during this time. I have no great insights, and there are tons of food blogs out there. Just a few things that have occurred to me:
- Don’t waste food. I have a container of ricotta cheese that I bought for something–can’t quite remember what–and didn’t use up completely. Friday morning I decided to make Jim and me a ricotta, pesto and Parmesan omelet with tomato sauce, with the ricotta dolloped over the top. I opened the container. It looked a little pink, which is how such items start looking before they get actually, like, moldy. But the stuff underneath the top layer was perfectly fine. (Note that if it had actually been green I would have thrown it out. As I’ve said to Jim on any number of occasions, “It isn’t worth getting sick just to use up a dollar’s worth of food.” So I am pretty cautious. But in this case it seemed fine, and it was going to be heated.) There was some left after the omelet and I was tempted just to toss the container, but then I thought, ‘No, wait–I can make those ricotta-black pepper rolls with this.” Which I will probably do for this evening. They’ll be baked in a 350-degree+ oven, so any microbes will meet their deaths. It’s a small issue, as it’s a small amount of food, but it doesn’t hurt to have a frugal mindset even in the most robust of times.
- Take an inventory. Probably everyone reading this has already taken stock, but I haven’t as yet. Especially if you have one of those pantries with deep shelves, or a backup pantry somewhere, it’s all too easy to lose sight of what’s in there. In our old house I had two pantries for our little three-person household, one in the kitchen and one in the laundry room. I was always saying that I ought to have some kind of running list on the doors so I could cross items off as I used them and add what I bought. But I need to pull everything out and just see what’s there.
- Buy wisely. Don’t get items with short shelf life. So I bought Napa cabbage this past weekend but not lettuce. We can have some nice fresh greens that won’t have quite the tendency to wilt away. The freezer is stuffed. I have lots of packages of pasta and dried beans as well as cans of beans and coconut milk. I have somewhere around ten pounds of unbleached all-purpose flour, plus maybe 25 pounds of wheat that I can grind in my grain mill. There’s a full, unopened bag of yeast in the pantry. Did you know that, at least according to Michael Pollan, a person can indeed “live on bread alone”? (Humanly, practically speaking, that is.) If you give someone a bag of flour and some water, and that’s all he has to eat, he’ll die of malnutrition. But if that person makes bread out of the flour and water, which wouldn’t require buying yeast but just leaving the flour-and-water mixture sitting out long enough to ferment and then baking it, he/she could live perfectly well. So interesting! (I’ve felt at times that I had too much flour/wheat on hand, but now I’m glad to have it. I can’t claim any particular wisdom in buying these items in bulk–it just sort of happened that way. I even bought a big mega-pack of toilet paper at Costco last Wednesday, not because I thought there would be a shortage but because we were out. If I’d waited one more day to go shopping . . . well, I wouldn’t be feeling so safe and secure in that department as I sit here.)
Anyway, you may feel that all this gratuitous advice is pretty gratuitous, but remember: We’re at the beginning of this, not near the end. The CDC has just asked that all gatherings of 50 people or more be cancelled for the next eight weeks. So there’s going to be plenty of time to be careful about our supplies. And also ourselves, by the way. Jim will probably be doing the grocery shopping for awhile. I’m quite healthy, but I am almost 68 and I have a tendency to get sinus infections. I’ve had two just in the past five months, one just last month. I work from home and feel indescribably fortunate to do so. I keep thinking about a hypothetical man who runs a coffee cart on the corner of a big city. He’s completely on his own. I’m not. I don’t have to go out and mingle with people, so it’s best that I don’t. All of the major activities that I do participate in have been cancelled: Community Bible Study, church services, and Cherry Creek Chorale rehearsals. We’ve been planning a trip to France and The Netherlands starting May 30, but it’s probably safe to say that it’s not going to happen–not on the dates planned, anyway. We had thought of driving to Seattle for the tulip festival next month, but I think we’ll leave that for next year. (The hot-air balloon festival in Pagosa Springs this fall will probably go on as planned.) I keep saying, “We’re so cushioned and insulated here in this safe little house, with our kitchen stuffed full!”
How about you? Have you taken stock, in all the best senses of the word?