Pantry Organization

If you all are anything like me - and from the sounds of it, many of you are at least in this respect - you know and embrace the value of a fully loaded and operational pantry. The ability to provide for one's family at the drop of a hat... or, more likely, during an ice storm, power outage, flooding, and other natural or unnatural disasters is something to strive for. Me? I think I could feed us for a month, maybe more with judicious planning, from the pantry. It's not enough to keep us through TEOTWAWKI, or the zombie apocalypse, but realistically I can't and won't plan for absurdities. And... there are other ways to deal with those, but that's outside the realm of this article, and into ones on fiction writing about what can go very, very wrong with a world. Today, I'm being very practical and realistic, and planning for a far more foreseeable eventuality: too much of a good thing.

being me, the lists are, um, odd. Also, we really need to do more organization, although at least this she has sorted by what's on which shelf. The Moustache Elixir, by the way, is not medicine. The First Reader's growth is luxuriant enough without help. It's a comic energy drink the kids bought him.

I was reminded of this recently when Pam Uphoff wrote about prepping and disastrous results over at the Mad Genius Club. I had already put Pantry Inventory and Freezer Inventory on the paid chore list at that point. We'd done it about a year ago, but since then, we've moved (and bought a new freezer) so it desperately needed to be done again along with some organization so items were findable. I know for a fact I came home with egg noodles the other day, only to discover that we had a few bags - just not where I had looked. Ah, well, they will get used up. But keeping a good and reasonably accurate inventory is a way to prevent not only the spoilage that Pam talked about in her article, but overspending. Also, as my daughter who was doing the inventory pointed out, I tend to buy weird food because it looks cool, and then forget about it. At least, until we do one of these and it's expired. Whoops.

What the Ginja Ninja did for this inventory was to sit down with her laptop at the kitchen table, open a google document (which she promptly shared with me) and start entering information that could be accessed from any device she or I have Google Drive on. I then shared the link with the rest of the family so everyone has access. Which, despite the whole thing of Google becoming Evil, I do a lot. It's simply too convenient not to use it in ways like this. Now, if I'm at the grocery I can have the inventory pulled up on my phone, and see that we have four bags of egg noodles, so no, I shouldn't buy another two. And when I'm at Jungle Jim's being tempted by the interesting ginger liqueur, I can see at a glance that I already have two bottles, because yes, I did want to cook with that, so I shouldn't put another one in the cart. While we were moving the Junior Mad Scientist looked me in the eye, through the tops of bottles in the milk crate full she was holding, and said, "You two have a booze problem." I protested that we don't drink that much, and she replied. "I know. You need to drink more, or at least stop buying it!" Um. Well, she had a point. I tend to buy it to cook with and then... you know.

I found this part of the list utterly hilarious. No, I don't know why so many alcohols use 'burst' in their name. And, um, spelling, GN?

So the inventory can be a powerful tool in menu planning and grocery budgeting. But it's also something you have to keep track of, since it does no good unless you alter the amounts when you use up items. I should have had her put expiry dates in a column as well - maybe next time. We did that just before moving, to make sure we didn't move useless weight, and found some stuff that could be tossed. She reminded me as she was doing this one that there's a pumpkin cheesecake I said I'd make, and I haven't. Soon? Maybe? At least now I have a way to remind me of it! Of course, that we have no less than 39 packages of mac 'n cheese is NOT my fault. I'm not the one that bought a case of it, cheap, and then moved it from Oregon to Kentucky to Ohio! I may have a problem, but so do you, JMS!

Now that we have moved, and are settling in nicely, I plan to organize the pantry and dedicate some shelf space out in the garage as pantry-overflow. What that will allow me to do, at least in theory, is to buy more in bulk. Some things I just know we eat a lot of in this house, and now that I officially have a male teenager in the house, we will need to keep enough fuel on hand for him. In the last two months, he's grown up and out at least in the feet! Boy has clodhoppers. One thing the inventory should allow me to do is to look at our buying patterns and use those to predict what we need to have more of. Like hotdogs and ketchup, as his grandparents report that in the two months he was with them, he ate about 30 pounds of hotdogs and three quarts of ketchup, not to mention a few gallons of ice cream. Good heavens...

Even if your pantry is smaller than mine, an inventory is still a good thing. I made sure we inventoried the chest freezer, for instance. We'd chosen it based on initial cost and energy efficiency, but the downside of a chest is that items can vanish into the depths, only to reappear years later as burned-out icebergs. With an inventory, I can keep on top of the rotation. Noting the dates when things went into the freezer is also good, not only on the packages, but on the inventory list. I'm debating putting a whiteboard over the chest freezer to keep a running list there. Might be a better way to remind people to mark something off when they pull it out. Or not. That's the hardest part of the organization, after all, maintaining it. There's a reason this is a paid chore - it's tedious.