It’s official. No more shopping for us! Well, at least until life is back to normal. Maybe that’s just a month or maybe it’s through the summer.
I’ll explain why we’re doing this, then show you what our food situation is at the outset of this crazy challenge. I’ll update you with new posts and videos throughout however long it ends up being, showing what we’re eating (and describing what we wish we were eating) including recipes we’re making to keep our food storage staples interesting.
And of course we invite any of you to join us!
Why are we choosing to eat what we have and NOT go to the store?
Yes, I know stores are still open. I’m not worried that they will run out of food. Sure, there will be hiccups in the supply chain and they might not have all of the things you’re looking for, but I imagine there will still be food.
That being said, there are two main reasons we are choosing to live off of our storage and not shop for food through the duration of the coronoavirus pandemic.
First, we are taking this health situation seriously.
It may not turn out to be as terrible as the experts have predicted. That would be great!
But it might. And if we can do a little something for the greater good, then we are happy to do our part by keeping eight people from getting infected and possibly transmitting the disease to others. We’ll just stay home.
Thankfully, we are all healthy and don’t have any pre-existing conditions that would make us particularly susceptible. Still, we feel like the responsible thing for our family to do is just stay home.
Since grocery stores these days are one of the highest trafficked places, they are a great place for transmitting stuff. I would feel especially sad to contribute to the problem when we have actually prepared for this day.
Not this specific day per se, but we have prepared for events in which we would need to have food storage (natural disaster, job loss, crazy world health crisis, etc).
Which brings me to the second reason we’re choosing not to visit a grocery store for a while.
Second, this is a great chance to test our food storage preparedness.
We’ve done no-spend challenge months where we have gone the entire month without grocery shopping. We managed just fine.
If you’ve checked out any of our monthly grocery haul videos or posts, you know that we don’t shop from a particular menu, but rather just shop to replenish the ingredients and staples in our pantry. That way we can cook any of our normal meals.
Since we keep a pretty well-stocked pantry, going a month without shopping isn’t too bad, but we haven’t tested out what it would be like to live on our long-term food storage (you know, wheat, rice, beans, etc). We want to see how it goes and learn what things we would like to have in our food storage so that after this is all over we can work on improving our family’s food preparedness.
In short, we will treat this experience as our “dry run.” Surely this won’t be the last time food storage has the chance to save the day.
How long will this food storage challenge last?
I wish I knew!
But part of the challenge is not knowing.
Not knowing how long it will last encourages us to ration the “good stuff” and get creative with the boring stuff right from the beginning.
So depending on how long this all lasts, this challenge may be easy (if it lasts for a month of so) or difficult (if we’re sheltering in place until July). Only time will tell.
Our pantry, food storage, and freezer inventory
As I was taking inventory of what we actually have in our pantry, food storage, and freezer, I made videos to document everything.
Want to see? Here’s what we have in the deep freeze in the garage:
Here’s what our pantry, cupboards, and long-term food storage looks like
And here’s a current look at our fridge and freezer. This one is a little embarrassing as I didn’t clean anything before taking this video, so it gets pretty real.
Updates and an Invitation
I plan to share updates to show you what we’re eating as well as what we are missing. Hopefully we can all learn from this experiment.
If any of you are in a position to do a similar challenge I invite you to join me! I would love to share ideas on how we’re using our long term food storage during this crazy time.
Stay healthy out there friends!
Quarantine Food Storage Challenge Series
Why We’re doing a Quarantine Food Storage Challenge, Pantry, Food Storage, Fridge, & Freezer Tour
UPDATE #1– What we’ve eaten, Food Tips
UPDATE #2– What we ate, Theme Days, Baking Supplies, Snacks, Seeds
UPDATE #3– What we ate, Trying New things, Garden Expansion?
UPDATE #4– What we ate, Food Storage FAQ
UPDATE #5– What we ate, New things to try
UPDATE #6– What we ate, New Things we tried
UPDATE #7– Pantry Update after 2 months of our challenge
UPDATE #8– What the kids think of the food storage challenge
What we Learned from our our food storage challenge
I am super excited for this challenge! Thanks so much for sharing! I’m excited to learn new recipes! We are also eating from our food storage and I am collecting recipes and ideas in a binder for the future. Do you have a foodsaver with a canning jar lid attachment? I love mine because I can seal pasta, flour, crackers, etc to stay fresh much longer and it and it keeps bugs out of the pantry. Another question–Do you have a system to inventory food so you know what you have? I would like to get a system in place to keep better track of what I have on hand. Stay well! Thanks for this series!
Hi Kim! Glad you’re excited too! 🙂 I don’t have a food saver, but that’s cool that you can use it with canning jars. Thankfully we haven’t had many issues with bugs. I periodically take inventory, but I don’t have a super organized system. I wrote everything down when I went through the food storage last week and and I’m working on getting a system/spreadsheet together so I can keep track of what we have used and know what we have left.
Isn’t that the whole point of having food storage, to eat it?
Most people eat what they have before buying more. We always est down our pantry and freezer before doing another big shop
Yep! 🙂 The point of food storage is to eat it, of course, but our “long term” food storage is different than our everyday pantry food. For example, we have hundreds of pounds of wheat and beans in our garage. We have powdered milk and freeze dried eggs. These are things with a long shelf life that we don’t use all the time. While we do use it occasionally so we can rotate through it, we have that food stored specifically for emergencies like this (or a natural disaster, or a job loss, or another catastrophe. I have been taught my whole life to have food storage and have tried to follow that practice. We usually do a big monthly shopping trip and a few smaller trips in a month. We don’t wait until our cupboards are bare before shopping.
Way to go! Good for you for taking this quarantine very seriously. I grocery shopped yesterday and stocked way up – we’re planning to really stay-in for the next 2-3 weeks. Thanks for the article!
That’s good to hear! Stay safe Ben!
Hello to all
In this difficult time, I love you all
Prize your family and friends
We now have about 3 weeks of food in our house (We would have had much less if your grocery haul posts hadn’t changed how we shop – definite thanks!) I am interested in reading how people are balancing the “good stuff” with the more shelf stable, perhaps less palatable things. For example, we have several cans of black beans but I tried making dried black beans this week and they did not go over so well. (Which is totally fine, and also the opportunity for life lessons!) But do people have recipes they know work better for dried beans and save other recipes for the canned beans? Also, the dried beans took over 24 hours to get soft — is that normal? (Thanks for the tongue smashing on the top of the mouth tip!)
I am also interested in hearing other people’s thoughts on balancing using up freezer goods first versus canned goods if we are stuck in this for the longer range. For example, we have frozen vegetables (in the good stuff category) and canned vegetables. Is it a best practice to use up the freezer food first? Also, if we have to venture out to the store (we most likely will not have a very good bulk store option) should we buy freezer things, which seemed to be better stocked when we last shopped, or focus only on buying canned things? Are the freezer things more readily available because it is not as good of an idea to buy them in this situation? We aren’t in California so we haven’t had the pleasure of rotating power outages yet but our power is still known to go out for 4-12 hours.
In my efforts to stay sane, I was organizing some things and came across my old Wacky Cake recipe from junior high foods class. (An old ditto copy and 25+ years old!) We will definitely be saving an egg and making this vinegar leavened cake this week for some comfort food. It was nice to think about that class and my former classmates — pretty cool how just a recipe can make you feel better.
I think it will depend on what you have, what you can get, and what you will eat. There will also necessarily have to be some playing-around with recipes to find what works, especially if you’re cooking with things you’ve never used before. For us, right now we’re eating fairly normally; when/if the time comes that we have to use our food storage, we’ll be eating a lot more soups and baked beans, but I hope to still be able to serve 2 to 3 ‘normal’ dinners a week. Not every meal will be a winner; but this is a crisis situation; the idea isn’t to eat well, but to eat. We aren’t too worried about our electricity supply, so I’m not really worried about using up freezer food first or anything like that.
When I was stocking up, first I focused on foods that I knew we’d eat – pasta, pasta sauce, kidney beans, baked beans, cans of tomatoes, rice, etc. Next I focused on food that could sustain us – things like black beans and canned ham, yeast and flour for baking bread, etc. They’re not necessarily the first things we’d reach for, but they’re good, healthy food that will help us through. Finally I focused on comfort food – chocolate, chocolate chips, potato chips, flavoured popcorn, etc. Nobody needs chocolate; but when my kids are deprived of so many of their normal activities (going over to a friend’s house, going to the movies) it’s nice to be able to offer them something special.
Becca — thank you for the response. It is very helpful. I especially like the idea of 2-3 ‘normal ‘ meals a week. Tomorrow we are trying a ham stir fry with lunchmeat ham. Not a normal recipe for us but normal ingredients so hopefully it works out.
I am regretting that I regularly eat through my chocolate stash. When this is over that is one area of my food storage that definitely needs a boost. I will store more cocoa powder because any other form is too easy for me to eat when it’s not an emergency. I can go through a bag of chocolate chips in the blink of an eye.
Ah – the trick is to buy so much of it, that even looking at it makes you sick! And then you have to hide it really, really well, so that it’s a pain to get to. If you can’t even see it, it’s an added bonus – out of sight, out of mind.
Hi Yma P – I prefer the taste and texture of frozen vegetables to most canned veggies with the exception of tomatoes. I use the frozen vegetables in dishes like: soup, fried rice, pot pie, casseroles, pastas and stir fries. Canned vegetables, other than tomatoes, I use primarily for soups only.
I also make a lot of my own frozen vegetables. For example I dice a head of celery and freeze it, same for onions, kale, etc. All of those I freeze without blanching. Other veggies that I freeze need to be blanched first like asparagus. Again I’m not serving these frozen veggies as a stand alone side but incorporating them into dishes. I found last week at the grocery store that the inventory of fresh produce was more robust than the selection of frozen vegetables.
I have the same taste/texture preferences for frozen fruit vs canned fruit. But it also depends upon how much space you have to freeze things.
There was a question asked about keeping an inventory of the food in storage. There is an excellent system outlined in one of the Tightwad Gazette books. Essentially she listed an item and made one X for each quantity – i.e., if she had five bags of frozen peas that line would have five X’s. She taped the inventory to the top of her chest freezer and each time a bag of frozen peas was removed, she put a circle around one X. Also makes it easy to keep track when restocking the freezer. Same system works for dry pantry.
Regarding the beans taking a long time to cook, if salt is added to dry beans, it will inhibit the beans absorption ability.
And finally, I have purchased bulk cocoa (and spices, sea salt, dehydrated vegetable soup, powdered kale, etc) from the San Francisco Herb Company. Their website shows they are still shipping products out. Even paying for transportation across country, their prices as cheaper for these bulk items than I could find in New England.
Beans can take longer to cook depending on the type and how old they are. I cooked some last week in the crock pot that took forever and I ended up leaving them over night.
Wasky cakes are great for when you don’t have eggs! We actually have them in abundance since we have chickens, but I’m definitely searching google for recipes without other ingredients that we’re going to have to ration (like butter)!
As for the frozen versus canned, I think either is fine in thie situation. I think people’s first thought for emergencies is canned food because in lots of emergencies there isn’t power, but this situation is different. When you’re building up a food storage in general, it’s for an unknown disaster, so canned food is great because it is versatile and doesn’t need power or freezer space. In this unique situation, I think frozen is great (it sure tastes better than canned), so if you have space in the freezer than go ahead and grab it! Thankfully this isn’t coinciding with fire season here in California where the power companies shut our power off for days at a time.
I’m in! I live in Northern CA too. I have some recipes I can share if you want. We are spreading out the meat to go along with beans or flavoring in casseroles. Like you said, saving the good stuff so it’s not just beans and rice at the end. I’ve made yogurt 3 times from the same 1/2 cup starter and using my crockpot. The recipe uses dry milk. We use it as sour cream for beans. We are doing random extra stuff to use up or leftovers on Sunday, Monday casserole (shepherd’s pie, and creamy dishes from homemade cream soup mix from dry milk and bouillon), Tuesday pasta night, Wed breakfast night (soon with no eggs), Thursday Mexican night (maseca tortillas, corn tortilla casserole etc, beans), Friday kids foods (pizza, pigs in a blanket, homemade bagels etc), soup Saturday with artisan bread (so there will always be leftover soup for Sunday after home based church:). Having a night makes it so much easier and varied with the food storage! Breakfast is cereal until it’s gone and oatmeal, lunch I make whole wheat bread from ground so sandwiches, snack is popcorn or frozen make ahead muffins. My husband and I have not been over eating because we want to ration the food and have each lost a little. Yay! The kids can’t tell a difference yet and are having a grand time at home. Love your site!
Hi Katie, my northern California neighbor! I’d invite you over, but well, that’s frowned upon these days!!
That’s great how you have themed meal nights! We’ve done that at times, but I think it would definitely be good now. 🙂 We make yogurt in the crock pot too, but I haven’t done it with powdered milk. I have one small container of yogurt in the fridge that I bought to make more yogurt, but we’re running low on regular milk. Maybe I’ll try doing it with powdered milk. Or half regular, half powdered and then see how long I can keep it going. Using it as a sour cream substitute is great. Our family eats lots of sour cream. 🙂 I would love to try some of your recipes! 🙂 You can email me.
We have about a 3 month supply of food; but we are trying to save it for when things get really bad. We figure it’s safer being in the shops now than it will be in a month or so. So, for now, every time we use something, we add it to a list. Once a week one of us goes to the grocery store and tries to get 2 of everything on the list. If we can’t get something, we add it to the list for next week. Once grocery stores start delivering and offering pick-up services again (which is expected to happen shortly after Easter) we’ll transition away from physical visits and to delivery/pick-up. And when/if it ever gets really bad, or if one of us gets sick, we’ll sequester ourselves at home and live off the food storage. We are being told this could last for 6 months, so the longer we can leave the food storage, the better.
That sounds like a good plan. I really don’t know how long our food storage will last. That’s part of what I want to learn. How do you think Australia’s supply chain compares with what we have in th US?
My 3 months supply is largely a guess. I took stock and worked out approximately how many meals we could get out of what we had. Mind you a lot of those meals would be really boring; but we’d survive.
Supply-wise, I think the US and Australia are in a similar position. I can only go from what my parents are telling me, and they haven’t stepped foot inside a grocery store in about a month now. But a couple of weeks ago, the same things that were missing from their pick-up order were the things we couldn’t find in our shops. Now they are getting most of their pick-up order and we can find pretty much everything in our shops. (Although the cheap meat we use as dog food for our picky dog who refuses to eat dry dog food, but has no problem eating sheep poop, hasn’t been available for about a week; but we’ve got plenty on-hand; and if we run out, he’ll just have to stop being so picky and eat the dry dog food.) Here, the supermarkets have stopped running specials, and produce prices and some meat prices have skyrocketed. But it’s nothing we can’t deal with. Green pepper is around US $3.25/pound; but it’s easily substituted; the cheapest non-ground beef is around $5.45/pound so we’ll use chicken instead; etc.
Also, with how much you guys freeze stuff, have you ever thought of investing in a Food Saver? My mom and stepdad gifted us ours one Christmas, and it has been life-changing! You never get any freezer burn, and it vacuum seals everything so you can fit it a lot easier in the freezer. You don’t seem to deal with freezer burn as much as we do, but it still might be worth the investment for you someday!
That might be something to look into. Thanks for the suggestion! 🙂
Wow, I’m impressed! We went most of March without grocery shopping and probably could have lasted through April, but you guys would be set for a lot longer!
If you need a recipe to use up all those tater tots, here’s one we love that uses basically all pantry ingredients:
https://www.toloveandtolearn.com/2017/09/22/easy-weeknight-meal-tater-tot-casserole/
Stay safe over there, and I’m excited for this new series!
Thanks for the recipe Torrie!! 🙂 You guys stay safe too!
What about toilet paper, shampoo, toothpaste etc? Do you have those things stocked too?
That’s a good question Christy. We do keep those stocked as well. We always have a pretty good supply of shampoo, soap, toothpaste, deodorant, and other hygiene products. We don’t always keep months of toilet paper on hand, but we buy a lot when we buy it, and purchased a large commercial case just before the outbreak got going.
We’re blessed to have adequate storage space and long-standing habits of keeping bulk supplies on hand, partly because buying bulk can be much cheaper, and partly for the unexpected, like a shelter-in-place order of indeterminate length.