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Saturday, January 26, 2013

Food Storage

In all honesty, by far the number one way that we save money on food is through our absurdly huge food storage.  I have incredible in-laws who have taken over responsibility to ensure than none of their children or grandchildren starve when the Zombie Apocalypse hits. A few times a year they send me a "case lot sale" sheet where we can order cases of foods we commonly eat from their local grocery store, and in return they get a significant discount on gas when they fill up their construction equipment. So I usually order a few things I know I'll use: corn, chicken broth, soup, tomato sauce, and maybe a few other things. And then the truck shows up with what I ordered plus about 10x more because my in-laws are sure that we will starve if we just receive what we order! For instance, at one time I had 12 cases of cake mixes. Yes--that is 144 cake mixes. So that year we learned a lot of creative things to do with cake mixes. But all the extra random food does come in handy because usually we have everything we want to make anything we want. These pictures don't even begin to do justice to what we have. I am constantly scrambling to cook or donate things that will go bad.

Canned food: fruit, vegetables, soups, beans, jams. 
Condoments, dry foods, on other shelves we have every pasta and rice you could ever need. Cases of  different kids of sugar and flour. 
Cleaning and breakfast stuff. Last summer we had about 80 huge bags of different kinds of cereal and now we are down to about 10 (my boys eat a lot of cereal). The boys also love oatmeal and so we have cases and cases of it.

My in-laws also often trade work they do for farmer's for cows or pigs, so we end up with a lot of meat in our TWO big   freezers. Hamburger, steaks, roasts, pork chops. And then I buy chicken in bulk when it is on sale. My mother-in-law also orders bulk food items from a catalog and we end up with a lot of it--frozen vegetables, fish, kitchen spices. 
The other freezer contains the non-meat items. Cheese, frozen fruit and vegetables, etc. I buy bread and cheese when it is on sale and freeze it so we always have some ready.

With all this food storage, most weeks my shopping just consists of fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, eggs, cheese-sticks, and yogurt (although I sometimes buy that in bulk and freeze it as well).  I feel so lucky to have such generous in-laws, not only to us, but to all the people around us who we are able to help in tough times by contributing groceries to their families.

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