My goal to write every day isn’t really happening but I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of the good & give up completely. So I am going to try and keep up with the practice even though it may mean not posting everyday. C’est la vie!

Mr. Tucker and I ended up heading down to the basement to take stock of what we had in the freezers and on the shelves. This was partly an organizational exercise and partly a recon mission to figure out what we had to work with for future meals. Since the stay-at-home order we’re trying to spread out any trips we have to make & that means using what we have in meals instead of making extra trips. Meal planning is a good strategy but it only works if you know what you have.

I also want to see how things are going in terms of the things we canned from our garden and from local farms. Knowing what we eat in 6 months allows us to plan for next summer. We have to plan our garden for the spring soon and I would like to expand a bit. So hopefully this knowledge will help us figure out how to get the most bang for our buck.

For the freezers, my main goal is to see how much of our local meat we have go through. It looks like we will be getting a pig in March, which works because we are pretty low on the stock we had from last year. We already miscalculated our chickens which means that this summer we are going to have to double order. We bought too much beef last year and so we won’t have to buy more until the summer, so that’s a plus. My biggest regret was not buying more garlic from our CSA! I purchased 8lbs in September and if they last until the end of March, I will be surprised. Next year I am aiming to either buy 16lbs or see if growing them is feasible – maybe a combination of both! My garlic wasn’t fantastic this year but I could pay them more attention (aaaaaand I just learned I have to plant in fall. Oh well! I am happy to buy it!).

In the end, I have a lot more rice noodles and instant Pho bowls than I thought I had but very little in the way of Italian-style pasta. So until our next grocery pick-up it will be more Pad Thai and less pasta bake. We also have a ton of canned soup that my dad had brought us in the fall. So lunches will be a lot more soup and sandwich meals. Thankfully, my pickle canning endeavors were fruitful and our homemade pickles are not only amazing but we still have a lot, so those will go well with lunches.

In the end, I have three pages of inventory on my desk now and I can see at-a-glance what we have a lot of, what we have very little of, and what needs to last until we can replenish it. Whenever we make meals I update the inventory and that way we can get a variety of food in our diet without running out of things.

This weekend we will head down to our basement and tidy this storage room. It’s become pretty unwieldy as a junk room so between the four of us it should only take an hour or two to tidy, get rid of some things we don’t need & organize the rest. Poor Mr. Tucker is often in charge of managing our storage because I can’t get downstairs as easily. Now that he’s installed a second bannister I can head down and help.