How do you keep track of what food you have in the house?

Cafe Society
1

I am not a good cook, but I like to experiment and try things from time to time. At the moment I am also underemployed and I really need to figure out what I have and how to use it.

I’m lucky in that I have access to a fairly large pantry and a slightly larger than apartment sized freezer on top of some cabinet space and the usual fridge and freezer space.

Unfortunately, the pantry needs organizational help, and I probably only have access to about a third of it, but even that is larger than my last apartment by at least five times. The cabinet space is pretty much to be used for my kitchen stuff that I want to have out and about, but don’t use much. I’m short and it’s all very high up. But it can be reorganized to get me a little bit of space lower down and condensed for more space overall. The freezer in the garage is all mine, but the garage is five stories down and not attached (not a huge deal, but meaning I can’t just pop something in it for consumption “whenever”). The fridge is the same between any shared space, and you find space for your food wherever there is some. The in-kitchen freezer has some of my stuff in it, but I think of it as mostly my roommate’s, as it was pretty full when I arrived and hasn’t changed much.

Hopefully this makes it clear that all of my food is rather far dispersed, and can only be wrangled to a degree. I did move plenty of non-perishables and frozen goods when I moved, so I would really like to find a way to keep track of what I have so I can start figuring out how to make it into meals. Just knowing in my head what I have is clearly not working, and I’m tired of the waste - both of food and in buying goods I already have when

I am not yet to the point of being able to plan a week’s worth of meals in advance, though I try it from time to time. That will probably be my next thread, especially since going to the store more than once a week is becoming a bit more difficult, though if the job situation changes this might change as well.

So, how do you keep track of what food you have in your kitchen? If it’s in your head, do you have any bright ideas for someone who can’t keep track of an inventory in their head?

2

Me, I mostly keep track of what food I have in the house in my head–with some knowledge of what I tend to buy, and usually shop once a week or so, buying ingredients for 1 or 2 “big” meals–meaning things with leftovers I can eat later in the week, and a few things for some quick meals, and sometimes a few items just to stock up my pantry.

Of course, this occassionally leads to problems-- my Asparagus and Mushroom Quiche turned into just plain Asparagus Quiche when I realized that I did NOT in fact have any fresh mushrooms in the house, nor any canned ones either.

Ideas for better organization.

Start by making an inventory of what you already have. Think about dividing things by “category”–Canned Veggies, Frozen Veggies, Frozen Uncooked Meat, etc. Aim to have enough categories that you have 6-10 items in each category.

Write a grocery list before you go shopping. Then, double check your cupboards/pantry/freezer. Make sure the mushrooms you thought you had are still there. But likewise, remove the box of rice from the list if you already did pick one up.

Spend some time thinking about perishables that you already have and good ways to use them up. Do not store leftovers you will never get around to eating in the fridge. (I’m guilty of this–it’s amazing how much freezer space, and plastic cartons I reclaimed when I cleaned my freezer this past weekend. Of course, now it’s full of new frozen goods).

3

What we do is to make up a menu on Saturday morning, and then check our freezer and pantry for the ingredients we need for the dishes. We often do an inventory before we make up the menu, so we can use stuff there already. In this way we buy only what we need, which reduces the stuff we have sitting around, and spoilage too. Every so often we “eat down the house” which means make an effort to eat what is there.

This system saves money, since you don’t buy stuff that looks good in the store but not so good when you get it home. If you really want an inventory control system, you’ll need a barcode reader in your kitchen or a lot of time to enter stuff. I think our system is more efficient.

4

How do I keep track? Simple, my inventory is VERY low…always. I’m poor and can’t afford to buy $300 in groceries anymore. So I get a few things like chicken breasts, italian sausage, pasta, and some clamato. This, added to the box of instant potatoes, 13 or so packs of ramen noodles and 7 sticks of butter, constitutes the entire working inventory of food in my kitchen. Pathetic, maybe. But I’ve managed to come up with some imaginative ways to make OK dinners from what few materials I have. Or, I’ll just cook up an entire package of italian sausage and eat that for dinner.

5

I arrange my pantry as a mini supermarket and I try to keep it stocked with the things I use all the time, so that I don’t have to remember what to buy when I need it and I don’t have to spend extra money when someone really wants something that’s not on sale. When I go shopping, I try to replace what I’ve used, not just buy what I’m going to need.

The canned goods are in the back, cooking soups (cream o’ chicken, mushroom and celery) to the left in a row so that there’s one visible and a few behind for each type, just like at a store. Eating soups are in the middle, again sorted by type (although sometimes I don’t have enough room to really sort them so they become “chicken soups” “vegetable soups” and “weird soups”), Canned tomatoes of varied shape and variety to the right. There’s a little stack of tuna and another of canned mushrooms - I don’t use canned vegetables, so I have no need for a veg section beyond my tomatoes and mushrooms.

Cereals up top (yes, plural, my husband’s a cereal addict; we never have less than 6 boxes of cereal in the house), baking goods and spices (overflow spices that don’t fit in my spice rack, that is) down below. On the side is pastas, rices, couscous, stuffing mix and other starchy boxed goods, jarred spaghetti and curry sauces (which I jazz up on busy nights) and at the end is a plastic bin that holds the dried beans and pulses: lentils, split peas, etc. (I do it this way because I always think of my dinners in ones or threes. Ones are one-pot meals like chili and stew. Threes are main dish, veg and side dish - usually starch (although I’m trying hard to move away from needing a starch at every meal). Having all my starch on one shelf makes it easy to wander in and study my options.)

In the window ledge is a milk crate on its side that holds all the snacky foods that are fair game for the kidlets - that way the babysitter doesn’t have to search for foods that are okay to give while I’m gone. There are cookbooks on top of the milk crate, 'cause I don’t use cookbooks often, but I want to keep them around for reference. (The snack foods that are OFF LIMITS are hidden up on top of the cookbooks and require a stool to reach.)

When you’re ready to try some meal planning (and really, it’s much, much easier that way than scattershot cooking!), I highly recommend Recipezaar for recipes and for organizing your plan. You can click on a recipe to save it to a cookbook, place it on a meal plan which tallies your nutritional info for you, or put it on your “shopping list”. You can scale recipes up for a crowd or down for one or two people, and you can print out the shopping list or send it to your cell phone to make your shopping easier. Unlike many shopping list programs, this one tells you how much of each thing you need AND what recipes you need it for, so if you get to the store and they don’t have shallots, you can look and see what recipe called for it and if green onions will probably work instead.

6

Yep, this. I’ve been thinking lately that I need to list all of our tried-and-true meals so I can rotate them a little better as well. We have a recipe file, but if it’s something we cook without a recipe, I sometimes just forget about it.

7

At some point in the week, one or the other of my daughters will say “We’re out of _____.”

I then have them add it to the list on the fridge.

8

Our inventory system is foolproof, and quite simple.

First, we go grocery shopping. When we get home, we realize we already had at least two of everything we just bought.

Second, we plan a nice meal – usually with guests involved. When we’re halfway through the preparations, we realize we’re missing at least four key ingredients.

Using these two simple steps, we always know what we have and/or need.

9

I walk around with a pad of paper and look for things we’re out of or low on. After adding stuff to my list I leaf through the weekly fliers and see what’s on sale and where. Then I decide where and when to shop that week. A couple of different stores are closer to work then our main one we shop at, and Costco has good deals on bulk items that we need occasionally.

10

A tip from my experiences of stone-cold-broke cookery: do all the planning and organising that others are suggesting. But while shopping, throw in an extra tin of tomatoes, or bag of pasta, or other such versatile and long-life items. Nothing that will throw you off-budget, but the kind of thing it can at times be very welcome to realise you’ve got stuck at the back of the shelf.

11

We have lots and lots of cookbooks, and a looseleaf where we put recipes printed from the web. A few years ago I bought my wife a book which has places to write what the recipe is, how you liked it, and a pointer to where it can be found. We put the stuff we like and want to make again in there - very handy. You can even put stuff you make without a recipe in there if it will help - we have some of those also.

12

A list on the fridge is vital for those things you are running out of, which might not be a part of a specific meal. We take the list, add the stuff we need to buy to it, and then rewrite it to be roughly in the order it appears in our traversal of the grocery store.

And I forgot the fliers, which we make heavy use of. This last Saturday every single thing we bought was on sale.

13

Yep. I go grocery shopping once a week, and by the time it’s the day before my shopping trip, the refrigerator is damn near bare, except for the condiment bottles in the door. Having said that, if I’m planning my trip to the store, I will sometimes have to double check that I do in fact have paprika or mustard. If it’s not something I’m using on a weekly basis, I’ve got to check.

14

I say, “Honey, do we have fill in name of food here at home?”

He has some uncanny way of remembering it all. I have no idea how he does it. There is no list on the fridge (that’s where the takeout and delivery menus are), and as far as I can tell, he doesn’t keep a list anywhere else.

15

**Flander **and scout, I don’t mean to be a nancy-know-it-all, but you might want to check out The Grocery Game (aka “Teri’s List”) if things are financially tight. She can set you up with a mini-store pantry by letting you know when things are at the lowest price they’ll be for 12 weeks. So you can buy your ramen for 10 cents a brick instead of 30 cents a brick, but buy 3 times as many and have them on hand for the weeks when ramen isn’t on sale without spending any more money than you do now. You never buy anything when it’s not on sale, saving you money in the not-very-long run, but because you’ve got stuff on hand, you can make pretty much whatever you want whenever you want. It didn’t take me $300 extra all at once to stock up a pantry in short order - more like an extra $10 a week for a few months.

16

Nope, I don’t do it because money is tight (which is why I didn’t quote that part of his post). Why should I buy food I don’t need?

I just buy what I need each week and that’s it. Sometimes the things I need I won’t need all of at once (say a box of rice or something like that) so obviously I don’t have NOTHING in my fridge/pantry.

I make a pretty detailed plan of what I’m going to cook for the week, so I’m not prone to “hey what do I make for dinner tonight?” kind of situations. So I don’t need to keep stuff on hand “just in case.” I just make what’s there.

17

I have a few common ingredients that I keep track of in my head but when it comes to cooking I buy groceries the day before. I work nights and on my lunch break the only place that’s open is a supermarket so I buy groceries for the next day each night.

18

I do 90% of the cooking and 100% of the shopping here at Casa Ukulele, so keeping the numbers in my head is also my job.

Last night I came across a bizarre Kentucky recipe for pot roast, and I thought “OK, I have onion and potatoes and garlic in the house, a little short on carrots, gotta grab a few – I got a pound of string beans I bought fresh two days ago and we haven’t eaten yet, that’ll do for a green veg – OK on spices – got salad things – ready to go for a skillet cornbread; wait, no, get a quart of buttermilk – all’s I need next is a chuck roast.”

Well, and I keep a list. I also needed five pounds of sugar and a jar of mayo.

19

(Which didn’t go into the pot roast.)

20

You did say it was bizarre.