Pantry

A friend wrote the following about her pantry system and graciously allowed me to post it here. Enjoy!

I’ve written up what’s in my pantry, how I store it, how I track it, how long I expect it to last, and even what I paid for it.

My Pantry System

In 2008, it started to seem like a good idea to start storing staple foods like grains and beans, given rising food prices, grain shortages, and the fact that we’re still feeding corn to cows and cars. This is my pantry, and how I manage it.

This is most of the “pantry.” It’s up on 2x2s, as the basement floor occasionally gets damp (though no standing water, so far). The red-lid buckets are ice cream buckets – 3 gallons each. The notebook is my super-high-tech managerial device. I expect the 175lb of beans (the column on the far right) to last two adults and occasional guests for a year. The rest is various grains (about 325 lb of wheat and flour and 200 lb of rice, barley, quinoa, couscous, etc.), which will last 8 months to a year, depending on how much we rely on it. Bread is not normally a staple food with dinner in our house, but with this in the basement and a new grain mill, I’m experimenting with more kinds of breadmaking these days.

The lid of each bucket has the contents and the storage date written in dry erase marker. Future buckets will have day, month, and year to help me figure out how much we go through in a month.

Smaller quantities of grains are in 1-gallon zipper bags, and 3 bags go in a bucket. I’ve also considered double-packing everything like this, as I’m a little concerned about what happens to grain that’s stored when the bucket’s half-full. But I’ve heard from some folks that they do this all the time and it’s not a problem, so I’m going for the easy, cheap, least-plastic route.

Here’s how I keep track of it all.

Basically, I put one slash in a box to represent every quart of food in storage. Quarts seemed practical to me; in the kitchen, I store most of my dry goods in quart spaghetti sauce jars. My scoop (the square, clear Tupperware in the top pic – with blue funnel in it) hold 1 quart. So, easy to measure, easy to remember, no need to divide. When I take a quart of food from the basement pantry to the kitchen, I put another slash in the box, making an X. I only take full quarts from the basement, but I’m not too fussed about exact measurement. If I’m within a quart at the end of the barrel, I’ll be happy.

This is all my “root cellar” at the moment. I started this project in March, which is a silly time to buy root vegetables! Besides, I intend to grow many of my own squash and onions and to get my cabbage, nappa, and other storage crops at the market when they’re local and cheap. This bag of onions came from New York. I was visiting a friend, and they had these locally-grown sweet onions $5 for a 10lb bag. So I brought them home in my suitcase! We’ll see how long they last hanging from a hook under the basement stairs near the well tank. This is the coldest part of the basement because a draft blows in from where the well pipes come through the wall.

Our water is in 2.5 gallon jugs. These are pretty sturdy; I’ve stored water in them for years, refilling as we use it. Yes, they’re plastic, which some folks avoid, but it’s supposedly one of the “safer” plastics, and they are convenient, cheap, and easy to handle. A few of these serve immediate power outage and party service. (We’re on a well, so no electricity means no water.) There’s also the 50 gallons in the water heater, and I hope soon to have a well bucket or a hand pump for the well.

Not pictured are some extra bottles of vitamins and other OTC meds, a rack with some canned goods (e.g., the soup my husband likes best when he’s sick) and baking goods (sugar, palm shortening, oil), my pickling crocks, and future fresh vegetable storage.

Instead, here’s the dinner (sag daal over brown rice) I made tonight from the pantry. The cilantro is fresh, but this would taste just fine without it.

Helpful resources and thoughts:

“A pint is a pound the whole world ’round” – not precisely true, but a helpful rule of thumb. So a quart of anything weighs about 2 pounds.

Twenty-five pounds of most beans and grains fit neatly into one 3-gallon pail plus one 1-gallon zipper bag.

This Excel spreadsheet was exceptionally helpful in helping me figure out how to stock a pantry. It uses figures from the LDS pantry calculators and “Making the Best of Basics,” another classic self-sufficiency text.

I’m pretty strong – I could handle the 25lb bags with ease and carry the 50lb bags from the car to the house – but I could not wrangle the 50lb bags to pour them into the containers. I strained my back pretty badly; I should have scooped or gotten help.

Total cost of this pantry (grains and beans) on March 26, 2008: $558

Total cost of this pantry on April 28, 2008: $655