We’ve been eating down our stockpile for a few months now and spending much less on groceries as a result. My stockpile has saved us a lot over the years. I buy items when they are on special, often half price and its a part of our working pantry. I built a big pantry storeroom when we built this house years ago. I had visions of shelves stacked with preserves and a nice big food storage. We used to have our own fruit trees and a vegetable garden but that has gone by the wayside in last 5-10 years.
I’ve kept my pantry full and costs down through smart grocery shopping over the years, knowing when items come on special and stocking up enough to last till next time. I refuse to pay full price when I can get things way cheaper just with a little planning ahead. I use a different coloured sticker for each calendar year and every item that went in the pantry got a sticker. That made it easy to rotate foods. But I realised earlier this year that its time to cut way back so we’ve already eaten through a fair bit of what we had.
I took these photos this morning of what is left of our stockpile. I’ve made a list so I can focus on meal planning around using up whats left before we go on holidays. And I’m going blog my meals so I can keep myself focused.
There is also some food still left in the freezer and what is in the fridge. This is going my big challenge for the next five weeks – to see how I can use up these foods. I’m not someone who likes to cook much or menu plan and I need to just suck it up and do it anyway as it will help us save money.
The plan is to get the freezer and pantry as empty as possible before we go on holidays then when we get back I can clean out and declutter the rest of the pantry/storeroom and then plan what we need to stock up on and how much is reasonable for us to keep now.
So I’m going to create a new page for this challenge and get myself out of this funk I’ve been in for the last week. I kicked it off with having a box of pumpkin soup from the pantry for breakfast this morning. Its snowing out of town here and really cold after a beautiful sunny 18C day yesterday – a good day to menu plan!
