How well stocked do you keep your pantry?

[BarbaraY]

I thought I had the worst case of this disease possible but I see it could be worse. My freezer is full of a wide variety including a duck, a turkey, lamb shanks, ground beef, chicken pieces, chicken scraps for stock, breads, brown rice, orzo, a whole drawer full of baking supplies such as chips, nuts, dried fruit, coconut, etc.

Four pantry shelves with Oriental, and Middle Eastern ingredients. Two with jams perserves, etc.

One cupboard with spices and seasonings, one cupboard with dry goods ( crackers, cereal, raisins, prunes, etc), one cupboard with flour, sugar, and baking equipment. There is also a smaller pantry cupboard with rices, beans, cereal, canned goods, and onions and potatoes in a drawer on the bottom

We don't even want to get into my fridge. My daughter is always telling me I have too much crap in there and she has no place to put her watermelon.

[rooftop1000]

The new fridge is probabley 3 weeks old by now and I still havent done A Shopping. Today my husband asked when I was going to get some food.....

well what do you want? I dont know but the freezer was allways full before....

yeah with chicken fat and shrimp shells and a year old pork loin and a single chicken breast....

I dunno, get some balogna or something

geez then I would have to get bread too

tracey

[Arianna]

I generally have a pretty empty kitchen.

I have lots of little bags of grains of various types (quinoa, cous cous, polenta) but never more than a pound of each except for oats and rice. I have my cans on a single shelf. Usually there are about 10, mostly beans, tomatoes, tuna, and my boyfriend's chili. Our freezer is usually pretty full up with frozen pizza (also the boyfriend's).

Our fridge contains milk and juice and some other random stuff, but we definately don't fill it up all the way or anything. Of course, there are only two of us, and we don't have any other space to put things if we wanted to.

Also, the fact that I don't have a car really helps out- if I wanted to buy a ton of groceries, I would have no way to get them home!

[Lan4Dawg]

It is official. I have gone completely over the edge. Costco (at least the one in our area) is offering coupon specials. Most of the items are $1.00/2.00 off or buy one/get one. I admit I am a sucker for these deals. The latest round was bone-in chix breasts and boneless chix thighs--buy one/get one. I stopped by on my way home on Friday and picked up two packages of each w/ a couple of other small items (at least small for Costco). I went to put the packages in the freezer and the freezer door would not close. I had to un-pack and re-pack the freezer and move some of the stuff in to the freezer of the "extra" refrigerator in the garage (it usually holds mostly ice) in order to make every thing fit.

Now to add insult to injury I had it in my head all day that I wanted shrimp for dinner. I have no idea why but I had a craving for it (may be it was the Pinot Grigios, dry Rieslings, & Sauv Blancs I had been tasting at the store for most of the day made me think "shell fish!"). Any way I could find no shrimp despite the fact that I knew there was some in the freezer some where (which is why I did not buy more at Costco) so on the way home fr/ getting Fuss I stop by the market and get some shrimp for dinner. We return home and I get ready to P&D and reach in to the in side freezer for the shrimp shells for stock making and "BAM!" out on to my foot falls the bag of shrimp that I knew I had but thought it was in the out side freezer.

Well at least the out side freezer is some what organized and I know there is no shrimp in it.

[I_call_the_duck]

I have way too much in my pantry and freezer.

We have an entire shelf of canned soup. My husband likes it, but I'm not a big fan of it. Since I do most of the cooking, it doesn't get used, so sometimes I send him to work with a can or two. But I think the cans self-replicate, because there seems to be no end to that stuff.

There are boxes and boxes of tea. I don't drink that much anymore because it, um, makes me go a lot. There are currently three jars of applesauce in the pantry. Not to mention the various pastas, crackers, grains, spices, condiments. Oy!

We're also big suckers for two-for-one sales. My freezer is full of various meats, coffee, bones (for stock), and goodness knows whatever else.

We were even talking about getting another freezer if we were to join one of those wholesale clubs ... ($1.99/pound for short ribs!!!) ... until last week when we had a brief power outage during that horribly hot week. I spent part of a restless night thinking about ways to cook all that meat in my freezer if that outage wasn't resolved soon, and the other part of the night obsessing about what I'd do if we DID have that extra freezer.

The good thing about the power outage was that in only lasted a few hours, the meat was spared, and we decided not to invest in that extra freezer.