I Swore I Wasn't Going to do This

All right, so I restocked the pantry before Passover.

The price of food is going up weekly.  It would probably go up daily, like gas, if prices weren't published on Tuesdays.  Any raises I've gotten for the past two years have pretty much been wiped out by the rising cost of goods.  And since those lottery balls have stubbornly refused to spit out any of the numbers on my ticket, I need to pay more attention to my receipts.

As soon as the pantry challenge was over, I restocked the freezer with a few months of meat and veggies, which really isn't as much as it sounds like since I don't eat much meat and the garden is producing.  I'm still going to defrost it before Passover, but it's going to be very hard to get all the meats into the kitchen freezer.  I still have that whole chicken.  Need to put that on the meal calendar.  It's slightly older than the remaining pound of lamb roast.

The items that live in the freezer to extend their shelf life but don't actually require any refrigeration (flours, cornmeal, etc) will go in the hall closet box.  Everything else is going to have to go on the top pantry shelf when it becomes the chometz shelf.  Darn, I was so happy to have that gone.

So what did I buy?  Beans, of course.  Some emergency Chef Boyardee and similar pre-cooked meals.  Tuna and other canned meats.  A few cans of beans for days I don't have time to make them the long way.  Flour, sugar, and chickpea flour.  Rolled oats and steel-cut oats.  A couple of hard squashes, because they keep for months and are KLP.  All foods I like and use, and not a lot of any one thing.  Except the tuna, because that was 25¢ a can, so I got the limit of 4.

What did I not buy?  Pasta and sauce, since I still have some from the last time it sounded like a good idea.  A ton of canned vegetables, because I like very few varieties of them.  More meat, regardless of how great a deal it sounded.  I'll do that once the freezer is cleaned and the oldest items are on the calendar.

And where did I go for these items?  I started at the 99¢ store.  That got me farther than I expected.  Next up was Target, since I had a list of other general items going anyway.  Next, I did my ordinary weekly shopping at Pavilions.  That one would have been cheaper at Sprouts, but I had a coupon for three rewards with any purchase that was expiring.  And lastly, I did pop into Sprouts for a few things out of the bins and a 98¢ eggplant, because I was not paying $3 for one at Pavilions.

You'll notice that I'm not making the trek out to Walmart and 99 Ranch like last year.  The prices there are better, but I don't want to drive that far.  The price of gas would negate any advantage.  All the places I went in this list are a loop roughly 5 miles round trip.  If I had chosen Big Lots instead of 99¢, it would have all been on the same street.

I spent a little over $100 on this haul, including allergy meds and a case of half-gallon jars. That's for at least two months of non-perishables and non-food necessities.  I can ignore a lot of prices for a while.  I thought I was being panicky and reactionary to world events until Target had slim pickings in the Claritin department.  I'm not hoarding two years of it, just enough to get me through this year's pumpkin blossoms.  And unlike my mom, I know I will go through everything I bought long before the dates on the packaging.  I will make it a priority to base my meals around what has already been purchased, because that's the whole point of this blog.

With the price of gas, I don't recommend shopping around.  If a store has a website or an ad delivered in the mail, get your prices off of those and plan your shopping trip accordingly.  Get items now that you will need in a month or two, because prices are not going down.  The best we can hope for is that they stabilize.