.  It’s the only way I managed to figure out why one week my belt would be tight and one week there was some wiggle room, even though I was following similar budgeting principles from week to week.

Getting over the poverty mentality of “just enough:”  In order to overspend on my groceries, I had to get over the concept of just enough, which I picked up from my time as a member of the working poor.  When I was a young, single mama with a small toddler, I spent a lot of poorly compensated paychecks where most every penny was spent or accounted for when payday hit.  I used to hit the grocery store with a calculator and a dollar figure in mind and count down from the dollar figure, lol.  There was no such thing as overspending, because there was nothing to overspend.  But if I did have a spare money, I sure didn’t use it to buy more groceries — I was paying down debt or affording a little luxury or trying to put a few pennies back.  Once I became working class or (dare I say it?) lower middle class, I still found it hard to break that idea that even if you have purchased “enough” groceries for that pay period, you should buy more to put back.  Seems silly, but the instinct kicked hard.

Coming up, OPP:  Other People’s Pantries….lol.  Would also love to gather your strategies for filling the pantry!

Pantry Philosophy

Pre-divorce, I had the start of a small pantry that contained the basic sort of nonperishable stuff that we used to cook with regularly.  My ex was never really behind the initiative (as usual) or at best was politely neutral about it, but my initial goal was to try to help us wade through the summer months when neither of us made a paycheck.  We were both in academia, he as a grad student and I as a low paid faculty lecturer.  We actually did make use of the pantry in budget pinchy times, using it to craft meals when money wouldn’t be available for another few days.  Personally, I thought it was a success.

Post divorce, I noticed I had no pantry left, because I’d been putting what limited energy I had for sustainability projects into just surviving the hump of divorce emotions, refinancing the house, overcoming a cancer scare, worrying about my  job, blah blah blah.  Well, I’d like to move past survival and into thrival (lol), if that’s possible at this stage.  It’s still difficult for me, as so many things tend to cloud my mind and I’m building back healthy habits, clearing debt, and doing future planning all at the same time.  But I think a pantry is a good step for a number of reasons.

Budget Pinchy-ness:  See the aforementioned summer example.  For those of us living the life of the mind (whether we want to or not), there will always be pinchy budget situations.  Having the basics in your pantry can mean the difference in a nice meal or not. Not to mention helping to ease that horrid feeling that comes with not having enough money to finish out the pay period.

Good Money Stewardess:  If your goal is to minimize your food costs, then a pantry is the way to go.  After those things you regularly use to cook with are put back, then most folks who seriously do the pantry thing can basically live out of the pantry, only having to replenish it when certain stocks get low.  I’m going to get a small deep freezer for this purpose as well.  On occasion, I get great deals on meat, but cannot fully take advantage of it because of small freezer space.  One of the smallest deep freezers at a home improvement store fits more than I need to stockpile to be able to get through the summer and be prepared for emergencies.  Which leads me to…

Emergencies:  I find this category interesting for a couple of reasons.  First because it exposes human nature (the American version, anyway) and second, it changes the way we think about what goes into a pantry.  The human nature bit goes something like this:  snow falls for the first time, the weather is supposed to be bad for a day or two.  What happens? People fly to the grocery store and grab up every loaf of bread and jug of milk in sight.  Or suppose a real weather event does hit an area or the electricity grid goes out or something.  What do people do?  They stockpile Doritos…seriously.  I’m looking for the link I read earlier, but during some of the power outages in the Northeast last fall, people were dragging carts full of nothing but junk through the check outs.  Most people don’t make a plan at all, and then when extended disaster strikes, they’re in a real pickle.

Now, granted, if a tornado rips your house apart, a pantry won’t matter diddly squat.  But if things are locked down for intense snow, it will.  Better to have it, in any event.  But what goes in an emergency pantry exceeds the sorts of things we think about cooking all the time.  For example, an emergency pantry probably needs to include charcoal, matches, lighter fluid, bandaids and other simple medical supplies, batteries and flashlights,  access to your important documents (or pictures you’d hate to lose, etc.), things of that nature.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging about putting a pantry back together for myself — for emergencies, for long term financial security and for pinchy purposes.  I’m going to talk about digging out the money to fund it, what is in my personal pantry, and all things related to pantry philosophy.  I’m a pantry noob, to be sure.  But that doesn’t mean I cannot learn and that you cannot learn from my mistakes!  😀

Budget Buster: Not Using Your Leftovers

I confess this is one of the most difficult things for me to do.  I hate leftovers.  I associate them with a) failed cooking b) poor planning and c) being poor.  All of these associations are wrong, stupid and cost money.

Groceries are (to my mind) the biggest variable expense in one’s budget.  It’s the first place we tend to look when we want to cut down on costs because we can control whether we’re going to buy ramen or steak.  We can’t always control whether the energy company is going to raise their rates through the roof.  So not wasting the food you do buy is critical.

The key to reusing leftovers, at least for me, is to be creative with them.  I have a terrible time taking leftovers to work, and I’m not usually in a position to use the microwave.  If I just lop off a slab of the leftover meat and reheat the vegetables for dinner, I have an immediate rejection instinct (and so does the boy). However, if I reuse those things in a different way, I don’t do so badly.

Consider the pork roast I made in the crockpot a few days ago.  It was a delicious bargain that I got at the Shop & Slave as part of the 5/$20 meat purchase.  It was crocked with fresh garlic and ginger and then served with broccoli and rolls.  There was quite a bit of it left over, and I dreaded having to eat it the same way a second time.  The thought actually went through my mind:  It only cost $4, maybe it would be better to just throw it away.  No, no, no!!  Bad baby!  Such a path does not lead to financial security!  I’m a firm believer that while there are big financial roads to ruin, like buying more house than you can afford or being hit with a medical emergency you cannot cover, the majority of us who are in debt and complaining about our finances have nickel and dimed ourselves into such a position. And throwing out the leftovers is a great example.

So instead, I hauled out a couple of small packs of stir fry fixings — rice, sauce, veggies — that I’d also found on sale, diced up the leftover pork, and threw it all in a skillet and served it with a side salad.  It was delicious!  Didn’t taste like leftovers, didn’t waste the food.  The whole meal cost maybe $6.  Whoo hoo!  So the key, then, is to be creative until it’s used up.  If I’d had more leftover pork, I think I would’ve tried to make a pasta dish with it or thrown in some cheese, beans and fixings and wrapped them all up in flatbread.  Keep changing up the taste, and you’ll never notice.

Since leftovers are a big challenge for me, I’ll be regularly mentioning how I deal with them.    And I would *LOVE* your suggestions as well.

A Tasty Lunch

I’ve discovered a delightful way of sprucing up a simple pasta-and-tomato-sauce lunch.  I simply saute a few cloves of minced garlic and some diced artichoke hearts in the pan first, then I add the sauce for a few minutes until it thickens just a tad.  Doesn’t take much time, but tossed with pasta, it makes a tremendous difference in taste!  

I discovered I had artichoke hearts to use because the fridge was recently cleaned out and reorganized.  Who knew one person could collect that many chicken stock boxes in one place?!  Knowing what I had helped me take a simple lunch to something much, much tastier.

I keep a jar of artichoke hearts in my pantry, which I’m building slowly but surely.  The pantry has been a budget lifesaver on more than one occasion!  I’m just not very good at building one yet.  But we’re getting there!  What simple sprucing up have you done to a meal?