So as far as I know we are not lacking for anything barring some emergency (like another slab leak, power outage etc.)
It is astounding then to experience what can only be described as "scarcity anxiety" this morning. Over things we don't even really use all that much, like, chocolate! Just the thought that there is "no more" is amazingly powerful, and this is just a drill people! It's a strange phenomenon to experience. I can see that we are going to run out of dish soap, so I'll have to go swap out with my son (how on earth did we go through half a bottle in 1-2 days??) We have about 30 ounces of vegetable oil left, and use vegetable oil for nothing but baking, hence the "oh my gosh we're going to run out before the challenge is over" emotion is unwarranted and puzzling. Somewhere in storage I have a bunch of olive oil so the world will not come to an end.
We planned on canning some white navy beans for DD19 this morning. We soaked them overnight and late last night I realized that although I had a case of regular mouth pint jars at my fingertips, I had no idea where my plethora of lids and rings were, and the store I was at on Saturday (the last free day before the challenge) didn't have any.
So that meant this morning we canned in wide mouth quarts. Yikes! That's an awful lot of beans at one time to open up. I told DD19 that we can either make them in to baked beans or we can dehydrate them and repack them and then they will be instant white beans.
It reminds me that home storage unorganized is almost on par with "fake" food storage. My mother had miles and miles of what I called "fake food storage." FFS is when it looks like food storage but it's just a facade. For example, you can't eat safely that which you've stored (home canned food 50 years old-my mother's was canned in 1964!), or is so buried you can't find it (guilty) or a bunch of food you will never, ever eat or have no way to prepare (3,000 pounds of only wheat, oil, and sugar comes to mind; no grinder etc.)
I guess I need to get off my lazy keister and start getting stuff done. I was fanatical about organizing my food storage when I lived in California; my excuse now is (a) I was living in 3 times the space and (b) I wasn't working outside the home then.
Life lesson from Day 1: prepare for the mental anxiety--just accept it and let it go or come up with a plan B; and organize so that "in the day" you're not adding to your stress level unnecessarily because "you can't find that vital....whatever."
If you have freezer space, when you open a quart jar of beans, you can always freeze half for a later use. I do this all the time. And usually when you are making things like chili, recipes call for 2 or more cans of beans so you would use the whole quart at one time anyway. It's better to have them and deal with too much than not have them at all. :-)
ReplyDeleteI did not know that about freezing! Good to know!
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