Hey, Bekkers, have you received your NIDO dry milk yet? Amazon only took a couple of days to deliver mine!
~VOW
If y’all think 5 pounds of meat is hoarding, don’t read this.
I bought a frozen turkey.
So do I, except I usually cook it first. SOOOOO convenient!
I actually learned that trick from a co-worker who had a husband and 3 adolescent sons, and it works just as well for single me.
I even cook it in my Crock Pot; no babysitting needed except for a couple checks to turn over the cooked meat. It takes maybe 3 or 4 hours, and then I parcel it up after it cools a bit, using a perforated spoon to drain off the grease.
What a GREAT idea!
~VOW
I’ve got my AM coffee in my Mr Spock coffee cup (it has pointed ears that actually are 3D) and my Pop Tart. A&E has a few “Hoarders” shows on now, so my cat and I are taking some mental notes. Well, I am taking some mental notes; my cat has only two brain cells banging together in his empty head.
I know I’ll always have a cat in my life. A note I’m taking from “Hoarders” is that once the cat litter box starts to overflow in the living area of the house, the hoarder brain renders that situation as invisible. I’m hoping my Crazy Cat Lady tendencies will be kept in check by the reality of the litter box.
Fact is, poop of any kind grosses me out. So I’m setting my parameters now: my hoard will be CLEAN. (So will my bathroom!)
Living with the deer mouse invasion in AZ has made me a nervous wreck. The situation is much better now that we use the services of a professional exterminator. We actually should have engaged an exterminator when we first set up housekeeping in the middle of nowhere. Because of the constant deer mouse threat, I know my future food hoarding and paper goods hoarding will have to be kept in secure containers.
That spreadsheet sounds like an idea which just gets better and better!
Watching the Hoarders program is traumatic. When I am faced with an insurmountable pile of CRAP, I react by taking everything, trash or treasure, and stuffing it all in garbage bags to be hauled away. Sorting through “stuff” to say, “this I’ll keep, this can be tossed” makes me want to scream.
I also want to scream when I see the nightmare bathrooms or the fermenting, crawling refrigerators.
I just don’t think I have what it takes to be an official, diagnosed hoarder.
Since my hoarding tendencies are mostly food-centric (and toilet paper centric!), I guess I need to re-categorize myself as a … sigh …prepper.
~VOW
That is when you take the food-only saw and turn it into burger patties =)
Actually, I have a spreadsheet [what, I was a forensic accountant for a while …] with an ‘ideal loadout’ of frozen meats for 1 year per 2 people [me and mrAru] that I want to try next December [well, ordering it for delivery as of Dec 26th to give us time to arrange it in the deep freezers] Though once out in Nevada we will probably add hunting for both bambi and javalina/feral hog as a food augmentation from just storebought.
We just finished working on a ‘hoarding’ spreadsheet for shelfstable stuff for 3 months [we are going to kick it into play the next January and replace it with next years hoard, we want to keep 3 months of shelf stable and nonedible goods on hand all the time]
We discussed hoarding, and determined that both our mom’s actually kept about 3 months of pantry and non-edibles around, and that when Mom gardened actively in the late 60s/70s [a full third of an acre, not counting sharking fruit from Grandfathers small orchard] she tended to can/pickle/preserve pretty much 6 to 8 months of food, a hold over from being raised on a farm in the depression where you had to preserve for the year every fall. We decided to go heavily into gardening once we are in Nevada, we will have the space for a huge garden =) We both like preserving food, the cooking and canning/bottling process is actually very zen.
I have been hoarding vegetable plants in the garden.
3-4 tomato plants should be ample for two people. Instead I have 17 in the ground already. 7 hills of squash. And don’t mention eggplant.
Maybe I should get a backup fruit and vegetable dryer. And more mason jars.
If you have 3K sitting around, doing nothing…get a freeze dryer!
The Son recently freeze-dried hamburger meat and macaroni and cheese!
wipes away a tear I’m so proud of that boy!
~VOW
If you’re frequently thawing out large chunks of meat, get a sous vide cooker. They’re less than $100 now and you can set it to 4C/40F in a water bath and drop your meat for it to thaw in less than half the time. Once the water temp goes above 4C, you’ll know your meat is completely thawed.
Portioning prevents waste. I make patties out of all the ground beef before freezing. The meat defrost easier that way, it will be ready to go for hamburgers, and can still be used with any other ground beef based dish. I can also control the amount to defrost, just enough patties for a hamburger dinner, more for a large meatloaf, or just one to flavor some sauce. I wrap up chicken thighs and pork chops individually also.
I believe Rachael Ray put forth the cool tip of using fold-lock sandwich bags to individually wrap chicken pieces and pork chops. You turn the bag inside out over your hand, then grab the piece of whateber. With the other hand, you turn the sandwich bag right-side out over the whatever. Your hands don’t get as messy.
After I “bag” all the chops or chicken boobs or whatever, I place them in meal-size piles on the counter. Then I put the pieces in a labeled and dated gallon freezer Ziploc bag.
~VOW
I think I’ve always hoarded. It’s from being diabetic, I think.
Fear of not having a snack when my sugar went low is a great motivation to have snacks and sugar cubes stashed. (I have glucose rescue stuff, as well)
Stuff & things, I hid, because my younger sibs were theives who had no compunction about grabbing my stuff.
I am also a neatnik. So I lovingly stack and label.
~VOW, one cat does not a cat hoarder make. You’re fine.
I clean catboxes everyday.
My big fear is this pandemic might turn Mr.Wrekker into a hoarder. He has no off button.
On to figuring out how to make my own spreadsheet.
I know I’m guilty of some thread necromancy here, but as worried as I am about supply disruptions caused by the Ever Given situation in the Suez Canal and having heard before that about problems with shipping containers, it seems relevant again.
I’m currently fretting a bit about my own inventory, especially paper goods, since that’s being identified as a potential problem area in news articles I’m seeing (and yes, I’m checking dates on said articles).