What's your pantry stocked with?

[petra]

Not just "What's in your fridge?" but "What's in your emergency supplies?"

Comments

[petra]

We're going to eat a lot of black beans and rice in the not-distant future. It'll be like taking a vacation to Central America on the cheap.

[dine]

I've been eating up some of it, so less than I used to have - normally I have tuna in a pouch, pasta of some sort, soup/chili, instant oatmeal and I normally have bread/bagels, a 2-lb ham, and a handful of frozen dinner type things in the freezer.

[via_ostiense]

Soooooo many stale spices, and random baking things (e.g. isomalt I got to play around with for decorating a celebratory cake). Going through the pantry is on my to-do list this weekend.

[mific]

A lot of oatmeal, some canned beans, lentils, tomato paste, various jars/packets of stock, quite a bit of almond meal, and 4 containers of plain Metamucil. I do need the roughage, but it's to make keto rolls together with the almond meal. They're my bread-substitute, also used to make pancakes, with other flours such as coconut and potato flour. Teabags - gumboot (=English breakfast but not as classy), camomile, and Dilmah green/cardamon/ginger, my fave. Oh, and a lot of milk powder and DIY Greek yoghurt sachets, plus some bought Greek yoghurt. Also, supplements and vitamins, paracetamol and ibuprofen (yes I know but it works better for my bum knee). Then there's the bottle of Absolut and the aloe vera gel. :)

[fred_mouse]

Top shelf of the pantry is breakfast cereal (stash). Second shelf is the treat box, much jam, wine glasses. Third shelf is spices, vinegar, multiple types of molasses, cooking oils. Fourth shelf is breakfast cereal (in use), white sugar, pasta. Fifth/Second last shelf is flour (many types, all GF), sugar (again, multiple types), beans of assorted types (chick peas, lentils, yellow spilt peas at the moment), rice semolina, polenta. Bottom shelf is the stash - big bottle of the cooking oil I use most often, box with soy milk and UHT cow milk; curry-inna-packet, tea, probably some other stuff (so I should check).

Stash the first is mostly empty jars at the moment because we've been running it down, but usually the overflow of the second last shelf (more flour and beans, sometimes brown rice) and from the drawer I've not yet mentioned (dried fruit and nuts usually).

Overflow drawer (things that fit in tall skinny jars) - dried fruit, nuts (multiple variants on both), chia, leavening agents, poppy seeds, a range of other dry goods that we don't hold in bulk.

Stash the second - rice (large box, we buy in 5 or 10kg bags, plus the extra bag that we bought before youngest started doing as much cooking, so we just haven't done rice at all in two weeks!), pasta, more flour (mostly corn flour at the moment I think), something I've forgotten. It is also where the TVP lives, but the last of that went in dinner.

Some of these are running shorter than I like to keep them, but we could eat (albeit without much in the way of fresh fruit/veg) for some weeks.

[daegaer]

Pasta, porridge, pasta, rice, tinned fish, pasta, cous-cous, PASTA, tinned tomatoes . . .

Possibly my shopping has been a bit samey 😆

[illariy]

Mostly meds. They are more essential than food to me, it feels like, or at least as essential. Then some drugstore items like toothpaste, deodorant backups, of course soap and shampoo.

Also I consider books and hobby-type things to be essential because I do not want to go bonkers from boredom. :D

[petra]

That sounds like a good whack of stuff to start with. I hope your supplies last longer than you need them to.

[petra]

Isomalt is one of those things I have watched people play with -- primarily on the Great British Bake Off -- but have never been brave enough to mess with on my own. How did decorating the cake with it go?

[petra]

Green/cardamom/ginger tea sounds absolutely delightful!

My pantry involves quite a lot of non-wheat flours, as my SO can't tolerate gluten, so your ingredients sound very familiar.

Aloe vera gel is a very good thing to have on hand in this time of the thousand handwashings. It sounds like you're pretty well-stocked.

[petra]

That is an impressive pantry you've got there! It sounds like you've worked hard at planning it and putting it all together.

[petra]

When you know what your comfort food is, you know what your comfort food is.

[petra]

I have an extra month of meds too, laid in relatively early in this whole situation before the insurance companies were willing to cover more than the allotted span. It feels like finding food is one of those things that the world can't go on without, but distributing medication could get dicey.

Books and things to do are completely necessary, I agree!

[dine]

I had a habit of buying extras when stuff is on sale, so that helped. back before the great Lock-in started I did a bit of inventory and thought I'd have enough for a month - but I hadn't factored in so many extra meals, and not being able to restock for several weeks. but even when stocks started getting a bit lower I knew while meals might be boring, at least I wouldn't be starving for a while

[noxidlp]

Not as stocked as it has been as I've been doing a lot of baking lately with all this time I have. Lots of pasta on hand, far too many canned goods and far too many spices I never really use. I've been trying to get more creative as of late in terms of cooking. Luckily I have someone who can head to the store early in the morning if things get low or something is needed.

[fred_mouse]

I've pretty much been running a pantry like this since I left home. More so once I realised that I needed gluten free flour options, and things like that. I grew up poor and vegetarian, so lots of these are things I always have on hand for 'the bad times'. Plus, for many years, there was one place I could source a lot of these things from affordably, and I could get there once a month, so needed to hold that much all at once!

And we now shop at a local bulk foods place, where we buy cereal by the carton and peanut butter by the 2kg tub, because we have five of us, and two are doing serious amounts of exercise/training.

[fred_mouse]

The one month extra of meds is a good one (I always have a spare month worth, but that has to do with the fact that I used to not do that and I'd run out and it would be Bad about once every 6 months. The Australian system allows me to just get them slightly sooner)

[mesotablar]

I lived as a poor student for so many years that bulk buying sale items is second nature and I'm lucky enough to have several types of non-chain grocery stores near where I live.

In November I went to the Vietnamese grocery store and got a 20 kilo bag of rice which normally lasts me 2 years. My big storage crock only holds about 14 kilos so I end up with several other containers full of rice and I haven't manage to empty more than 1 of those yet.
In January the Indian store had a buy 2 get one free on my favourite brand of quick curry mix so I have about 2 dozen of them floating around. Also in January the local chain supermarkets were supporting bushfire devastated areas by selling certain produce so every time I went shopping I ended up 'support buying' a lot of stuff I didn't really need. I re-donated a lot of that but I did keep a few boxes of flour for myself.

So now I have a big range of spices and 'bush tucker rubs', rice and flour. and more rice.

[mesotablar]

I always wondered about the shelf life of spices. The weather where I am is mostly quite dry and spices that are 5 years old are just a bit dull and need a bit of a fry to bring the flavour back. My gran had some spices that were 30+ years old (she used them for decoration) and they were certainly stale. Where is the point of no return in that gap of time? spice storage just confuses me

[petra]

It sounds like you're well-stocked, and like you've been helping with social problems bigger than you are since well before the pandemic started. Are any of the bush tucker rubs particularly to your taste, now that you've got them in your pantry?

[petra]

I'd bet that the point of no return varies both by spice and by eater. I'm not sure what fresh celery seed would even taste like, for example, but I'm pretty sure I've had recently-ground cumin.

[via_ostiense]

I did two practice runs at making an isomalt sail (i.e. an abstract, blown glass-looking thing to plop on top of a cake like a fascinator) and decided that making one good enough that I'd be ok putting it on my friends' cake would require more practice than I wanted to put in. (I also was torn about it to begin with, because I think that every element of a cake should taste good, and isomalt decorations are purely for show.) It's not actually too difficult, but I wanted to prioritize getting the frosting decorating correct.

[via_ostiense]

Where is the point of no return in that gap of time

Accepted wisdom is 1 year, but spices are expensive, so I tend to use the sniff test. If they still smell fragrant, or can be made fragrant by toasting or blooming in oil, then go ahead! If they're a little faint, just use extra! If they have no smell, or the smell is off, then it's probably time to replace them.

[mesotablar]

1 year?! wow that is short. I have a terrible sense of smell so sniff test isn't really within my realm most of the time, though some of the 30+ year old spices I sniffed were SOUR.

[petra]

Ah, that explains why you have so much left over. I hope you enjoyed the experimenting, anyway.

[via_ostiense]

Right? It's what every food magazine/news article about spices says, but I find that most of my spice cabinet is still fine after a year, and depending on what it is, even two or three years.

[via_ostiense]

Yep. It's only about a pound and a half left, but I need to figure out something to do with it. I suppose now's the time to practice making sails again, since there will probably be lots of celebratory cake when quarantine ends.

[mesotablar]

I try and get as much air as possible out so they are as vacuum sealed as I can get (little baggies of spice for me! no air filled spice jars ...well except for the turmeric, but that is my own fault for accidently buying 2 kilos last time) I tend to have whole spices rather than powders as well so everything still seems fine 5 years on for some things

[via_ostiense]

What do you like to use turmeric for?

[mesotablar]

There is this Tuckeroo 'blackening spice' one that is nice and spicy which I will definitely buy again and several awesome dukkahs that I'm using as crusts on meat or topping sprinkles on bread.

Fires scare me and these ones were just so bad I needed to do what I could to help out in the way those businesses and people were asking for help. I want those people to reclaim their homes and businesses and think them worthwile and that people like their products because if the land is not given worth though thoughtful enterprise it will just be raped for it's resources and abandoned.

[mesotablar]

I like to fry my eggs in oil and turmeric. They go all orange and crunchy on the bottom. The turmeric changes flavour quite a lot when it is cooked like this. Half a teaspoon to 1 teaspoon per fried egg does use the turmeric pretty fast.

I also cook variations of these fairly regularly, I've changed the recipes for my own taste (more turmeric less coconut!) but these are the originals:
http://greatcurryrecipes.net/2010/10/07/broccoli-curry-my-favourite-vegetarian-meal/
https://greatcurryrecipes.net/2016/02/04/sri-lankan-chicken-curry-black-pepper/

I used to use turmeric quite a lot when I made honey mustard sauces, but I've found a beekeeper who sells turmeric infused honey so I tend to use that now.

[via_ostiense]

Those all sound so good - I'll have to give the eggs a try tomorrow morning.

[minoanmiss]

Considering Turmeric's healthy qualities you're probably going to live into triple digits, cooking awesomely luminous eggs the whole way. notes this recipe down