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.
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.
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.
Comments
24 responses to “Pantry Organization”
Good article! And I had to laugh over the JMS’s case of macaroni and cheese! Well traveled mac and cheese, that is! At least it’s fairly non-perishable, and should last until it gets eaten up.
The cheese packets have, at least some of them, drawn moisture
Very interesting idea for keeping an inventory accessible from multiple devices — I hadn’t thought of this particular way.
We’ve tried at least doing a freezer inventory multiple times in the past, but it wound up feeling like balancing a checkbook more often than not (one thing that I practically have to chain myself down to do each week as it is). Not kept up-to-date, it wound up being more like a “freezer census” than an inventory — still a valuable exercise, but not entirely helpful.
The problem I found with keeping a freezer inventory was not only updating it with what was being added, but also keeping up with what was being used up (especially what was being partially used up).
Maybe I was just being a little too anal or obsessive about it? (totally possible!) How do you guys handle that part of it? If you, say, open up a box of raisins for a recipe and put the unused portion back into the pantry, does the fact that you now have half a box of raisins versus an entire box show up on your inventory? What if you see that you “have” raisins only to realize later that you don’t have enough and should have bought more?
Because I am the primary cook, that happens with the partial box at times. But I also tend to buy in multiples because big family so it happens less often than would make me keep the inventory that often. Now that the kids are old enough to help, I pawn off the chore to them (and pay them well for it. We don’t give out an allowance, we offer them the opportunity to work for money by going above and beyond around the house. This chore earned the Ginja Ninja a very generous $40 since she spent all of a day going through three freezers and the pantry not only inventorying but organizing.) If it were just me keeping track, I’d do it more in my head and less on paper. I’m not at all anal about these things – sometimes too relaxed, actually. Hence overbuying!
Having the kiddos help out is a really impressive strategy (for lots of reasons). We don’t have children, alas, and the one cat we have who would like to help in the pantry only seems to be interested in emptying it, not taking inventory… taking a nap in it, maybe. The door is typically kept closed, but I did catch him this week, snuggling down between the malted milk and the Kashi Go Lean, the tabby stinker.
wait, pantries are supposed to be organized?
guess that explains it.
Well, it’s not a requirement. Does make using the pantry a whole lot more, um, exciting from time to time. Adventures in anthropology in your own house! Archeological digs to determine what that used to be in the freezer! What meal can we make from a can of straw mushrooms, tinned cranberry jelly, and that half box of raisins that has petrified behind the can of olive oil? Next! On Home Chopped!
LOL
that’s why whenever i need to find something I haven’t seen ion awhile in any closet, we go ‘dun da dun dunnnn, dun da dunnnnn”
And joke about needing a fedora and a bullwhip.
So is it science, or grave robbery? 😛
well, i wouldn’t call it archaeology.
*holds one box in place while dodging a sliding box to reach the desired object*
Have you considered renting out the Ninja to inventory other people’s pantries? I’d hire her!
If you were closer! LOL – she needs a job, but given college and all, it’s more the Junior Mad Scientist who ought to turn this into a cottage business, because at 16 she’s about to learn the hard truth that unless she becomes an entrepreneur, she’s not going to have the earning power of an adult due to child labor laws.
Every product has a bar code, and I wonder if someone with abilities far beyond mine could figure out a bar code inventory system using a scanner.
As Jason said above, if it’s tedious and hard to do, the inventory system won’t get used.
Actually, that’s entirely possible. I have bought a scanner in the past, and then used an app on my smartphone, to scan ISBN barcodes on books and inventory my library. For me, that broke down with my antiques – you only have to go back to the 1970s before you start finding books with no ISBN, much less a barcode. But it’s an excellent idea for the pantry. Huh. I wonder if there’s an app for that?
And it turns out there are several! LOL
https://learn.compactappliance.com/apps-for-your-fridge/
OK, thats kinda cool. But I’d need something that would allow me to add in home canned foods. Must look at it closer now…..
That’s what I was wondering about, too. I buy stuff in bulk and repackage. So I need more flexibility than just ‘scan a code’
I would be willing to bet there is a way to generate bar codes using software and a printer.
(John opens new tab, types rapidly and then scans the results)
This bar code generator is online, so yes it’s possible to bar code anything.
https://www.barcodesinc.com/generator/index.php
Lol. Yeah, ok, life in the future is too fun.
So relevant. Earlier this week, I was getting ready to make a loaf of applesauce bread, since we’d run out of dessert items and the menfolk sort of expect dessert with supper. So I start going through the cupboards, looking through the cans of applesauce — and found several cans that had spoiled. As in, were visibly bulging. So those go straight to the trash. Then I open a can that looks OK — except the applesauce is oddly dark and doesn’t smell quite right. So out it goes. Open another, find a similar problem. Out it goes. And then I realize the next one’s from the same lot, and decide not to even open it, just toss it now. After disposing of six or seven cans of applesauce (and a can of green beans that looked suspicious), I finally found a can that was OK, and was able to load up the bread machine and get it going.
In the process, I found a number of other “cabinet castaways,” cans of food we’d acquired somewhere along the line, intending to use, but which got pushed to the back and forgotten. Most of them are probably still good, but given that I’ve often bought from “scratch and dent” sales, some of them may have spoiled because of damaged seams, etc. Somehow I have got to get a better handle on just what we have.
From my mom’s pantry… a can of sweetened condensed milk that had been there so long all the moisture had disappeared (with no visible holes, damage, or swelling to the can) and the contents had turned into a caramel-colored hockey puck.
I found a can of corn with a best by date in the 1980s and from a grocery chain that is no longer extant! I wanted to keep it as an antique. I was outvoted.
Lol! I totally would have stashed it somewhere to come back to in another 20 years.
The common thread I see is, /non-perishables/ saved, not what people are actually eating. Start saving what is actually eaten, not the non-perishable foods that they eat /occasionally/. You are using generic lists of what is /eaten/ by *that* family, and not what yours eats.