With everything going on, I've been thinking about the best way to use my food supplies to ensure I can stretch it across the longest time possible and still keep our food interesting. My intention is to make our food last out as long as we can to allow others who have greater need to buy food at the shops.
I can't say how long my food store will last as I never built it up with a 'target' in mind. I just bought extras of what we normally use during a month when they were cheaper, on multi-buy deals, yellow stickered or when I had the extra money to do so. I was routinely putting surplus fruit and veg in the freezer or dehydrating it last year so I have some supplies in that respect.
So, I had a think last night about some of the things we currently do and how we can adapt those to work better in the current environment and decided I'd share some of my thoughts.
1. Not eating the same things at the same times day in, day out. I'm guilty of this, and to a certain extent so is Martin but as he is a postman, eating out on delivery has to revolve around things that are easy to handle and wrapped as he cannot wash his hands properly.
I don't have an excuse - I often just have cheese and crackers or a cheese sandwich for lunch because it is quick and I don't want to think about it. However, gluten-free bread is so expensive and currently in short supply so I'm planning on making what bread I do have go much further by rotating my lunches to include a lot of variety. I probably won't worry about baking bread - I've had too many failures trying to make a decent loaf and it uses up a lot of ingredients with every failure. Now is not the time to perfect my skills.
So, for example, lunches for me might look like:
day 1: sandwich
day 2: soup and breadsticks or add some pasta to the soup to bulk it out
day 3: crackers with the normal sandwich filling
day 4: one slice of bread to make half a sandwich (or an open sandwich) and team it with some fruit and a yoghurt
day 5: baked potato and the sandwich filling
day 6: salad and the sandwich filling
day 7: something not traditionally lunch
day 8: use up protein powder as meal replacement shakes
day 9: leftovers from the previous night's dinner
day 10: pancakes
Other things I thought of:
2. Pasta is not just spaghetti or recognisable shapes – it’s also
macaroni and broken up lasagne sheets. I was reading about shelves being stripped bare of all pasta apart from those two and was surprised. They are both pasta and can be used.
3. Consider
replacing pasta with a vegetable, such as something spiralised or cut into thin strips using a potato peeler.
4. Consider eating foods out of the normal sequence –
nobody says you can’t have a bowl of porridge for dinner, or cheese on toast for breakfast. In fact, no-one said you have to have breakfast at all. Most days I don't feel like eating until late morning anyway.
5. Eat less by reducing potion sizes
6. Use less cheese at a time by grating it.
7. Eat last night's leftovers with some additional carbs or veg
8. Have a bowl of soup before, or a more veg with, a smaller dinner.
9. If I run out of pasta, I have a pasta machine lying dusty somewhere and it is easy to make, just a bit time-consuming.
10. Drag out the back of the cupboards and see what's there, lying forgotten. I did this yesterday and found a sachet of peanut satay sauce, an out of date mini Dolmio stir through sauce, some shredded coconut, a tin of pilchards, and some lasagne sheets. So tonight's dinner will be satay chicken for Martin and Audrey, pasta for me with the mini Dolmio sauce (peanuts give me gut ache) but in all honesty I'm not sure about the pilchards. I don't even know where they came from! I'll probably try and lose them in a fish pie. I'm the only one in the house that likes coconut so I might try to make some coconut 'milk' to drink and for porridge.
11. Using less meat and padding out main meals with grated veg and/or pulses. We routinely use pulses but have not yet tried veg so I will start doing so. Instead of using a whole tin of pulses we'll use half and add some grated veg.
12. There will be limits to how many of each product we can have when we eventually do have to buy some food, if any is on the shelves at all, so we have to think outside the box. For example, if I can't get chopped tomatoes then I'll look at passata, fresh toms, sundried toms, plum toms, ketchup, tomato puree, baked beans, tomato soup, etc. Think of all the different ways a particular type of food can be treated and get something different.
13. Grow some. Some things are quick to grow. Lettuce leaves, spinach and herbs are quick and simple and can form the basis of a salad. I have beans I can sprout.
Anyway, that's all of my thoughts on food for the moment. Hope some of my ideas might be useful for you.
