A. It's eye opening. So many forgotten things. I tell people I don't impulse buy at the grocery anymore, but the cupboards are telling a different story.
B. It's forcing me to rethink what I was going to eat this week. I have these things already - eat them instead of buying so much more food. It's ridiculous how much food I have that just sits forgotten.
C. It's making me break a pattern of buying. I'm staring at the result of new recipe left overs. I have things in this cupboard like walnut oil - which I bought for one recipe - and now it just hangs out. I really need to look harder at that one ingredient buying. I think I will only buy an ingredient I don't normally use if I already have at least 2-3 recipes I can use it in. It's just a huge waste otherwise.
D. It was a great opportunity for reorganizing the increasing entropy of my tiny pantry cupboard.
I decided to use a spreadsheet on google docs. At least to start with. Lots of people had great suggestions for it. And I can create a repeatable shopping list from it.
I decided against including expiration dates, purely because the job was already taking a long time and finding exp was adding too much time. I noted whether or not the item was opened or still sealed. I noted how many and what size. And I want to go back through it and categorize it, but I couldn't decide how to do it. Type of food or fresh/frozen/canned/ or maybe several categories... If anyone has suggestions for categories, I'm interested.
September 24, 2017 at 02:30PM
