Raiding the freezer and pantry......

[poltr1]

Since I've run out of money from being unemployed for so long, now is an ideal opportunity for me to start going through and eating the food I have in the freezer and the pantry.

The rule of thumb I've always followed was to have enough canned goods in my house to last a week if I was snowed in or couldn't leave the house. That may be practical in snow-prone areas like Buffalo or Cleveland, but is it practical here in Dayton?

Also, some of the canned goods were bought on 12/31/99, a day before the Y2K "bug" was supposed to hit. (I know because I marked the date on the cans.) The plan was that I'd either eat out of the cans, or heat the contents on the propane grill or use Sterno (aka "Napalm in a can"). I was fully prepared to go into camping/survival mode if we didn't have electricity on 1/1/00.

I've also taken inventory of what I have, and entered the data into Excel spreadsheets. (For the past couple of years, I've only tracked the month and year of the purchase date of canned goods.)


Here's what I'm discovering in this project/"experiment":

Freezer-burned food tastes and smells awful. (Off to the disposal it goes.)
Stuff that was already frozen before it arrived in my freezer tastes much better.
Canned food ages, believe it or not.
Aged canned food tastes awful too.
Fresh canned food tastes good. (Except for canned peas, which taste nothing like fresh or frozen peas.)
Watch out for tomato-based canned goods where the ends are bulging. Call the bomb squad.
Canned spaghetti (Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, et al) doesn't taste as good as the Real Thing.
Ketchup can go bad. It turns dark.
Rice can go bad too. The oils get rancid.
Carbs are cheap. It's okay to throw out old carbs.
I wish I had the cash for one of those vacuum sealers.
I may be spending more time at Aldi than the local Kroger.


Ultimately, I hope to have more room in the freezer and pantry for more goods. But I don't plan to overload it like I've been doing.

Comments

[athenawindsong.livejournal.com]

Chef-Boy-ar-dee is the evil God of Heartburn. SWIM AWAY!!!

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

If I ever didn't have enough food in the house to comfortably last a month without anything but perishables, I think I'd go into some kind of panic-driven shopping mode. It's just the way I live; I buy the foods that I use when they're on sale, and I try to buy enough of any given food that it should last until the next time I hit a good sale. I learned this from my mom, although unlike her, I generally avoid buying foods that I *don't* use just because they're on sale, or continuing to buy at every sale even when I already have two year's worth of that particular food at home. There's a (general) space in the pantry for each species, and if the space is full, I don't buy more of it unless they're really giving it away. Whenever I open a new can or box of something, I do my best to make sure I get the oldest one, and generally nothing stays around so long that it goes bad.

If a can swells up, throw it away without worrying. Canned food is too cheak to risk botulism. As to freezer-burned meat -- you can make perfectly edible chili out of stuff that's well beyond serving as, say, steak.

[poltr1]

I like your system better. It makes sense. And my mom is like your mom in that they'll buy stuff that's on sale, whether they need it or not.

Vac-U-Sealer

[zorya-thinks.livejournal.com]

FWIW Jim, I have one of those things if you want to borrow it sometime. They are useful, but I found that I don't use it as much as I thought I would.

If you are sealing wet goods, like soup, you have to use a container instead of a bag - unless you freeze or partially freeze it and then seal it. Speaking from experience here. :-)

Re: Vac-U-Sealer

[poltr1]

(Take 2. Didn't have a correct HTML tag pair.)

Thank you! I'll keep that in mind the next time I do a bulk buy run, or bulk batchmaking session.

If I'm making relatively large batches of flat foods -- lasagna, pastitio, or meatloaf -- I'll either use (or reuse) freezer-style Ziploc(tm) bags, or reuse the Newspring (now part of Pactiv) Versatainer containers that I get from the heat 'n Serve deli at the Dorothy Lane Market. These are great because they can go from freezer to microwave (and then to dishwasher), and have a close-to-airtight seal. The only problem I've found with them is they're not shatter-resistant when frozen.

Soups can be put into Ziploc bags -- I've done it before. The trick is to get the bag to stand straight up, or to have someone else hold the bag. (Yet another use for those way-cool silicone baking gloves.) For me, since R isn't a soup eater, i need to keep the portions small, so I'll reuse the pint-sized or quart-sized soup containers from my local Chinese restaurant.