Living the Pantry Lifestyle - This month's priority purchases and decluttering the deep freeze

I didn't purchase much for the pantry during the Holiday season, except for a few items that were on sale.  The timing of Christmas and the icy weather we received soon thereafter prevented me from checking stores for after Christmas sales.  I didn't need anything bad enough to drive on ice.

Even my usual stock up day was delayed but when I could drive safely, I was able to get a couple boxes of Starbucks Holiday Blend k-cups on clearance at Meijer, one box of German almond cookies at Aldi (there were more on the shelf but I have no self control with cookies), and Kroger had no food items left by the time I could get there.  I don't need things like plastic reindeer.  ;)

I've been watching more YouTube videos about stocking a pantry.  I never watched them until recently because many of them were just about purchases made... over and over.  I don't buy a lot so I didn't think they could help me but I ended up finding a couple that had very good suggestions.

I tend to use the same products over and over so I wasn't aware of some products or varieties of a product available today.  Many of these videos are by what I call "professional preppers" who spend much of their time getting informed.  Because of that, they also tested many available products.

We all learned a lot last year when various products were unavailable and the one food I knew I needed to purchase was canned meat.  I'm not a huge fan of tuna, although it isn't too bad when you get it packed in extra virgin olive oil as Julia Child suggested.  

I have kept salmon in the pantry to make my favorite salmon patty recipe from time to time.  I also actually like SPAM, which I buy only in single packets now since my husband does not like SPAM.  I think it depends a lot on if you ate it growing up.  The single packets do not have as long a shelf life as the canned product but it is good enough for my pantry.

I started purchasing Essenhaus canned chicken and beef, just a couple cans at a time, last Fall.  Sometimes I would only add one can to my grocery cart.  I bought a couple cans of beef but concentrated on chicken.  (Kroger also sells their chicken base in a jar, which is amazing.)  

Essenhaus canned beef and chicken are sold at my local Kroger in an area near the produce section, along with their famous (around here) Essenhaus dried noodles, which have been my preferred noodles for a long time.  Obviously, so people can use the canned meat with the noodles together.  Noodles not made with eggs are like pasta and will store for years if kept away from humidity and high heat.

As it turns out, in my canned meat research, I found out most canned meat has a shelf life much longer than what is stamped on the can, which is usually a few years from the processing date.  Like non-acid canned vegetables, if you open a can and it doesn't smell bad, it is probably fine.  Never open or taste a can badly dented or bulging, of course.

Essenhaus meat packing is associated with one of our favorite restaurants, Das Dutchmen Essenhaus, in northern Indiana. It is run by both Amish and Mennonites, at least when we went to the restaurant.  It was and is a destination area with many shops... close to Amish country in Middlebury, Indiana (a nice afternoon drive from where we once lived in Western Michigan).  It is closed on Sundays.

A brand more available nationwide is Keystone, which I buy at Meijer but I have heard is available at some Walmart stores.  I purchased their ground beef and a couple cans of regular beef for my January pantry stock-up.  They also sell canned chicken, turkey, and pork; all of which are highly recommended on the prepper YouTube videos.

After watching the "taste test" of the Keystone beef, I am definitely going to add a couple more cans of it to my pantry grocery list.  The man doing the test said, after warming it up, it tasted just like his home canned beef.  I watched a different video by a man testing the Keystone ground beef.  He said it looked terrible but when he made a recipe of homemade sloppy joes with it, it tasted fine.  

Both Essenhaus and Keystone brands are cold pack canned, like many people who pressure can meat at home like to do.  The ingredients are only the meat and sea salt.  I know there are other brands that can meat this way but none that are sold in my area.  My husband has to stay away from a lot of additives so I was very happy to find these products.

So, why am I spending my stock up budget on canned meat for a couple of months?  I live in a state where there are quite a few meat packing plants and COVID numbers are sky high here.  It would not surprise me at all to see more shutdowns in the new administration and meat... besides TP... was what seemed to disappear from the stores the fastest.

Besides some cans of meat, I added a few cans of green beans to the pantry to replace what I had used.  The local Kroger had Red Gold tomatoes on sale so I was able to stock up on their stewed tomatoes.  I can't locate them at any other store I shop and I only had two cans left on the shelf.

As for the deep freeze... sigh.

Sometimes doing is just as important, if not more, than the buying for the pantry.  Last week my doing was to (finally) reorganize the deep freeze.  It seems like I just did that but it has been a long time. This is one of my most dreaded tasks but since I now keep most items in a thick Aldi 10-cent bag when I add them to the freezer, it wasn't quite as bad as it has been in the past.

I forced myself to get to work on the one afternoon when it was neither too warm or too cold in my garage.  It was well worth the effort as I found what I knew was there, what I kinda' thought might be there, a bag of bread flour I do not remember putting there, and what I thought was lost and gone forever.  That being the packages of Kerry Gold salted butter I had purchased on sale before the Holidays.

I threw away the few packages of year old cranberries that were left.  They may have been okay but I had been able to purchase bags of the 2020 crop at a great price.  They were double bagged and frozen when I came home from the store but now all of them reside in one Aldi bag that I just have to pull out when I am going to cook with them.

Besides the cranberries, the only other item I had to throw away was a ham that had only been stored in a regular thin grocery bag and had received freezer burn.  Honestly, it may have been in there since Easter 2018. It was tucked away in a bottom corner of the deep freeze.

It is always worth pulling everything out of the deep freeze and reorganizing what it contains.  For one thing, I not only know what I have but they can be arranged by placing what needs to be used soonest on the top of the other bags.  Everything now fits snugly together rather than all wonky in the freezer, too.

The butter and bags of frozen vegetables sit in the two freezer baskets, along with four containers of frozen soup I made previously.  There was even room for a frozen pizza to sit on top.  My freezer is small but if it stays organized (and that is a big if), it holds enough for the two of us.

Thank you for the excellent comments last week, I learned some things I didn't know!  For instance, I never even considered shaking the baking powder container to extend the life of its' contents but it makes a lot of sense.  Knowledge can help us save money.  

I threw away bags of dried beans a couple years ago because I thought they were too old to be good.  It turns out that dried beans can last for many years, it may just take them longer to cook.  How I regretted throwing those out after learning that!

So, I always appreciate good comments and learning more about deepening the pantry.  I think it is going to be very wise to continue keeping as deep a pantry as we can afford in the next months and years.  It doesn't have to be very deep to be incredibly useful.

Image: I made these cookies a few years ago but they are sounding very good right now.  They are simply Jewel Cookies (sometimes called Thumbprint Cookies), filled with lemon curd instead of jelly.

Recipe:  Jewel Cookies... here.