Groceries, Recipes, and Making Dinner

I seem to be addicted to food. Not in an “I can’t stop eating” problematic sort of way, but a “my fridge is always full of groceries I bought or things I made and my collection of recipes may one day take over the house” sort of way.

Shopping for Groceries

First, let’s talk about shopping for groceries. I’m a bargain shopper. I buy lots of things in bulk at Sam’s Club, I love Big Lots, the bins and endcaps of things at the grocery store that are on sale, clipping coupons, and we can’t forget about Super Double or Triple Coupon week at the local Harris Teeter!

I also recently discovered you can buy grocery coupons on Ebay for super cheap – we’re talking $1 for 100 coupons or something with FREE shipping.

Storing Groceries

Which brings me to my pantry … how do we store these groceries? I have a small house. It is about 1300 square feet plus a small storage shed. That is just large enough for my boyfriend, my two dogs, me, my home office, and all of our “things.” This includes all of my cookbooks (we’ll get to that in a bit) and other collections. The spare bedroom doubles as Marshall’s “room” full of tools and hunting and fishing gear. None of these things can go in the shed because the shed is not climate-controlled. So, if you come to visit I hope you don’t mind sleeping in a room that smells like boys and has fish and squirrels hanging on the wall. We won’t even talk about what’s in the closet in there. But wait, I’m getting off track. Back to the storing of the groceries.

I have a cupboard in the kitchen with spices, pasta, and rice. Our fridge sits in a little alcove in our kitchen that used to be the pantry. A “wise” former owner of my house turned the pantry into a home for the refrigerator, and there was plenty of space above and beside the fridge that was being wasted.

Custom Built Shelving

So, Marshall built a really nice custom shelving unit around the fridge, which has a big shelf above for miscellaneous things like cereal, cookie sheets, the rice cooker, and all the other random stuff that gets used once a month and takes up a bunch of space. Beside the fridge, there are five shelves that store canned goods, snacks, and other bargains I find while I am grocery shopping.

In my office, I have a large cabinet that also stores food, as well as a shelf that stores more canned goods. We also have a chest freezer that struggles to have enough room for ice cream, as well as a refrigerator freezer that also is stocked.

Pantry & Freezer Inventory

For a while, I kept a spreadsheet “inventory” of the food that was in the freezer and pantry. Although I am an organized person, I am also busy … and this proved to be just a little too much for me to maintain. But, I do clean the freezer out every other month or so and take note of things that should be used. I also clean out the pantry and cabinets every few months and check for things nearing expiration so I can add those to the “needs to be used” section as well.

Recipes

Anyway, let’s talk about recipes for a few minutes. When I first started cooking for myself when I was in college, I made the basics. Meals I had watched my mom make, things I liked … macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, tater tot casserole, meatloaf, cheese burritos. As time passed, I started experimenting a bit with new recipes here and there. Today, I have a large collection of cookbooks (should we say 100 or so?) Yet, when I sort through them to see what I can take to the used book store, I end up convincing myself that I NEED them all.

Magazines

I also have magazine subscriptions. Taste of Home, Cuisine at Home, Rachael Ray Every Day, Food Network Magazine, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, Saveur, and This Old House. I’m letting some of the subscriptions go. But, I won’t be able to get rid of Rachael Ray Every Day or Food Network Magazine. Or Real Simple. Or Cuisine at Home. Ok, so I can keep those four, right?

When I read my magazines, I clip out the recipes that sound good that I want to make. I am selective and clip only the ones I think I need. (For example, a recipe for a three-cheese pasta? Probably can figure that one out without a recipe.) I still find myself with a never-ending box of “recipes to be glued” onto cards. I store them in photo boxes and currently have two full ones. At some point, I think I may need to add a third.

Food Network

I also often watch the Food Network. My favorite show is Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (DDD) with Guy Fieri. I also like watching Heat Seekers, and some of the other shows. Again, recipes I see on the Food Network I can go to and search for them online and save them to my Pinterest account (or print them, but I don’t do as much of this as I used to.)

After all of these cookbooks, magazines, TV shows, websites, and recipe clipping and gluing, what do I do when I make dinner? One of two things:

1. Make whatever I am making without using a recipe.
2. Go to AllRecipes.com or Google.com and search for what I want to make, and use a recipe from there. (And I save it to my Pinterest or print it out and add it to my ‘to-be-glued’ pile.)

Meal Planning

I also recently purchased a small magnetic whiteboard that lives on the refrigerator, where we note “meal ideas.” I tried a scheduled meal calendar for a while, but that didn’t work (again not enough time to maintain it.) Posting a list of “ideas” of things we want to try or make soon seems to be working well. I can also post things I find in the freezer or pantry that need to be used in upcoming meals.

Eating at Home

After all of this food shopping and storing and recipe gathering and menu planning, we usually eat at home. It saves money, and it’s so much healthier. If someone asked me what restaurant gift card I would prefer, I think I would say the grocery store.

Sometimes we go astray with a dinner out at El Cerro Grande, Outback Steakhouse or a take-out pizza from Papa Murphys, but most of the time we cook. We try to cook healthy as well, with lots of vegetables, beans, and whole grains. But I can’t do without all of the cheese.

Anyway, all this talk about food has made me hungry. I think I’ll go choose something for us from the mass of food I made over the weekend that is sitting in my fridge: cheeseburger soup (A DDD recipe), chicken curry, grape and blueberry chicken salad, or Salisbury steak with mushroom cream gravy.