This week, the first after getting home from vacation, has been so satisfying. I’ve been getting Back Into Routine, crossing things off the to-do list, and gardening. My neighbour very kindly checked the house and watered the garden while I was gone, but of course there was much to be done after two weeks away. I have harvested one zucchini, and there are many, many more tiny ones on the plants, which grew so big that Salvadore was completely hidden; I had to move him to a different bed in order to enjoy his gnomeiness. I have two little peppers on my plants, and I had my first of many pea and tomato harvests.
I like to leave the house nice and clean when we leave for vacation as it makes reentry so much nicer; I make especial efforts to ensure the garbage and compost bins are empty and that the fridge only contains long-dated items. Unfortunately, and inexplicably, the jug of milk was something I forgot to deal with before leaving, and there was what can only be described as a science project in the three inches of milk left in the fridge. Ew. Chunky.
On that note, let’s get back to The Big Project. Previously on The Big Project, I had cleaned out my clothing closet and made a few rules for future shopping. This is, I feel, the easy part. It’s the rest of the house that will require some serious effort and also, is kind of boring. I like clothes! I am a bit daunted by other household items.
The next step in The Big Project, that I haven’t yet taken, is to go through my kitchen and donate my excess containers – the kids really do not need tiny snack containers at this stage of our lives – and to really assess the pantry situation.
And what a situation it is.
I have been working my way towards having Just One Backup of staple food and cleaning products, although I do make an exception for things I tend to need multiples of: canned beans and chickpeas, for example, for weeks in which I would need more than one can, or dish soap, which I appear to go through at an alarming rate. I have successfully gotten down to one backup of each of coffee and the various oils, vinegars, and sauces I use regularly, one bag each of flour, sugar, and rice, and one container of vitamins for each person in the house (we all have different brands). I still have a few extra nut butters and jars of vegan mayonnaise and salsa, as well as sundried tomatoes and, weirdly, mustard, but I’m sure we will get through them in due time. Tissues and toilet paper I purchase in large multipacks, and I try to have just one of those in backup.
Small digression: I was visiting with my husband’s aunt – who lives alone – a few weeks ago, and she told me that in the early stages of the pandemic she would purchase a large package of toilet paper every time she saw one available, not unlike me with twenty-five pound bags of flour. At one point she looked at her stockpile of toilet paper and thought oops. That stockpile of toilet paper lasted her a year and a half. I think we can all understand this. For reasons unknown to me, I have enough boxes of ziploc bags to last until I have headed for The Home or shuffled off this mortal coil, whichever comes first. I rarely use ziploc bags but somehow have a number of Costco three-packs in my pantry, in a variety of sizes, which must have been a Pandemic Purchase, but I cannot for the life of me recall my thinking on this matter. I may just give them away on our community Buy Nothing page. Either that, or I’ll leave them for my possible future grandchildren to discover upon my demise. Oh look, here’s Grandma’s wedding dress and…seven hundred ziploc bags. Huh. Will ziploc bags even exist fifty years from now? Who can say.
No matter. I have been working hard to not purchase things of which I already have backups (or, in some cases, several backups), and mostly, I have done well. I am trying to get back to my pre-pandemic consumption patterns and it is a Journey.
However, I have confessions to make. Friends, I am sorry to tell you that my Just One Backup vow has failed miserably in three notable areas: lemon juice, popcorn, and dried fruit. The last item, I give a pass – the dried fruit I love (strawberries and something that is cheerfully called Fruit Medley) is only available a couple times a year at Costco, and so I stock up when I can. This is my very valid excuse for having ten bags in my pantry at this time; it will last me for months, hopefully until the next time they come available.
As I mentioned briefly a little while ago, there was a strange blip in the lemon juice world, or at least, in my lemon juice world. Suddenly, there was no lemon juice anywhere. My brain immediately went from let’s just pick up one backup to PANIC PANIC PANIC. Let us refer to the lessons from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment as a precedent for the weird obsessions we get when something is not available to us. When I found store brand lemon juice, I bought it. When I found tiny little environmentally-disastrous plastic squeeze lemons, I bought them. My mom saw lemon juice at her grocery store and bought me two bottles. I now have seven bottles of lemon juice in my pantry and a few weeks ago it was back, available at Costco. Even with seven bottles in backup, I had a really hard time NOT buying the two-pack at Costco, and I know many of you can empathize with this. I especially feel bereft as it has not been available at Superstore this whole past month, and I noticed it was not there last week when I was at Costco. What if I can never buy it again, what have I done seems to be my thinking.
The other item that has been very difficult to buy recently is popcorn. Popcorn! Boom Chicka Pop has been largely unavailable for a few months now, so I have snapped up substitute bags here and there when I could. I am sorry to say that on my last trip to Superstore there was neither Skinny Pop nor Lesser Evil available, proving that I have indeed cursed us all by supporting ridiculously-named companies that apply moral values to food products. I currently have twelve (12!) bags of popcorn of various flavours and brands in my pantry, so it’s probably good that it’s currently unavailable. I mean, we all love popcorn but twelve bags is pretty excessive. WE JUST NEED TO WORK OUR WAY THROUGH WHAT WE HAVE, PEOPLE.
You may notice I haven’t mentioned the elephant in the room – sriracha. The sriracha shortage is a little unsettling, but not as unsettling as the environmental reason for the shortage. In any case, two of us here really like sriracha, and I have half a large bottle in the fridge with NO backup, but I think with careful rationing we should easily be able to make it into September, when it is supposed to become available again. We have two bottles of chili garlic sauce, and that should be a decent substitute, should we require one.
So I do need to go through the Very Full Pantry to see if there’s anything to be donated – ziploc bags! – and I vow not to purchase anything else until I am down to the last backup (but what if lemon juice and popcorn become instantly available, WHAT THEN), but I do have a food-related success story to share. I have cleaned out my freezer! I have discarded all freezer-burned items or items of questionable origin! I also have a dead freezer.
About a month ago I came home from the lake and my husband greeted me with the following: Nicole, you have to go look at the freezer. It won’t stop beeping and the temperature is rising. People, my freezer, my ten-year-old freezer, DIED. Without warning. As you might imagine, it was very full, and so I jumped into action. Fortunately we have a bar fridge-sized freezer from our early-marriage-child-free days, and after plugging it in we ascertained that it still works. I rearranged everything in the two fridge freezers and between those and the tiny freezer I managed to save most things, the exceptions being anything that I couldn’t recall purchasing or that was fuzzy with frost.
This is where I’ll mention that my mother-in-law still has the chest freezer she got as a newlywed in 1962, and it still works, although it probably uses more power than anything else in the house combined. STILL. Ten years, and I guess that old freezer is going to end up in the landfill? I don’t know what will happen to it when the New Freezer Delivery Guys take it away. I hope it will go for parts or something, but who would know. WHO WOULD KNOW.
Nonetheless, I’m counting this as a win. When my new freezer arrives, I am going to put nothing in it that cannot be consumed within a few months, mark my words. It’s a chance for a Fresh Start and I am not going to throw that away.
Weekly Reading
Children Playing Before A Statue Of Hercules. This collection, curated by my much-loved David Sedaris, is comprised of his favourite short stories and the proceeds of which go to an educational charity in NYC, which made me glad that I received this as a Christmas gift, rather than borrowing it from the library. If you love short stories like I do, you will not be disappointed. It is really excellent and it contains a few authors that I had never heard of, let alone read. One of my own favourite authors, Alice Munro, is featured; the story chosen isn’t my number one favourite, but it’s so good. Granted, as Sedaris says in the introduction, how can you choose just ONE Alice Munro story? Anyway, I loved this; every story is unique but they are all linked by the theme of class structures and societal constraints due to them.
Thick. This was such a powerful and important collection of essays about being a black woman in America. The author is an esteemed academic and her brilliance comes through in her writing, which is very thoughtful and readable, in addition to being very well researched. An important read for anyone, to be sure, but particularly for a very privileged white woman, like myself. I will be thinking about these essays for a long time to come, particularly one about her experience with prenatal and maternal “health care” that ended in a breathtakingly tragic way.
I am hoping to start on my cull of excess containers (and ziploc bags!) and organization of the pantry this week; will I, though? That remains to be seen! I hope you are having a lovely August so far. xo
I’m laughing because one of the things that I brought into my marriage was a box of 100 portion controlled mini ziplock bags that hold one cup of food. Once I got them I realized that I never, ever have a need to ziplock just one cup of food and every few years I thought about just throwing the box away. Fast forward to this summer when my husband and stepson went on a boy scout hiking trip and it turned out that the one-cup sized ziplocks were perfect for their trail mix rations so my oopsie impulse buy from 10 years ago finally paid off.
My pandemic overpurchase was low sodium soy sauce from Trader Joe’s and we only recently finished off the excess. You totally have my permission to stock up on as much popcorn and sriracha as you see fit when they come back in stock!
Oh, maybe I need to find a Scout group! Lololol ten years ago – seriously, I can see this happening to me. Til death do us part, ziploc bags.
I am just starting my back-from-vacation week. I hope it’s as productive as yours. As it’s past nine and all I’ve done is eat breakfast, I can’t say I’m off to a roaring start.
I can’t say I’m surprised you have peas in August, because I know you live in a very different climate, but pea season here is late spring, so it’s odd to think of them growing at the same time as tomatoes and zucchini (still in season here).
We can only plant peas (via seeds) in May, so it takes a while! This year the first three weeks of May were really cold, so everything planted by seed was slow to germinate. Tomatoes and zucchinis can only be planted out (in plant form, not seeds) at the end of May at the earliest! Tomatoes usually get planted out the first of June. I guess that’s why everything happens at once!
I love the thrill of decluttering and it sounds like you’re doing a top notch job.
I am curious…what do you use all that lemon juice for? Salad dressing? I might go through one thing of lemon juice every…two years?! Do tell…
Salad dressing, yes! I also use it as a wash for berries and fruit. I go through a big bottle at least every month, if not more often.
Nicole, I am so impressed by and happy about your garden! Such flourish and thrive!!! But when I got to the sriracha part I got a little breathless. Sriracha is one of my desert island foods – I eat it on everything. EVERYTHING. So the shortage of chilies and the resultant shortage of sriracha is deeply upsetting. I may have… stockpiled a bit. It is so reassuring, to see my little row of bottles. But how am I ever going to dip into them, knowing they are the last???? (I could go through a bottle of sriracha a week, that is how much I use it. I suppose this is a good time to practice a little asceticism.)
Wow, you use a lot of sriracha! I love it but we are slower to use them. I sure hope it’s back in stock soon, on every level.
And thank you – I love my garden so much. The kale is especially fun to grow.
I laughed at the Ziploc bags going with you to The Home. So funny. Grandma’s wedding dress and her Ziploc baggies. Hee hee.
I went to Costco this week and spent a record breaking almost $700. I was buying all kinds of Skinny Pop and Pure Protein bars and other bars. These items were on sale and I wanted to offer them to my college kids in case they wanted to take a box or two. The pantry cannot hold all of it, so it has spilled over onto the dining room table.
I don’t think I stocked up on anything specific during the pandemic – perhaps because when I buy ANYTHING it disappears in the blink of an eye, but I do still have some frozen pasta from our June grad party. I made a note this morning that I need to yank a bag of that out of the freezer every few weeks so that it doesn’t become inedible due to too much time in the freezer.
This is my last day of summer before babysitting begins, and I’m struggling to prioritize what to focus on. Organizing the house after 2 of the 3 college kids have left? Writing and insisting on being left alone? Or relaxing at a friend’s pool (if she is home today)?
Ernie, I just stocked up on Pure Protein bars at Costco too! They were $5 off a box, and my sons eat them quite a bit. When the wrestling season starts, my younger son will go through 5 a week.
I vote for relaxing at the pool! It’s not the most productive but it sure would be restorative, and you deserve it!
There is so much excitement to getting rid of stuff and having a nice clean cupboard/fridge/closet. Over the weekend, I cleaned off two shelves of a bookcase of material that I had for a job that I haven’t held for more than two years. I needed the space for some book purchases I’ve recently made and even when I put the new books there, THERE”S LEFTOVER space. It’s glorious. Good luck with the pantry clean.
Oh, I need to do that too for my bookshelves! I found a big binder from a conference I was at in 2001, and I really do not need that material! Lolololsob.
This stockpiling really made me laugh – I don’t stock pile much of anything now that we are a household of two. The only exception is my fave coffee (PC Columbian Dark Roast) when it’s on sale. I HATE paying full price, which is now close to $17 a container. I am also curious about what you use lemon juice for? I only buy bags of fresh lemons for our water and occasional recipes. I didn’t get a chance to comment on your recent book post — I read a lot of fiction but also love memoirs. I did enjoy Valerie Bertinelli’s book and found it so sad how she struggled her entire life with body image. Two memoirs I recently read: Nothing But the Truth (Marie Henein: a criminal defense lawyer in Toronto whose family immigrated from Cairo; very interesting & funny). Chop Suey Nation, by Ann Hui. This is stories of Chinese Canadian immigrants in Canada. She did a cross Canada “tour” of Chinese restaurants & interviewed owners for an article in The Globe & Mail. So good!
I wonder what will happen when my birdies fly the nest – hopefully I won’t still stockpile things. Well, except coffee. If we run out of coffee, someone will get stabbed. Not that this has happened, mind you.
I use lemon juice in many of my salad dressings and I go through a lot. I also use it as a wash for berries and fruit, although I COULD substitute apple cider vinegar, but I find ACV leaves a bit of a tang on the fruit that lemon juice doesn’t.
I love hearing about what others hoard! Our kitchen does not have a lot of storage space and we only have a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer. So that precludes us from really loading up on things. I do order multiples of things from amazon that are expensive locally, like the white rice flour I need to make my GF flour blend and bob’s red mill GF oatmeal. But I go through that stuff pretty quickly, especially oatmeal since I eat it every day! But I think back to my childhood and how much food we had on hand. We had a fridge in the kitchen, one of those tall deep freezers in the laundry room, and then a chest freezer in and additional fridge in the basement!! I was 1 of 5 kids and we lived in a tiny town where the grocery store would often go out of business so my mom typically did her shopping in a town 25 miles over and usually once/week so she would really stock up. She also canned when I was younger so we have a shelf with jars of marinara and various tomato products – juice, whole tomatoes, tomato sauce, etc. It is how I learned how to can, though, which I did for the first 2-3 years I had a garden. It was very satisfying but I gave all my canning stuff to a friend because I just do not have time to can anymore – or have a garden!
I actually would like us to have more food around than we do. For the most part, we operate with a “just in time” inventory situation. My husband is a minimalist and he does our shopping so that is why. But it would be better, I think, if we had more inventory of canned oft-used things, like tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, black beans, coconut milk, etc. Surely those items will NEVER expire because we use them alllll the time.
My biggest opportunity for purging, though, is my closet but I need some help with that task and I keep putting off hiring a wardrobe consultant but it’s probably time… Fashion is not my forte and while I have people in my life who are good at it, I know I will talk myself into buying things they suggest to avoid hurting their feelings because I am too much of a people pleaser. But with an impartial 3rd party, I will be able to say – no, that isn’t my style/never will be my style.
Lisa, I don’t think I realized you’re GF! Is that because of your RA? I know gluten is inflammatory. I do like canning, mostly for jams though. My mom always cans tomatoes and pickles as well, and beets for my dad (and son and husband).
I will be interested to see what the food situation is like in your house in like 10 years, because I sure didn’t stockpile as much when my kids were small. Now, though. Hoo boy. It’s hard to even keep enough food in the house, they mow things down so quickly!
Oh, I can only imagine how good it feels to do deep decluttering of the pantry! I need to get on with mine; I actually need to get on with my entire house!
I was at Costco yesterday and saw Skinny Pop popcorn and thought of you, and I wondered what is so good about it and was tempted to buy one. But we are not bagged popcorn eaters so I refrained. We do like to pop some popcorn from kernels, with an air popper that we’ve had for maybe 20yrs! It kinda goes with the theme of your story of freezer life. I am dreading the day this popper stops working; I remember bringing it to my son’s Pre-K class so the teachers can pop popcorn while the kids watched; the teachers said it was so much fun watching the kids see it!
What is the sricacha sauce you guys speak of? Is it the regular/original hot sauce? This?
https://www.amazon.com/Huy-Fong-Foods-Sriracha-Chili/dp/B0014E4G0Q/ref=sr_1_6?crid=RL95X89QE2CG&keywords=sriracha+hot+sauce&qid=1660575330&sprefix=srira%2Caps%2C175&sr=8-6. Sriraca seems to be so popular that even my very-picky eater wanted to give it a try. I knew he wouldn’t like it but we bought a bottle, he tried it, and decided it’s not for him. I should’ve at least tasted it to see if I like it myself…but I’m a wimp when it comes to hot/spicy foods so I didn’t even try.
That is indeed the sriracha I’m talking about! It’s very spicy but great for sauces and stir fries!
I used to just pop my own popcorn but M, I have gotten LAZY. We have a great popper but it requires cleaning every time (it uses some oil, and the popping compartment is what you eat from, so it gets all buttery), and you know what, it’s just TOO MUCH. I think I would eat much less if I didn’t just buy prepopped. BUT LIFE IS TOO SHORT! Am I justifying myself? Kind of!
Very true. We rarely eat popcorn and still, the cleanup is a pain. We have the air popper that is easy to clean up because it just uses hot air to pop but we have the butter bowl (we microwave some butter to melt to pour over popcorn) and the pan that we use to catch the popped corn and of course, everyone’s popcorn bowls. If you eat popcorn often, I think buying them popped is the best way; I know I’d do that, too!
Love your reading this week, Nicole! Sedaris and Cottom are winners every time and can make me think… and chuckle.
Friend, I too am working through the jars and tins I stockpiled in the early days of the pandemic… But it’s my closet that I really have to work on–I have stuff from grade school that I think I could wear because everything keeps coming back. Like sundresses with tees underneath. I loved those days.
Oh me too! It was such a cute look! Breezy and easy!
I do the same thing to my house before I go on vacation! It feels so good to come home since I know I’ll be overwhelmed by post-vacation laundry.
I had a cocoa stockpile by the end of 2020 for some reason I don’t comprehend because I wasn’t creating a lot of chocolate recipes. I recall opening my cabinet on Thanksgiving Day and discovering five cans!
Whoa! I totally get it though. I also have a cream of tartar stockpile because – this is weird, get ready – baking powder went on a blip and I read that CoT could be substituted, and so I bought some each time I went to the store and, well, then baking powder came back. Ridiculous but true!
I like how angelic I feel when I de-clutter something, a closet, a drawer, the basement. Then I heap lots of praise on myself for doing it. Good for the psyche to let things go, great to get organized, and then gloat about it.
“…and then gloat about it” – YOU GOT THAT RIGHT, ALLY!!! I am with you 100%. I think I need to bite off the kitchen/ pantry into manageable pieces, because it’s currently feeling overwhelming!
Look I don’t want to be a bad influence or derail your progress but…the thought of backups is so so *satisfying.*
Erin. ERIN!!!!
I do love a good decluttering…once it has been done. Lucky for you, mustard has a shelf life of forever; just about. The ONE thing I have given The Husband permission to stockpile on in the pantry is coffee. Apparently, the cost of coffee has shot through the roof; so if he sees it on sale he is to grab it.
Under no circumstances will I allow this house to run out of coffee!!! It’s a must.
I relate to SO MUCH about the shopping/back-ups, I cannot adequately express. I am working to reduce back-ups, with considerable success—and also there are some particular categories where I am, er, Being Gentle With Myself (i.e., failing).
Appliances dying young when their ancestors are still alive after multiple generations drives me absolutely through the roof.
I can tell my mind is Going a bit, perhaps due to Ongoing Stressors, because when you mentioned harvesting peas, I briefly IMAGINED the peas as growing individually on the plants, and I marveled at the fact that I’d never before considered how they must look before they are harvested, and wondered were they more like BLUEBERRIES or more like GRAPES in terms of their clustering? Then with a WHUMP I remembered peapods.
Oh, that made me smile! Thanks for the giggle!
Ha ha ha, when I was at my sister’s last month she showed me her “pandemic table” in the basement, which was a tabletop FILLED with extra food items- jars of nutbutters, flours, beans, etc. etc. She said she started hoarding during the pandemic and just couldn’t seem to stop. So, it’s definitely affected people in a weird way! I love the story of your husband’s aunt and the toilet paper.
I just recently read The Help and it made me realize just how privileged I am, in ways I never thought about before. I should probably read Thick! I’ll put it on my TBR.
Thick will take your breath away. It’s really incredible.
The pandemic has affected us all! I wonder if we’ll end up like those people who lived through the Depression and save string, etc., but with hoarding.
Decluttering and lightning up our loads is a work in progress…we all need to do it. I think you’ve been doing a good job and you can let yourself slide on the three things you really need to stock up on.
I had no idea about the The sriracha shortage! That’s crazy.
My mind is blown by the 1962 freezer!
I know! I mean, imagine how much energy it uses. But still!
I actually don’t have a stockpile of anything! This is because (1) I am not wedded to any particular brand of type of food and (2) my husband does all of the food shopping. Whoo hoo, flouting gender roles! Did you know there is a new David Sedaris book out? I’m inching up the holds list and I can’t wait.
SARAH! NO! I DIDN’T KNOW!!!! Thank you for telling me!!!
This is so interesting to me because I am just the complete OPPOSITE when it comes to backup/storage. It was only this year that I started a backup storage closet for cleaning supplies/toiletries! But I definitely do not have backup food supplies, lol. Maybe that’s just apartment living/solo living for you?! I don’t really have the space + it would take me forever to eat up bulk bags of food! Probably much different when you’ve got two teenaged boys to keep fed, too. Haha.
I’ll be interested to see what habits I retain when the boys fly the nest! The boys eat so much that I feel better when I have backups of things (but 12 bags of popcorn, and these are BIG bags too…maybe overkill).
You garden is looking gorgeous. Our weeds are thriving – the vegetables? Not so much. Yikes! You’re doing great working your way through the extra stuff. The pandemic was a crazy time. Good luck with the popcorn and lemon juice! 🙂
Thank you! I’m enjoying the garden so much. It’s just so satisfying! Sorry your weeds are the ones that are thriving this year, boo.
First of all your reference to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment made me bark with laughter and scare my dog (the one with decent hearing, the deafish dog didn’t even notice). ANYWAY, w/r/t the buying paper products in bulk I though of my mom who bought paper towels in bulk at Costco for years as my dad was declining because he used a lot of them. My dad died in 2017 and my mom just this year finished using all of the paper towels she had bought.
Wow Maggie!!! 2017!!! That is nuts!
Also *takes bow* I love referencing the MSE!