For Such a Time as This...Building a Pantry

I believe that a pantry and a filled freezer are as necessary an emergency fund as a savings account.  I've always believed this and that's partly due to personal experience.  

During my first marriage there were two pivotal incidents that really rooted me in having a food supply on hand.   Mind you all, this was something I'd seen all of my elder family members do.  Mama, Granny, Grandmother, my aunts, both my great grandmothers, my great great aunt and all of my grandmothers' sisters harvested and preserved foodstuffs and had a pantry that fed their families year round. 

 

I was married in 1978.  For those of you too young to remember, 1977 was a disastrous year for farmers in the southern states due to an unprecedented drought.  Gas prices shot through the roof.   Interest rates went sky high.  The economy tanked.  People lost jobs in 1978.  I was one of them.  I lost not one job but the job I'd found immediately upon losing the first one.  The loss of income was a real hardship for us.  We had a brand-new home and two brand new vehicles.  The loss of one income was devastating to us financially.  

My husband decided the way to cut costs was to turn off the AC.  That was his only solution.  It was sweltering hot and our home did not get cross currents of any kind.  We sat there for a week sweating profusely.  I couldn't bear to cook in the windowless kitchen.

After a week of 100F temperatures outdoors, I suggested we shut the windows, turn on the air conditioner to 80f, cook our food at home and cut everywhere we possibly could.

We sold my car and replaced it with a much older model.  We sold his truck and had just the one vehicle. This saved us on gas and electricity.  It meant when he went to work, I stayed home, or I went with him, ran my errands and then went back to pick him up.  I tried to avoid that as much as possible, because it meant two trips into town instead of one.  

In our two income days we'd taken the money we were gifted as wedding presents and bought dining room chairs and an overpriced stereo cabinet.  I wish we'd skipped that last item and bought something more practical.  The cabinet was beautiful, solid wood and filled an entire wall, floor to ceiling in our home.  However, you couldn't sleep on it, eat on it or sit on it...Like many newlyweds we took whatever family would offer.  We went to a rundown motel that was refurbishing and bought lamps, a couple of living room chairs, mattresses and a bed frame.

Nor did we have a pantry. We had a refrigerator freezer which contained two ice cube trays.

My husband decided that the best thing we could fill the fridge freezer with was mullet he bought off a fishing boat on the coast.  Mind you, the money he spent on that trip to the cost would have been a lovely bit to stock up the pantry, but no the trip was a necessity in his mind.  Mullet is what they used for bait.  We had 40 pounds of mullet, and we ate it just about every way you could possibly think to eat fish and then some.  He determined that a 5- pound bucket of peanut butter was a great investment.  Guess what we ate for lunch every single day?  

My funds for our grocery budget was just enough to purchase a loaf of bread, a bag of potatoes and onions and eggs.  Some weeks what we purchased has to last two weeks instead of one.

I knew how to cook and how to cook well, but I'd never been taught how to shop and while I had a few frugal tips from Mama, she was and still is, a "I feel like making..." and she bought the ingredients to make that meal.  Her budget for food was whatever she spent on it that week and while she did buy on sale, often as not, she bought what she wanted when she wanted it.  

I decided there had to be some place between the two extremes of a steady diet of mullet and peanut butter and that of "I want therefore I shall buy and make..."   I started perusing the women's magazines that mama kindly passed along to me which were thankfully filled with budgeting tips and helps especially with budget recipes and menus.  I picked up my favorite old cookbook and started reading recipes once more.  If a recipe called for frugal ingredients, I made note of it and bought those items when they were on sale.  I looked hard for meals that used less meat which was the highest component of most meals and found some keepers, a few of which I still use today, 45 years later.

I could cut up whole chickens.  I learned to stretch that chicken hard.  Often a whole chicken would do us for most of a week.  Hamburger was served up as part of casseroles and soups that required only 1/4pound to feed the two of us more than two days.

But mostly what we did to manage was that I sat down and figured out how I could stretch every single bit of the money I had at my disposal for food.  Some weeks it was just $7.50.  Out of that I fed us three meals a day, seven days a week.  I learned if it was food and offered to us as a gift to take it and preserve it.  I borrowed Granny's pressure canner and I put up vegetables.  I foraged for wild plums and made jelly.  I learned to pack the freezer above our fridge with food as tightly as I could.  When a family member offered us an old upright freezer, I said "Yes, thank you!"   We hauled it home and I proceeded to fill it up ever so slowly.

Our economical lives improved.  We sold our home, rented a place that cost far less per month than a house payment, he changed jobs and I was able to stay home with our daughter.  Four years later we added a son to our family.  We bought an old house that cost even less than our rented home.

And then our personal economy tanked again.   This time, for reasons I never quite fathomed, my husband decided to change jobs.  We were struggling at that time and I suggested he work out a two week notice and we pay off everything we could with that two weeks pay.  Nope.  He quit the next day, found a new job that paid him about $30,000 a year less and those old frugal habits went right back into play.  This time we didn't have AC.  Nor windows we could open but we just suffered through it.  In winter we had a single propane heater to warm four rooms and the rest were closed off.  But I had a pantry and a freezer filled with foraged fruits, gifted garden produce both canned and frozen, and a working repertoire of good frugal meals I could make to help us survive.

Fast forward 5 more years and my husband was drafted for the Gulf War.  He left to go to training camp.  I had two children, bills that were already three months behind, more bounced checks than you can possibly imagine and absolutely no income other than that from my new job.  He didn't set up his pay to be sent home to his dependents.   No one told me I had any recourse to get it either.  

BUT I had a pantry.  And a freezer.  And for the next two months we ate exclusively from the pantry and freezer and every penny I made brought all our bills up to date and paid off the bounced checks.  Did I see the value of that full pantry and freezer?  You bet I did!

The marriage broke up shortly after his return.  It was already sinking badly and once I realized that I could, on my own, manage financially, it took only one more straw to break the camel's back and boy did it break.

After the two months, he returned home and a separation ensued.  I got hit by a drunk driver one week later, spending months in a rehab hospital and then at my parent's home while I recovered.   The marriage died entirely.  I finally moved into a rental home shortly after I got back to work.  I had no pantry.  I had a freezer (the only piece of furniture I got out of that marriage) and nothing in the freezer.

Slowly and methodically, I built up a new pantry, but I was never really able to fill the freezer.  Eventually I sold the freezer and made the best possible use of my refrigerator freezer.   When I met John and we moved in together, I continued to use the fridge freezer as my sole freezer until John suggested we buy a small chest freezer.  We bought it and then he insisted we fill it up, too.  

Our grocery budget was pretty tight in the first years of our being a family, with seven to feed three meals a day, but we took every bit extra we could scratch up and put something into the freezer every chance we had.  I learned something I'd not learned as well as I might have all those years before. I learned the art of the leftover makeover, taking the same principle I'd used to stretch that single chicken years and years before and applying it to every meal.

Chili was stretched hard with beans and served with rice.  Leftovers became Tamale Pie.  Ham went into ham and potatoes au gratin, ham pot pie, Dried bean and ham soup.  Chicken was stretched ridiculously far, becoming Spaghetti ala Diable, Chicken Pot pie, Chicken and Rice Soup and Chicken noodle casserole.  Ground beef was used in 1/2 pound portions but I tried hard to get two meals from every 1/2 pound.  Roasts became pot roast and then hash and then a vegetable soup using the base broth from cooking the roast.  And when all else had been stretched, we opened a can of kidney beans and mashed them to make burgers...Boy did I learn to make the most of what we had!

As children moved out, things eased up a bit.  It was with John's urging that we started to build a larger pantry once the freezer was consistently full.  I was content with what I could store in my one kitchen cupboard, an ample supply for our family for a month or so, but John felt we ought to keep a little more.  When Katie moved away from home, I supplied her with a basic pantry's worth of foods.  With her gone, it felt natural to turn her closet into a deeper pantry.  

That deep pantry has seen us through so many things.  Children moved in.  Children moved out and needed a fresh start to their own pantries.  Children moved in with children.  Children with children moved out and needed a fresh start to their new home pantries.  Children with children moved in.  You get the idea.  

It wasn't all children.  There were times when we had big financial expenses hit us.  We scrambled to save wherever we could, and that pantry/freezer saw us through those spells as well.  When John's job was on the line, we knew we had an assurance of at least having food to carry us through if unemployment occurred.

My pantry suffered this past year with prices rising and life changes, but you can bet I'm working to bring it back up.  Those old frugal recipes have been marched back out, too.  I'd never let them go unused, but I incorporated them more often. I've wanted very much to just throw a big amount of money at the pantry and fill it up that way.  I periodically threaten to do this.  But then I recall that the way I built it up was one or two extra cans or packages of food at a time.  It's doable either way.  

A time will come once again when we're very grateful we have our pantry.  I know prices are rising.  I know the forecasts and speculations.  I'm not worried.   I'm prepared, for such a time as this...

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