Bread and milk runs

This week, we're going to have nasty winter weather almost every day except for today. That means that today I had to go out and do our shopping. Unfortunately, anyone in the New England area (and surrounding) can tell us exactly what I ran into... the Bread and Milk Runs.

Now this is a Northern phenomenon that happens whenever winter weather is expected. People flock to the stores to prepare by buying extra supplies in the necessities, usually milk or bread.

I dislike being rushed in the grocery store. I don't like being swarmed. It's not easy at all to wait in a long line with an eight-year-old and a toddler. So how do I avoid the bread and milk runs?

I know that some people live in very small apartments and can't put this into effect. I grew up among the "land-rich money-poor", and my parents have always had a cellar, as have the parents of most of my childhood acquaintances. It was considered normal to put up a couple of shelf sets and store extra food down there where it was cool and reasonably dry.

I only have one shelf set and I need another. Still, I do have a space down in the cellar which is used exclusively for extra food. I keep on hand enough food to have a varied and pleasant diet for at least a week and a half, and enough to just plain eat for at least two months. I never had it any other way, so I don't know what it's like to have it any other way.

If it's at all possible for you, I would recommend that you my readers keep a sufficient cache of food that you don't ever need to do a bread-and-milk run in the face of bad weather. Develop a list of the items you use most often, shelf-stable staples like pasta and rice, and watch for local sales. Buy three times what you need whenever it's on sale. Not only will you avoid the dreaded crowded panic shoppers, you will find that you spend less on food than you used to.

Yay for snow days!

Yes, I did want to update this blog daily this year if I could, with the exception of Sundays. Yes, I didn't update on Wednesday. Yes, I'm going to backdate this entry to fill it the gap.

So what happened?

In Connecticut, we broke our record for the greatest amount of snow in a 24-hour period when 18-24 inches (depending on location) fell around the state, with some places totaling 30 inches altogether. At my home, we got an even 20.

My son went out playing in the snow with my mother. I didn't take my daughter out at all, but she's going out in it today now that the driveway is plowed out. See, yesterday, the snow was as high as she was and there was simply no place for her to walk!

How did we weather the storm? Well, I always keep a good supply of food on hand, because my area is sufficiently rural that going out to the store all the time is a real pain. Our power went out, but my electric company deserves great praise for fixing it pretty promptly. They had trucks out within an hour and fixed the problem an hour and a half after it went out. This is good for us, because we have no source of heat that is not electric-dependent. We have an oil furnace that is lit, not by pilot light, but by electric spark.

Our gorgeous little bi-level doesn't really have room for a woodstove, or you'd better believe I would have one in this house. I know how to deal with woodstoves. I grew up with one. Unfortunately, we are going to have to find some other method by which to (someday) heat our home when the power goes out. I believe our best bet now is to find a generator, as that would give us water as well.

Kitchen Upkeep!

How things change! Since my last update, my husband has landed a job and I have quit mine. I am now a full-time mother and homemaker proper! It didn't take long for me to launch headlong into long-neglected housework and today is no exception.

How often you need to do this really depends on how you run your kitchen. Since I've been quite lackadaisical, this badly needed to be done. I basically took all of my non-refrigerated goods out this morning and put back only what was still good. Come to think of it, everyone probably could stand to do this maybe yearly. Even the best housekeeper may end up with a three-year-old box of brownie mix in the depths of her cupboard.

My house is a bi-level, and the kitchen is pretty small as kitchens go. I don't have a lot of cupboard space. There are two shelved closets in the hallway, and one of them is my pantry. There I keep dry goods, cans, etc. In my kitchen, I keep baking goods (from rice to vinegar to baking soda to cane sugar) and the simplest common things I have more often, like my trusty jar of Ovaltine. Down in the cellar, I have a shelf on which I keep things like extra boxes of cereal that I bought on sale and the cases of ramen that my husband persists in buying periodically for himself. I cleaned up the kitchen this morning, getting everything off the floor for once and giving it a good scrub, so I had plenty of room in which to pull everything out of the cupboards and pantry and go through it all. Wow. I ended up dumping easily half my inventory.

I hate putting so much stuff into the garbage. I live on a four acre lot, and I have designated a small area for compost. You don't even need to have four acres to maintain a compost bin. You can do it on two, even one acre, depending on what you compost. Meat is not recommended as it attracts carnivores. Most dry cereals, pastas, and vegetable leftovers can be composted. I filled a container with old potato flakes, ancient bread crumbs, aged pastas and similar, and my young son carried it out to the compost and emptied it out for me.

Hopefully this will help me keep from buying things that we already have, that I just plain couldn't find!