This might not work with a household with many members, but as a single person household I am finding this quite beneficial.
Some background first, I own a small European style fridge (tall, skinny, upright) I have 6 cubic feet of fridge and 5 of freezer, as well as a small apartment sized freezer. I pass many grocery stores on the way home from work and because I am quite organized using digital coupons, flyers and shopping lists, I shop two to three times a week to take advantage of sales. I prefer frequent ten minutes shops over one giant shop.
However as of right now I have too much food in my freezer and pantry. I eat mostly whole type foods, so most everything is raw ingredients. I am terrible for buying meat and then forgetting to pull it out of the freezer to defrost.
My goal is to meal plan once a week the night the flyers come out, based upon sales for the week. I am also going to only buy enough for the week with a few exceptions for dry items. I do not find I save money by bulk shopping, quite the reverse in fact.
So to solve my dilemma currently of having too much food stocks, I have taken pictures on my phone of everything in my fridge, freezers and pantry. It was a simple twenty minute task and now I am meal planning for a week based off of the pictures. In another week I will repeat the whole procedure and keep going until my current stockpiles are totally gone and I am onto my new test run of buying only enough food for a week or less and not freezing any items other then single serving homemade complete prepared meals as backups if I run out of cooking time or want a night off.
I've only meal planned for a week but the photos were invaluable and allowed me to sit down at my table and write out my meals without checking anywhere in my kitchen. And truly I don't need to take new photos, in seconds I could just cross out used items each week.
January 13, 2017 at 11:28AM
