Hoarding as a coping mechanism

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I think most of us are feeling pushed up a wall right now. There have been a few threads about–ha ha-- hoarding. I’ve talked about my grandmother Hilma, and how her legendary hoarding is a running joke in our family. No doubt, Hilma’s hoarding was either triggered or exacerbated by The Depression.

I’ve had my spurts of hoarding through the years. I mean, I currently own a pressure canner and a dehydrator. My epitome of hoarding behavior is parked in The Son’s garage: a home freeze dryer. It’s something I’ve dreamed of owning, and I had a few dollars set aside for it. I talked to my family, just casual conversation about a freeze dryer. The Son was the only one to show an interest, and his interest was most enthusiastic. He’s had fun playing with it (taffy candy is incredible!) and he’s got stockpiles of stuff because HIS hoarding gene has been triggered.

As I’ve mentioned the COVID pandemic has made my hoarding kick into high gear. I want to see rows and rows of STUFF and piles of STUFF and shelves groaning under the weight of STUFF. I talked to The Daughter in a semi-hypothetical way, because she has complained emphatically in the past of our possessions encroaching areas of HER house. I realize any hoarding would be walking a fine line in her eyes.

Well, HER hoarding gene has been triggered by COVID. Theoretically she’s greenlighted my plans to “stock up,” but I need to do it cautiously.

So, I regularly shop at Sam’s Club. I did some online browsing, because I know a lot of places are limiting meat purchases to two or three packages. My initial foray to the website showed Sam’s to be completely OUT of fresh meat. My mind had a hard time taking that in. I clicked around the website and approached the meat from a link on the main page.

I’m kinda sorry I did that.

They featured a chuck roast. That used to be the absolute cheapest cut of beef. Sam’s going rate for this “Charles roast” is $7.37 a pound. The picture showed an averaged-sized roast weighing in for $68.

My hoarding gene went splodey. I have full-blown panic mode.

Right now, I’m working on a spreadsheet. I don’t know how functional it will be, I don’t even know if I care. But it’s SOMETHING, something constructive, and hopefully will keep the anxiety bugs from chomping away on my insides.

I am understanding my grandmother more and more. For years, her daughters made fun of her various eccentricities. I actually do not think she was as whack as her family thought she was.

Call me Hilma Junior.:cool:
~VOW

2

I say this with love.

You worry me. I’m worried about you.

3

Nah i tend to shop only when my cupboards are bare and then I have to point out to the family who pretend to be wasting away from hunger the tins of sardines, saltines and chunky soup waiting to be eaten. Water is good enough for a couple days when no one has touched the grapefruit juice. Jeez but no they insist I go shopping. I will say since the pandemic I have picked up my shopping game and rarely do we have an empty shelf now. I only go once every two weeks rn, and will buy stuff I usually don’t especially if it’s discounted like spiral hams, skirt steaks, corned beef. I m waiting for the leg of lamb or shanks to go on sale next. And they will because it’s not a big seller in my area. Ground beef is the biggie.

4

That’s so sweet of you to care. But I’ll be fine. I shall indulge some of my craziness now, and the spreadsheet will be useful so we can track expiration dates.

No, save your worry for when Mr VOW and I finally return to our house in AZ. We’re getting new floors throughout, and rehabbing the master bath with one of those step-in tubs.

And we’ve been talking about getting a shed, one of those with a cute little front porch and a gambrel roof. The front half will be made into a guest room. The back half will be for storage.

THAT is when you should worry! I’ll have a separate hoarding spreadsheet for AZ!:smiley:
~VOW

5

Heck with worrying about ~VOW, I’m worried about ME.
I can’t even leave the house but I’m managing to hoard, once removed.

Don’t tell me you’re going to the BigBox stores. I have a list and a debit card.

Right now, besides meat, I’m concerned with disinfecting wipes. I want shelves of them. I kinda want it to look like a store shelf. All lined up, showing their faces at me.
DIL, has expressed concern that they will dry out before we use them all.

Mostly I have over planted my garden. If it grows like I think it will this will be a BIG canning season.
Oh crap! I’ll need more canning jars. On the list it goes.

6

I’ve looked around online, and really, the best prices I’ve found for canning jars are at WallyWorld.

When I was a working mommy, canned spaghetti sauce was a Godsend. Now, with the kitchen [del] twerked[/del] I mean tweaked for a salt free environment, I actually have to COOK.

Salt free canned tomato products aren’t always readily available.

If you watch The Food Network, the best canned tomatoes, called “San Marzano,” come from Italy. I found out the are processed with NO salt. Hallelujah! I ordered #10 cans. I’ll be cooking up sketties sauce! I have jars, a copy of “Stocking Up” by Rodale Press that is so old it’s probably from the first printing. I have successfully canned before, so I doubt I’ll be killing anybody.
~VOW

7

Mr.Wrekker did a bunch of hoarding while I was in the hospital.
Among his purchases is 2 cases of sardines. We don’t eat sardines. I guess I would if I was starving.

He bought lots of stuff, one of the more curious is a very large box of bags of cotton balls. I asked him why he bought those. He only said, he thought we needed them. I personally think he thought it was toilet tissue.
Or if I’m generous I’d say maybe he thought I used them for my diabetic needs. I don’t. If you find yourself in need of a bunch of cotton balls PM me, I’ll share.

If I had my ‘druthers’ I go and buy corned beef hash, tuna fish, canned chicken, deviled ham, & spam. I’m worried about meat. I have lots of frozen fish and game meat.

I make jerky from deer, if I can talk Mr.Wrekker into some decent cuts from one. I didn’t make any this past season. I plan on doing it this fall. I may make some from beef if we come across a sale.

My biggest worry is milk. We need milk. I have ordered me some ‘NIDO’. I’m anxious to see how it is.
I have cases of petmilk. The kids will not touch it for drinking or cereal.
I wish I had a cow.

8

I ended up doing some food hoarding but I did it on the cheap.

I bought a couple 20# bags of rice, a gallon of vegetable oil, a few bags of flour and a few bags of sugar (there was still plenty left on the shelves when I took them). Having a month or two worth of food with a long shelf life that I bought for $35 or so has helped me deal with any fears of shortages of food. If push comes to shove I’ll be eating sugar cookies and rice quite a bit.

I’ve read some people who survive famines do this. They just feel compelled to have a 100 lb bag of rice somewhere in the house. Its a cheap and easy way to calm down your anxiety about the pandemic.

Also after this is all over, assuming I don’t use the staple foods I bought and they are still before their expiration date I can just donate them to food pantries.

9

I dislike the taste of canned evaporated or powdered milk. Imagine my surprise while visiting my brother in Germany some years ago to learn I had doused my breakfast cereal with UHT (Ultra High Temperature) pasturized milk. I had no idea such a product existed! It tasted just like regular milk to me.

It was years till I found it here in the States, but Wal-Mart carries a Canadian brand called Parmalat. It is shelf stable for about a year. I keep it around for shortages or when I’m too lazy to drive to the local convenience store for fresh milk from the local dairy.

Might could be an option.

They have shelf stable chocolate milk, too.

Do rotate your supply if you decide to try it. It does not keep much past its use-by date. Maybe for baked goods.

10

Thank you. I’ll look into that.

11

We had UHT milk in Germany. The chocolate flavored milk was divine! In Europe (1985), there are no price supports for farmers, so dairy products were inexpensive comparedto the American stuff in the Commissary. I frequently bought milk, real butter and honest-to-GAWD coffee creamer that was actually cream. I got so spoiled on that stuff!

German refrigerators are small, and many Germans grocery shop every day. The UHT milk allows you to keep it in the pantry until it is opened, to minimize refrigerator space.

Yes, you can buy UHT products in the US. But they tend to be pricey, and if you are supplying the GrandWreks with oceans of milk, it could be a costly venture. If the GrandWreks get fussy about NIDO, I’d recommend mixing it half and half with whatever you can find in the grocery store, or half and half with UHT milk.

These are trying times, and we do what we must. Mix up the NIDO on one of your insomniac trips to the kitchen, and just place the pitcher in the refrigerator. And then tell a distracting story, of how the milkman used to leave glass bottles of milk on your front porch every morning.
~VOW

12

I’ve definitely developed some food anxiety and a tendency to hoard as a result.

Now, anyone who has ever seen me knows that I am in no immediate danger of starving to death (yeah, I know, deficiencies / electrolyte imbalances could kill me even at my top weight, if my diet got THAT poor…). But I’ve become almost compulsive about making sure we’re stocked up on everything we possibly can.

We have a large fridge/freezer in the kitchen - and a standalone fridge in the basement. Both are full especially after a grocery delivery. I started looking around for another freezer - thinking I can probably make room in the garage for it - only there are none to be had anywhere (I did ultimately find one at Sears that will, supposedly, be delivered in early July…). If we had gotten one already, I’m quite certain I’d have braved Costco to fill it up.

We add anything we can think of to our biweekly grocery deliveries, figuring that if it arrives, we’ll find a place to stash it. We’ve ordered 30-40 pounds of dried beans etc. from North Bay Trading and Nuts.com. We finally got a big bag of rice - 20 pounds. I’m going to buy more dehydrated veggies from North Bay to have around since they’re shelf stable and will go well with the bean soup etc.

And we have no place to store most of it! I actually just bought a bunch of Tupperware bins so we can at least stack it up neatly (hint: their largest Modular Mate bin does not quite hold a 20 pound bag of rice).

We have three cases of Charmin. We had 2 when things started getting bad - I had a bimonthly subscription from Amazon, and I changed it to monthly which has, surprisingly, worked (though one was delayed a couple of weeks).

The hall by the front door looks like a loading dock. 2 cases of TP, the box containing the composter we just ordered, and several empty cardboard cartons that my husband wants to save because we might need to ship something (“You had to send that package to your friend, right?” “Yes, and that was a one-time deal - and there WILL BE OTHER BOXES ARRIVING”) - I have told him those are going to go in the recycler whether he likes it or not.

13

We rarely eat in the actual dining room so it’s become the default storage til I get around to stashing the hoarded cases of stuff Mr.Wrekker bought.

I have 3 stand alone freezers. And two refrigerators with freezers. They are for the most part filled with fish and game and peas and beans I blanched and froze from my garden. The veggies are depleting fast with the crowd I’m feeding. Good thing my garden is planted and looking good.

We fry fish at least once a week.
Mr.Wrekker would eat Venison everynight. I keep it to no more than twice a week.

When she could get it, DILs has been buying the 5lb chubs of hamburger meat. I’m not sure but I think we have 10 or so frozen.

14

The whole five pound chub is frozen??? :eek:
~VOW

15

Why not?

Of course it means it’ll be harder to use when the time comes, but if you’re using it in something that requires browning / crumbling (like soup / spaghetti sauce) that’s not that big a deal, as you can start that while frozen. It’d be tougher to do so safely if you were planning something like hamburgers or meatloaf, which require shaping raw meat, as it would likely take a few days for it to thaw in the fridge.

My last trip to a regular grocery store - Friday, March 13th, when the entire place looked like a plague of locusts had descended - found quite a bit of ground beef in the family-size packages. I grabbed two of them, and froze one. It’s 6+ pounds.

The other got turned into a large pot of spaghetti sauce. Which led to the lesson that cooking up something like ground beef, and freezing the results, requires in a higher demand for freezer space due to the tomatoes etc. which were previously safely room-temperature in their cans.

16

Okay, Everybody, pay attention. Takes notes. There will be a brief question-and-answer period following, and later on, there will be a WRITTEN TEST.

When buying bulk hamburger (lean is good, but you can do this with the cheaper stuff, too), bring it home and haul out the crockpot(s). Five pounds will not fit in the biggest crockpot, so if you have more than one crockpot, now is the time to dig it out. You CAN use heavy dutch ovens on top of the stove, but the stovetop version must be attended to more frequently.

To begin: spray the insides of all cooking containers. Fill them with your ground meat, to a level about two inches from the top of the container. Then add a whatever amount of dry onion, dry celery (if you have that), and granulated garlic, or minced garlic. Use a big wooden spoon, and “chop” through the mass of ground meat. Put the lids on. Crockpot starts on “high.” Stovetop version starts on low.

This will cook for several hours. Eventually, turn the crockpots to “low.” Every time you walk by the cooking beef, take the wooden spoon and “chop” up the ground meat. You are trying to achieve small crumbles.

Later on, add two cups or so of water, and “stir” it gently into the mixture. Do this a couple of times.

After cooking most of the day, turn off the heat/unplug the crockpots. Let the mixture cool for an hour or so. I, personally, am not comfortable allowing this to sit overnight in the kitchen to cool.

Hunt down every large container with a lid. I keep empty cottage cheese tubs. Use the wooden spoon to break up large chunks of meat, then ladle everything into your containers to a level of 1-1/2" or more below the top of the container. Once your cooking vessels are empty, check the containers. Ideally, you want a layer of “broth” to float above the surface of the cooked meat. If you don’t have this layer of broth, or it isn’t deep enough to prevent “beef burgs” from sticking up, gently add water, and VERY gently stir.

Put the lids on the containers, and refrigerate them. They will stay good for several days in the fridge, if need be.

Clear the decks, and get out quart-size freezer Ziploc bags, a magic marker, a soup spoon, and a scoop or ladle. Even a coffee cup will work. Bring all the containers to your cleared counter, then label seven or eight Ziploc bags with “HAMBURGER MIX” and the date.

With the soup spoon, pry the layer of grease from the top of the meat mixture, and discard. The purpose of adding water to the whole mess is to allow the grease to float to the top so you can get rid of it! Yay!

Now, using the scoop, ladle or coffee cup, fill the Ziploc bags. If you are as Type “A” as I am, I fill each bag with 14 ounces. But whatever. Fill the bags 1/2 to 3/4 full. When all the meat mixture has been distributed, you can wipe the inside zipper of each bag with a paper towel or napkin, then seal and burp the bag.

After all the bags are full, cleaned, sealed and burped, lay them flat on the counter, and squeeze the meat mixture so you have an even layer. If there are still big clumps of meat, you can squish them with your fingers.

Freeze the bags flat. Once frozen, you can tuck them anywhere in the freezer.

Now, why in the HELL would I recommend all that work?

Because as a working mommy, those cooked and de-greased bags of hamburger were my lifesavers.

Take it straight from the freezer and plop it in a pan. Add a can of spaghetti sauce.

Or add seasonings and heat through, you have taco meat.

Or add seasonings and tomato paste, and you have sloppy joes.

Or for those DESPERATE nights (you know the ones I mean!), throw together a box of Hamburger Helper.

ANY recipe that starts with “brown a pound of ground beef…”

If there is too much liquid, then just let everything simmer on low for a few minutes.
THAT is why freezing a 5 pound chub of hamburger makes no sense to me!

I started doing this over thirty years ago. I have explained it to more people than I can count. Every single one of them says, “Oh, what a great idea!” I have even GIFTED some of those people a few packages of frozen hamburger mix.

Not one person bothers to do this.

Sure, it sounds like a shitload of work. But it’s an investment! Do this on a weekend, then breeze through the workweek evenings.

It’s also healthy, because most of the fat has been removed!

And it certainly makes more sense than wrassling a frozen 5 pound chub in the kitchen sink, trying to hack off a pound’s worth of hamburger for every meal.
~VOW

17

We separate most of the hamburger in to usable sizes and put in Ziploc freezer bags.

Mid-daughter even pattied up one chub.
I thought that was overkill.

I’ve never pre-cooked it. That sounds like a good Idea, though. DIL will really go for that. Her infamous casseroles often start with browned HBmeat.
With ~VOWs tutelage I may actually get through the pandemic with a little sanity preserved. (:))

18

Once you’ve done the “processing” a couple of times, it becomes a routine and seems MUCH easier!

The flat hamburger mix “frozen slabs” will earn your respect the very first time you use one. No browning! No pouring off grease! Just throw everything in the pan and let it go!

Thawing out a one-pound frozen raw burger has definite disadvantages. The biggest one is that frozen burger thawed on a skillet is tough. The second biggest disadvantage is that you have to stand at the stove with a pancake turner, as you scrape off the cooked layers and flip the chunk over and over. In the meantime, the starving masses are running around in the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator, and standing in your way no matter how you turn around, all the time whining about “when is dinner gonna be ready?”
~VOW

19

One of my best friends is a hoarder, as is diagnosed clinically; her daughter was part of the campaign to have hoarding classified as a specific psychiatric disorder in the UK. My friend’s route to hoarding is fairly obvious, though I won’t go into it in detail, obvs - it was about losing everything she owned as a child at the same time as she lost her father.

So yeah, hoarding does often start as a coping mechanism.

I’ve always somewhat hoarded food as a response to childhood food poverty, but never to the level of a disorder - it’s a reasonably sensible response as long as you only hoard food you can actually eat before it goes off, and don’t have to climb over boxes in order to get to bed, etc. And recently it benefited me for obvious reasons, though you’d be surprised how quickly you run out of actual balanced meals even when you still have stuff in that provides calories. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one of the outcomes of the covid crisis is more people hoarding stuff, and some of those doing so to a level that causes problems.

20

I am FULLY expecting the “Hoarding” shows on Discovery Life and A&E channels to do hoarding specials on hoarders created by the pandemic.
~VOW