This is definitely more than my fourth series of meal planning sessions, but I’ve been learning quite a bit with each time through the cycle. I have found that I can batch meals that will last through the month which is why I’m only really doing the Cleanout, Meal Planning, and Shopping posts once a month and pulling together many different cooking sessions for the last post of each month.
Meal planning seems to work well for the weeks that I’m not batching and is terrible for the week that I do batch to the freezer. It’s primarily an issue with ingredients, but I’ll get to that in more detail in the next post.
In this post, I’m going to elaborate on some changes I’m making to inventory and food storage.
I’d already been thinking about building up some food stores in the canning cellar under my kitchen. It’s half laundry right now and I’ve been fighting some water leaking issues since I moved in several years ago. The cabinets in the kitchen above are experiencing too much temperature fluctuation for bread and I’m fairly certain there is zero insulation in that wall, which I’m told was common in the 1950s.
Personal Health Considerations for food Storage:
It’s critical that I don’t ever lose track of food in the basement or that I forget to rotate the older stuff up so it gets used timely. As you may have read, I have Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) which causes me to have allergic responses to foods based more on histamine levels than on the food and its particular make-up.
However, shelf-stable foods tend to start at higher levels. It’s very tricky but for our purposes here, just consider that it’s like all food has half the shelf life or less before it becomes dangerous to me.
What is my current food storage situation:
First off, I have no pantry. Any food that doesn’t require refrigeration or freezing is in the upper cabinets. I’ve isolated this food to two cabinets but it really is 90% of these two cabinets. These include things like canned soups, canned olives, unopened apple sauces, honey, bread, baking ingredients, and grains.
I have a side-by-side counter-depth freezer fridge situation. I went this way because I need to freeze everything right away unless I know it will get consumed the next day. Even things that many can leave on counters, I go ahead and put the fridge to by myself a reasonable amount of time to consume them. Which sometimes still isn’t reasonable. The big issue with the fridge is that I very often forget how long things have been there.
I’m working hard to masking-tape-and-Sharpie label everything by the date I opened it or cooked it. It’s very hard to remember everything, especially when it already has a label.
Why I want to add food storage in the basement:
I’ve resisted this in the past, primarily because I threw out tons of food when I’d do this Day 1 of meal planning purge. It didn’t make sense to put even more items further out of sight. For some items, it absolutely does not make sense.
What it does make sense for:
- Canned soups
- Shelf-safe broths
- Noodles
- Potato chips or other types of shelf-stable items I limit
- Apple Sauce
- Black Olives
- Soda or other drinks
- Bouillon cubes
- Single serve items I tend to eat first (extras)
- Other household items that are non-food
The main reason I think it’s worth doing is that I’ve noticed that I would often order delivery just because I wanted a soda. This is really extravagant. I may have spent $30 on a bunch of food that I wasn’t craving and delivery just so I could avoid going out to get myself a soda.
There’s some resistance to going downstairs but not as much as going to the grocery store (this is a brain injury thing – I had no problem grocery shopping before acquiring a TBI). Guys, I live 1 block away from a grocery store. 1 BLOCK! Instead, I’d order tons of food to get one over-iced and probably not even the brand I wanted soda.
The other problem I referenced for next week’s post is about being one pantry item short of a meal. This happens a lot. I bought all but one ingredient and now the spinach spoiled because I didn’t have noodles. This is ridiculous as well. Since I can’t quite as easily wing using the item up and it defeats the meal planning purpose, then it just ends up spoiling.
So I fully intend to keep a low level of inventory but enough that I wouldn’t have to shovel myself out of 4 feet of snow and trudge through 1 block of the park to get to the grocery store. It is not my intention to collect and store items that I don’t eat often or can’t be stored safely for a month.
Cleaning out food inventory before traveling:
So I don’t believe I have any photos of this time’s cleanout but I do want to talk a bit about cleaning out the fridge before and after traveling. I actually did this several days before I traveled. My plans had me away for about 5-6 days and I had cleaned it out about 4 days before.
This timing was maybe a little too early but it did actually give me a chance to use some of the ingredients and prep to the freezer while I was away. Some veggies like onion can be chopped and frozen. Others will have no problem getting by that long. I was able to use my spinach up and make spinach chicken lasagnas, one of my favorite prep meals before I left.
Unfortunately, I discovered, yet again, that green onions had already gone bad and I’d forgotten I had them. This has been happening a ton. I have the orange Tupperware fridge containers and they are too opaque for me (mine are orange with two white buttons on the side). I always forget what’s in them. I hear they’ve made clearer ones now, but that’s not what I have. I also feel like the container keeps them too moist so they develop mold instead of drying out.
This is an issue that I need to research further. I’ve tried keeping them in water and loose in the veggie drawer and other things, but green onions and spinach go bad on me so fast. For now, I’ve just moved the container up to eye level in the door. This was a suggestion for a YouTuber for all fruits and veggies and I’m going to give it a try to see whether it makes any difference.
I put the soda down low since that’s why I open the fridge most of the time.
It felt great to have cleared my fridge of leftover food containers that I didn’t remember when I’d bought, prepped but unused garlic, and the spinach and green onions. I didn’t come home to a mess. But I also still had an item or two spoil while I was gone. It was not a goopy-smelly mess, thankfully, but it was moldy.
Modifying my “Pantry” upstairs:
My work gave away gifts before we shut down for the holiday. I happened to receive an entire sealing decanting pantry set. Who would have guessed? I wasn’t even sure if I should open it. After all, labels are pretty critical to me. However, I spent an evening playing around with what would fit and what items I could store in them and be relatively “safe”. It does seem like I will be able to use the majority of the containers.
I can decant rice and quinoa without much risk and any homemade items I have to label anyway so homemade granola or popcorn would work. I was also able to put many items together in a some with their packaging and it allowed me to get many more items in the pantry and easily move them around.
If you follow Cas from Clutterbug, I’m a ladybug and I had open-top cardboard in there before, so there’s a pretty high chance these won’t work out at all, but they were free to me. I also took the time to identify the categories of food items I kept on each shelf and which ones could be over-stocked into the basement. See below.
Next week I’ll cover some of the fundamental issues with making a grocery list from one week’s meal plan on a monthly prep week. There’s a bit more than the obvious problems…