How much do you guess you have in your permanent 'pantry'?

Cafe Society
1

(Pantry is in quotes, because I mean all of your basic food storage types, freezer/fridge/cupboards/true pantry/whatever.)

This came up because a friend is going through a really miserable divorce – basically she fled her home because her husband in increasingly abusive/domineering/controlling/generally wacko. Yes, probably she ‘should’ have been the one who stayed in the home, but it was more important to her to get to somewhere safe than risk angering him by trying to get him out. So she packed up just her most vital type things – clothes/medicines/paperwork/irreplaceable emotional stuff – and fled. Fortunately she’s got a good job, and had been squirreling away extra funds in accounts in just her name, so she was able to find somewhere to live quickly enough. But she was faced with starting all over from scratch. Not only didn’t she have a bed to sleep in, she didn’t have a pillow or a sheet or a single towel. Nothing, nada.

But she says she was expecting that, she knew she’d have to buy furniture and pots and pans and dishes and what all. What keeps surprising her is how much ‘basic’ food stuffs she had to buy.

Like, say I decide I want to make chili and corn bread for supper. I put stew meat and chili peppers and maybe canned tomatoes on the shopping list. But, in fact, I will also use tomato paste and beans and chili powder and garlic and salt and pepper and probably some soy sauce and dibs and drabs of other things. Oh, and corn meal, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt (again), an egg, some milk, Crisco to grease pan, some stuff I’m blanking on right now…but the thing is, I don’t have to buy any of that, because I already have it on hand. They’re ‘basics,’ things that are ALWAYS there, because I automatically buy them as soon as I notice the stock on hand is getting low.

Carol says she’s been having to buy stuff like that for every single menu for the last three weeks, and it’s still frequently happening that she’ll be partway through cooking something and discover that, damn it, she forgot she’d need molasses or something. She started to keep a list of all these ‘of course I have it on hand’ things she has had to buy, and says the list is past 250 items already!

Which amazed me, until I took a good look at what I have in my own kitchen. The freezer, the cupboard, omg the door of my fridge (really, we do ‘need’ six different mustards on hand), and the four plastic shoe boxes I use as my spice ‘rack’… How many varieties of canned beans? How many types of pasta? What frozen vegetables do you always have? How many cans of ‘emergency’ soups and fruits? And how much would it cost to replace that all at once?

And I’m not even a foodie.

What about you? How many things are in your ‘keep on hand at all times’ list? What do you guess they add up to?

2

We are pretty extreme opposites of you. We pretty much have what we eat, and we buy pretty much a week’s worth of food at a time - largely fresh. We often have backups for some of the staples - an extra jar of PB and jelly for when the open ones run out, a couple of cans of beans/tomatoes. And a couple of frozen ingredients - I’m thinking diced onions - when we find them in the store we’ll buy a couple, as they are not reliably stocked. Or if something we really likened eat often - a particular cereal - is on sale, we might buy 4 boxes.

But must people viewing our fridge/cabinet would think they look empty. And even when WE think they look empty, there is generally enough to make SOME kind of meals for the next day or 2.

Funny you mention mustard, b/c some good friends of ours have you beat. I forget if they have 8 or 9! We have brown and yellow (neither of which I use.).

Over the years, we’ve pretty much identified the foods we like for various purposes. We don’t eat a lot of pasta, but when we did, we might have kept spaghetti, macaroni, and try-color rotini - each for a specific dish. Would not have a number of varieties just for variety.

But we are definitely not “foodies” and do not make a lot of many-ingredient dishes. If my wife intended to make something requiring molasses, she’d damned sure check whether we had it before starting to cook. But I do most of the cooking - and I am at the furthest extreme, viewing food essentially as fuel.

Also, we have a grocery store 3 blocks away, so we don’t need to drive distance and stock up.

3

Maybe she should wait to get more settled before she starts buying this that and the other thing. Unless she really really likes to cook…

My pantry staples: coffee, tea, sugar, flour, coffee creamer, baking soda and baking powder. Maybe yeast in the refrigerator, along with milk, butter, sour cream, mayonnaise, cheese, yogurt. Cans of tomatoes, vegetables, fruit, spaghetti sauce, soup of my choice. Peanut butter and jelly. Chicken and beef bouillon. Tuna, ramen, pasta, Kraft mac & cheese, rice, Idahoan potato flakes, packets of gravy mix. Crackers! Spices (oregano, cinnamon, chili powder, garlic powder, onion powder) salt, pepper. Mustard, ketchup, bbq sauce. These are basics. I buy a roll or bread and eggs and cold cuts as needed, and I have a big freezer half full. I buy meat and chicken and fish as needed.

4

It depends. We have a large variety of spices, and only buy if we are about to run out or a recipe takes something we don’t own. We have a case of chicken broth and a big box of diced tomatoes from Costco which we cycle through. Every Thursday night we inventory our freezer so nothing gets lost. We buy lots of stuff that doesn’t spoil on sale, things that do spoil we buy only a bit ahead.
We plan menus for the next week each Thursday night, and check to make sure we have the ingredients we need, and buy anything we don’t have on our weekly Friday morning shopping trip. That cuts down on emergency grocery runs.

5

We have TONS of stuff including a walk-in pantry, a second fridge, and since Covid a chest freezer.

My wife just finished her first cookbook, due out in August, so she does actually use it all. As I sit at counter eating lunch, she is preparing Chocolate Toffee Matzoh and Chicken Soup for Passover next week.

6

Dried stuff that will last; beans, split peas, barley, rice, flour, corn meal, grits, oatmeal, pasta. Canned whole, crushed, and pureed tomatoes. Lipton’s Chicken Noodle and Onion soup packages. Canned black olives, tamales, clam juice. Some canned vegetables for quick recipes. Lots of spices.

Bottles of sauces, unopened in the pantry, opened in the fridge, some in multiple varieties of a type; hot sauce, hoisin, fish sauce, oyster sauce, soy sauce, Golden Mountain sauce, lime juice, ponzu, usually an open bottle of wine. And the condiments as well, mustard, ketchup, mayo, sometimes specialty versions. Also jars of Thai green and red curry sauces and jars of beef and chicken base.

Oils; olive extra virgin and filtered, canola, corn, sesame, sunflower seed (now for Ukraine, keep the demand up).

Not much else always in the fridge, butter, cream, some kind of cheese, carrots, parsnips. There is often a packaged corned beef or ham because those keep for a while. We try not to keep other fresh food for very long at all in the fridge. Outside the fridge we keep up on onions, garlic, and potatoes, and try to use them up because they don’t keep forever.

Most food cycles through the freezer fairly quickly, try to keep some frozen fries, spinach, corn, peas, shrimp, scallops, other seafood. Maybe some frozen raviolis. Try to maintain some frozen ground beef and pork, sausages, chicken thighs, pork chops, and maybe a roast of some kind.

I am not a foodie, I’m a fooder.

7

Slightly tangential but you could help your friend connect to a domestic violence agency for some support with those kinds of unexpected new things. Even if she doesn’t come across how you’d imagine the typical person who gets support from an agency like that would come across (i.e. even if there’s no financial need, no housing need, no childcare needs, no need for legal assistance, etc.), I know that agencies I’ve worked with have often had all sorts of pre-made packages and different kinds of helpers with all the most common things that come up when you have to start anew.

There are so many mundane things that come up for almost everyone in those situations, which resupplying the pantry is a great example of, and it has always seemed to me to be the case that people can find the smallest things super helpful. Since most everyone who comes through the agency’s doors will be somewhere along that same process, it tends to be the case that they can seem almost presciently prepared to help. I can’t say for certain that a local agency would have a premade little food pantry that she would be welcome to just come in and grab stuff from, or a collection of pre-packed toiletry essentials, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Sounds like she’s in a pretty good place for those specific things, and I know that’s not really the point of your thread, but you never know what the next thing to pop up would be, so just figured I’d mention it.

8

Surprisingly little. I worked at Safeway for a long time and got used to just buying food 1-2 days at a time.

There’s cans and other stuff in the pantry, and a bunch of stuff in the freezer, but they don’t get used, they’re just kinda… there.

9

We have all sorts of stuff in the pantry. That said, I’ve been in the position of starting from scratch and didn’t have a problem with just buying things as needed. I also tend not to cook proper meals when I’m by myself, I’m generally happy living on cereal, milk, eggs, toast, and so on. If kids are in the picture then it tends to be pasta with sauce, sausages with veges, and other simple meals that don’t require a lot of time. I would always assume I didn’t have an ingredient and, if anything, I’d end up with multiples rather than missing things out.

10

We just moved last week so… three boxes for the pantry, plus two large coolers for the refrigerator and freezer.

11

We moved long distance in 2003, ditching all the food we had at the old house and starting anew. We purchased over 400 items (over $1000) in the first three weeks and we still weren’t as stocked as we were at the old house. I’m sure we’ll over 90% of those items (not necessarily dollars) we’re not items we’d replenish every few weeks normally.

I’m sure a good 30-40 of those were dried herbs and spices alone.

12

We’re almost never without Jell-O. Sometimes Mom has to go on a liquid diet for some reason or another.

I had to replace half my spices due to a roof leak recently.

13

I’m definitely on the extreme side of keeping large quantities of all staples on hand, and my stables include not just the obvious ones but couscous, tahini, mirin, wasabi, nori, about 30-40 herbs and spices, and a million other things that some people would never use, much less consider as pantry essentials. I have a large stand-alone freezer and I track what I have on hand carefully to avoid waste from things going bad. My freezer contains not just meat/vegetables/fruit but also flours, grains, nuts, and seeds that don’t perish quickly but which definitely keep better in the freezer if you want them to last 6 months or so.

One reason I have such an obsessively well stocked pantry is that early in my adulthood I lived on a remote tropical island where the ship only came in once a month. (This was long before the internet so you couldn’t just order things on line.) I developed a habit of buying in bulk and storing well.

14

I keep well stocked with soups and stew.
My freezer has frozen peas, corn, and meat.

I try to have whatever is needed for the recipes that I routinely make. I can avoid going to the stores for several weeks.

I do buy milk and bread every week.