Keep Calm

I must say that I'm hearing more and more urgency amongst bloggers and vloggers urging us to stock up now, shortages are coming, etc.  Some are darn near hysterical.  

I continue to remain calm.  I've been feeling the urge to stock up for years now and I've slowly and methodically built-up my pantry and filled my freezer.   Do I have enough food?  I've no idea.  There's really no way to know if there's enough but I assure you, I've done what I could with what I have.  When I see a good price on something, I try to lay in a supply that I can stretch out over a short time period until I see a good price once again.  What's my advice to you?

Listen to your own intuition.  If you're one of those who is unsure if you even have intuition, then I'll ask you this:  do you have enough food to feed your family the next day?  For a week?  The month?   If your answer to any of those is "Noooo..." then you should start stocking up on a few items at least.  If your answer is "I don't know..." then you should find out.

Start by making an inventory of all the food you have in the house and plan meals with what you have.  Odds are you have more than you think you do unless you've spent all your time buying only snacks.  True you mightn't have enough fresh produce to make a meal, but do you have enough canned food and fruit?  Or frozen?  Be sure to inventory those items and use them to plan meals as well.   

I confess, I prefer fresh produce in season, and it's traditionally been the least expensive way to eat most produce, but I'm not sure that's going to continue to be true.  Canned, dehydrated, and frozen foods have nutritional value, too and the bonus of being something you can stock up on for the long haul.

Use what you have.  There are always items in the pantry that I bought with good intentions.  Or with certain recipes in mind that I was going to make more often but then they somehow fell off my rotation list.  Not sure how to use a can of coconut milk?  Then go online and look up recipes that require that can of coconut milk.  How many more of the ingredients do you have on hand?  You can list several ingredients "Coconut milk, sweet potato, onion", and recipes will pop up that include those items.  

Be adventurous and try a new recipe.  You might just find a new family favorite. And you might not.  I've tried hundreds of 'new' recipes over my lifetime of cooking, and you know what? Not every new recipe was worth repeating but in all those years (53 to be exact and I'm not too much older than that) there were TWO that my family disliked so much I was asked not to make them again.  Of those two meals only one was tossed into the trash uneaten and other foodstuffs were found, lol.  I think that's a pretty good record.  So yes, be adventurous.  

Stock what you eat, not what preppers say you must have on hand.  You might be too young for Y2K and the doomsday predictions surrounding that incident, but it all came to naught.  Many and many a person found themselves with buckets of military grade dried foods and beans that they then proceeded to look at dolefully and wonder how they'd come to spend so much money on them.   The kids hated beans, and no one in the family found the long-term dehydrated food tasty.

Just as an aside, dehydrated and freeze-dried foods have come a LONG way since then so don't be afraid to try a few of those things. Need examples of dried foods your family might like?  How about mac n cheese?  Au gratin potatoes?  Stuffing?  Buy the foods you know your family will eat and then get small quantities of other items and try them.

Write down several meals that your family routinely enjoys.  List the items you need to make those meals.  Do you have any of those items on hand already?  Then you've got a start.

Buy what you can afford and stick with your budget.  So many bloggers and vloggers are issuing dire warnings and then saying things like "I really stock up when I see 'x' on sale!"   Don't go over your budget!  The truth is that you can't make up for your lack of preparation by spending money you don't have.  Buy what you can afford.  Know what you can spend.  Draining your bank account won't help you one bit.  You'll soon have empty pockets and an empty account to show for it.  Talk about stress!  You have just created a storm within a storm.

Develop a repertoire of frugal but delicious recipes.  I've recently started re-reading MFK Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf.  I've been making notes as I read each chapter and as I read through Chapter 2, she related a story of her grandmother sitting with a group of young women during the first World War who were discussing various ways to make a cake without sugar.  

That made me think of my own determination to pull out all the old economy and thrifty meal ideas I've ever used in the past, the ongoing struggle to use ALL the food that comes into or from my kitchen and not waste any of it, seeking new ways to find food less expensively by shopping at more than one store, checking prices at stores all around me, etc.  You see, I've been practicing skills I had let slide.   I am preparing myself now to be ready for the next season, whatever that may mean.  I'm polishing old skills and learning new ones.  I am thinking ahead.

Years ago, when I was a beginning homemaker, newly unemployed and hit by the 1980's recession I pulled out an old cookbook and looked for recipes that used small amounts of meat and inexpensive basic ingredients.  Every once in a while, a publication would come out like Woman's Day Meals on a Budget in magazine form, and I'd filch a couple of dollars from the grocery budget to buy the magazine.  I culled those magazines for recipes, too.  

Those recipes stood me in good stead when we were up to our eyeballs in debt and my then husband decided it would be 'smart' for him to take a job making $30,000 a year less...And they stood me in good stead when I later remarried and we combined our two households into one so that we had 5 children, 2 adults, 2 dogs and one cat to feed and I found myself out of work again.  Fortunately, I had quite a recipe file by that time.  

Nowadays there's probably a library nearby and there's internet and TikTok and YouTube at our fingertips to help us find those frugal recipes.  Use search terms like 'frugal' 'budget' 'economy' 'low cost', 'thrifty', 'depression era', etc.  You'll be amazed at the wealth of good recipes you'll find.

Try them on your family.  Not every single recipe is going to be a keeper, but you'll find enough to start your own recipe file of really good, inexpensive meals that you can use routinely to feed your household.

Do What You Can.  I found myself very frustrated this summer because I wasn't able to purchase all the produce I wanted to buy.   I do not have a garden or the tools to garden with.  I have neither a dehydrator nor a pressure canner at present.  I have a limited quantity of jars and lids. The money simply isn't there for all those things at this time and while I am saving towards those goals, I have to remind myself as well that I am older with some limitations.

But I finally got over that pity party and realized that I can do what I can do. I bought a hot water bath canner few years ago.  I have frozen juice saved from last fall with which I can make jelly.  I was given cucumbers and made a double batch of sweet and dill pickles for the fridge.  I can pull out that Ball Blue book and see just what all I might do.  Jessica at Three Rivers Homestead and Jennifer at A Country Life both can cranberry juice with whole cranberries which will be coming into season soon.  I've always kept a few bags in the freezer.  Why not a few jars on the shelf?  And given the lack of cranberry sauce on store shelves, if fresh berries are affordable, why not take time to can a few jars for our pantry?

My grandmother never owned a dehydrator but every single year she dried loads of peach and apple slices to use to make wintertime fried pies.  She had a window frame with screening on it, she laid a thin layer of cheesecloth on the screen lay out her fruit in a single layer and covered with another layer of cheesecloth.  She put this screen outdoors in the sun and let the sun dehydrate her fruit.  If humidity was an issue, she pulled the car out from under the shelter, parked in a sunny spot, put the trays in the back window and on the dash, rolled the windows up tight and let the natural buildup of heat inside the car do the work!

I can't dig a large plot of rock-hard ground on my own. No, nor even a minor sized hole either. Yes, it does seem ridiculous to own ten acres of land and not be able to garden but equipment that is needed costs a LOT of money that I don't have.  However, I can fill a planter and plant a few seeds here and there.

And most importantly, I can do my level best to waste nothing that comes into my home when I buy or am given food.  

Keep calm. I lost my job in the economic crisis of 1978.  I didn't know that I was going to lose my job.  I was a relatively new homemaker.  I didn't have a pantry.  I barely had a grocery budget before I lost my job.  I could have panicked but instead I looked to see what I did have.

Do you know what the foodstuffs in my kitchen were?  30 pounds of frozen whole mullets, 10 pounds of frozen fresh black-eyed peas that a co-worker bartered with me in exchange for 5 pounds of mullet and a 5-pound bucket of peanut butter.  That swap was made right before I lost my job.   I fed us for two whole months with mullet to spare.  I learned to make mullet fried, baked, stuffed, broiled, filleted and to use cooked mullet to make a mullet patty.  I ate a peanut butter sandwich every single day for lunch.  We bought a 10-pound bag of russet potatoes, three pounds of onions and a loaf of bread each grocery day.

If Granny or Mama or the in-laws offered us an item from their gardens, I took it.  If I went to the grocery and I saw a sale on tomato soup 4 for $1, I bought the four cans and put it in my pantry.  I borrowed a pressure canner and jars from Granny, and I canned what I could of what produce we were given.  I started to slowly build my pantry...And you know what?  We didn't go hungry.  I won't eat mullet to this day and I'm not keen on peanut butter, but it taught me to build a pantry.

Carry On.  We do what we must.  We'll manage.  Remember that these things are cyclical.  It's a season of time.  I'm not saying we'll have the same things we've always been used to, but things will eventually improve.  They always do.  So, do what you can with your budget, with what you can acquire.  You got this.

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