On the Topic of: A Pantry

     According to the first definition listed on Dictionary.com a Pantry is: a room or closet in which food, groceries, and other provisions, or silverware, dishes, etc., are kept. And while I wouldn't advocate giving up a whole room for groceries, I do strongly recommend building up a stock of them ahead of time. Cooking isn't something most people do everyday, some people not even every week some only cook once a year for a family reunion or holiday get together. So, why have a pantry? I'm assuming that since you're reading this article, well any article on my blog really, that you cook, or are learning to cook, but that doesn't mean that you have given a pantry much consideration, I know I didn't till I moved to Columbus.
     When I moved here I was out of work for a couple months, just living off of the little savings I had and selling what used to be a fairly impressive collection of extremely nerdy movies on DVD. I had been lead to believe that I was going to be stepping into a fairly solid job but the position was filled while I was loading up the U-Haul. Understandably my diet went to shit. I was feeding myself and my fiance on $20 a week, mostly spent at the Dollar General near my home. Even after I got a job hours were short for the new guy and we were still mostly living off the proceeds of box seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Gilmore Girls(don't judge me.)
     I was so trapped in the day to day struggle that I couldn't see a way out, until I started thinking about rice and noodles. Rice and noodles are your salvation when you're on the borderline of starvation, healthy, filling, and most importantly, cheap. But still expensive when you're buying them a pound at a time. So, on a rare week when our food budget jumped to a whopping $30 I went to Wal-Mart and bought it, the big bag of Great Value Rice. It was, I think, $8.00 for 20 pounds. We'd been buying about 2 pounds a week for $2.00. For those of you who don't want to do the math I just got 10 weeks worth of rice for $8 instead of $20. While it showed no immediate benefit, eating up most of my extra food money it did put me a little bit ahead.
     The following week I spent the $2.00 I didn't need to spend on rice along with the money I normally spent on peanut butter and a few extra and bought an 'Institutional size,' Peanut butter. If you've never seen the 'Institutional size' before, it is a 6 pound cylinder made for things like schools, day cares, and nursing homes who need to feed about a hundred people everyday. The next week I didn't have to buy Rice or Peanut Butter and I spent the money I normally spent on them on a 50 pound bag of flour and a 5 gallon bucket to put it in, the next week a 25 pound bag of sugar, etcetera, etcetera.
     This was pure Hell for the first few weeks, plain and simple. Mary thought I was crazy, we had more food in the house than ever before, but even less variety, basically all Rice and Peanut Butter Sandwhiches. It sucked, but as time wore on and we made additions to our 'Pantry' things became much easier. The addition of Flour added Pancakes and simple unleavened Breads to our diet, Sugar added Cakes and Cookies, and each addition loosened up a few extra dollars to broaden our shopping a little. Eventually we could have a week where all of our 'essentials' were taken care of and we could buy a bulk pack of meat to separate, then another, then another. And separate it we did, a five pound roll of Ground Beef became 20 quarter pound baggies to be added to rice or put over noodles. A five pound Beef Roast became a one pound Beef Roast, two half pound Steaks, and six half pound bags of cubes.
     And eventually work picked up, I caught on to corporate culture and started getting more than 15 hours a week and my grocery budget gradually rose with it. This is the point where it could have fallen apart. A clever shopper can EASILY feed two people on $30 a week if they have that every week, and believe me, you get to be an awfully damn clever shopper when you are barely managing to stay fed and sheltered on your budget. But if the 'Pantry System' helps you eat better and get ahead when you're dead broke, it changes your life when you have a little more cash to pump into it.
     A well stocked Pantry can allow you the freedom to branch out and buy things that you've never tried, buy things you love that are normally outside your logical budget, and sometimes allow you to skip the grocery store altogether. The only limit being your patience and persistance.
     But the Pantry has its limitations, fresh fruits and vegetables, Milk and Eggs, anything that rots, spoils, or reanimates as some sort of undead monstrosity after a week in the refridgerator is not a great candidate for storage unless you plan on cooking it off and freezing it, canning it, or dehydrating it. Getting a Farmers Market to give you a bulk discount on 25+ pounds of tomatoes is awesome... IF you plan on making bulk Marinara sauce for a family reunion, but in most cases it just means you are going to have a lot of ammunition for bad street theater in about a week and a half. So, exercise a little sense when shopping.
     The Pantries greatest weakness though, is disorganization and forgetfulness. Make sure to keep a list of what you run out of, because I promise there will be few times in your life where you feel stupider than when you believe you have 10 pounds of butter but in fact you have none because you haven't bought it for 4 months.