Yesterday I went with my dd14 and ds15 for our big shopping stock up. I usually say my monthly shopping, but since it’s been 7 weeks since I last went shopping, it wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that. Since it was my son’s tenth birthday, he spent the day with his grandparents instead, and in the end, most of the other kids joined him there. This was the first time I’ve ever gone with just older children, and it was very nice. 🙂
It was nice to go with a budget for two months instead of one, since it allowed me to purchase a lot of bulk things at one time instead of breaking it into smaller amounts that better fit a monthly budget. I got a bunch of bulk grains and frozen vegetables, among other things. Whoa, did I get frozen vegetables. $140 worth (and since none of them were more than $1 lb, and a lot were less, you can do the math….). I kind of went overboard. For the first time, I ordered them in advance by the case with the person in charge of the frozen food department, and since I wasn’t seeing how much I was ordering, it was very easy to overdo it. I was like, ‘Two cases of that, two cases of that, four cases of that….’ It didn’t sound like so much! When I got there and they wheeled out my order on an industrial sized cart, I was a little taken aback for a minute, wondering how in the world I would fit it into my freezer. Especially since at the store before, I blithely bought two cases of blueberries and two cases of strawberries. But do you think I’d let a little consideration like that stop me? 🙂
When we got home, we unloaded everything before picking up the other five kids (wouldn’t have had room for them to sit in the van before unloading), and came home to do the major work – finding space for everything. Because the weather is so cold, I had my kids take five or six cases of frozen vegetables to the steps outside our house, covered by the storm door. Then I had them put most of the milk there, too. After filling our large freezer almost entirely with frozen veggies (fortunately it was much emptier than usual thanks to the long space between shopping trips), that worked out perfectly.
I also had them take the bulk bags of grain to those same steps. (Yes, this very small area is packed now.) I like to freeze grains before putting them away in buckets, to make sure if there are any insects in it, they’re killed. But that’s problematic when you buy things in fifty pound bags and there’s not more than an inch of available freezer space, so I often skip this step, as important as I know it is. It occurred to me that with the weather being so cold outside, that keeping the bulk grains in that area would be the same as keeping them in the freezer. I’ll leave them there a couple of days and then do the transferring – I’m kind of glad to have an excuse not to have to deal with unpacking them yet. It’s always a big project – yesterday I got 150 lb. hard white wheat, 25 lb. millet, 25 lb. brown rice, and 100 lb oats (50 – rolled, 50 – quick) – it takes some muscle and spatial organization (I call on my oldest son to do the muscle stuff, ie, hoist the bags and pour them into containers; I do the organizational aspect). This should hold us over until our next shopping trip. Though I don’t enjoy cold winter weather, I’m so grateful for this beneficial aspect of it – I’d be canning up all those veggies for the next few days if I didn’t have the possibility of keeping them cold in nature’s freezer. As it is, I made a 16 quart pot of veggie soup to use some of those vegetables right away and free up some freezer space, and will be starting to can that as soon as I finish here.
On the way home from the shopping, my ds15 asked me why I buy so much food. I told him, ‘Because we eat so much food!’. I know it sounds obvious, but because I don’t shop weekly, the amounts are much more noticeable than they’d be otherwise when I do shop. It is kind of amazing how much food a large family can go through, and even family members forget until they see (and have to unpack) all that we buy.
Avivah
