In July my family went on vacation and because of lack of budgeting I ran out of money for our regular grocery shopping. I decided that I was only going to “shop” out of my own pantry and see what I could come up with. I was really kind of fun to see what we could do, it was also a learning experience for me.
My religion teaches us to store food for emergencies, whether it be personal emergencies (job loss, medical bills) or something bigger and larger (economic disasters, weather related disasters or earth disasters). I have been plugging along the last year creating a food storage, it is going slowly, but surely. It takes a lot of time, space and money to store one years supply of food for 7 people. I try to store what I cook and I have been learning to cook from items that can be stored. It has been a fun year of learning and growing in that area, and in doing that, other aspects of my life have changed too.
Skipping a shopping trip was a great learning experience for me. I learned that we really can eat out of our small garden. I learned that I need to store more veggies in case we need our stored food in the winter. I learned that I need to store cheese and potatoes. I learned that keeping chickens in the backyard really is a good thing. I learned that I need to store more bottled tomatoes.
All in all, I learned where I can tweak my storage. The biggest thing I learned: I can really feed my family with the stash of food I have stockpiled in my basement.
I would like to encourage everybody to try this. Skip your regular shopping trip, see what you can do, see where you can improve and stop relying so much on being able to “run” to the grocery store, there may be a time when that isn’t possible. If you do, please blog it and leave a link my my comment section, I would love to see how you all do.
NOTE: this doesn’t count if you go shopping then start, you have to completely skip a trip. For example, I go grocery shopping twice a month when Dadzoo gets paid. So to do this I would skip my mid-month shopping trip so I really am out of the food I would usually buy.
I can skip a trip, the problem is that I end up eating Ramen noodles all week. 🙂 I am waiting for you dress around the house post!
I’ve always wondered if I could make that work. I’ll have to just skip a trip and see!
Thanks for visiting my blog.
I love to do this, too.
I really enjoyed doing this a few months ago. You can read about it here. I never realized how much food we had around! It also helped me see what we needed in our food storage (like you, more tomatoes, and also powdered milk for my little one).