Nancy and I have been doing this for years. At any given time we probably have enough staples to go a year or close to it. We buy flour and sugar in 50 and 25lb bags, white and Basmati rice in 20lb bags. We go through these in reasonable amounts of time. We use the white rice to make dog food. We eat the Basmati, and 20lbs lasts us about 6 months. I have also started piling up bags of dry beans of various sorts and stocking up on dry pasta when it's on a 10 for $10 sale. Eating well on the cheap isn't hard to do if you want to do it. I'm simmering stock from left over holiday ham bones right now for bean soup tomorrow. 4lbs of pimento beans, 3lbs of cubed ham, and a gallon of stock makes a solid three gallons of kick ass soup for about $20. Spent over half of that on the ham.
Be Ahead Of The Curve.
- Thread starter Jackalope
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Yeah buddy. I have 50lbs of long-grain on hand. I love rice but my wife doesn't care for it. I guess she's a true northern girl and would rather have mashed potatoes which I have about 20lbs of dehydrated instant potatoes on hand. Nothing better than brown gravy over white rice to me though. I have about 25lbs of Calrose rice also as I like to eat it with kimchee when I can find it.
For beans, I have no idea. Probably a combined total of 30lbs of red kidney, lima, black eye peas, and great northern. Not a bunch but a good bit.
Two weeks ago I added 7 of the folders 3lb cans from Sams for $8.49 per can. Today they're $11.24. I bet they top $20 this year as coffee was up %76 in 2021.
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Oh you fucker. If it gets to where I gotta live off baked beans I'm calling it a good run and going out with a bang.
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Snagged two rotisserie chickens on end of day clearance at wally world for $3.50 each. 1.5lbs each of white and dark. Two carcasses to boil for stock recipes like chicken sausage gumbo. 
Jeez Joe, your freezer gonna look alot like mine. I've got various quart bags of chilli, chicken, turkey., ham. I transitioned in the fall from focusing solely on great deals to also just anticipate future availability. I need more rice and flour and saltSnagged two rotisserie chickens on end of day clearance at wally world for $3.50 each. 1.5lbs each of white and dark. Two carcasses to boil for stock recipes like chicken sausage gumbo.
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Salt is another thing I keep in large quantities. I probably have 15-20 lbs of various types of salt. Several sea and specialty salts for cooking, kosher salt, iodized table salt.
I don't do any of this. You guys know your stuff. Maybe if I cooked or did grocery shopping I would. Those just aren't my departments.
How long will your feezer keep stuff good with no poweror generator fuel? Do any of you can food?
I have actually thought this through. In the middle of summer, I could probably make it a week or more in the chest freezer if I don't open it. three or four days in refrigerator freezers, obviously longer in cooler weather. This is one of the reasons I ended up with a whole house standby generator that runs on propane. with a full tank of propane we could go well over a month running the generator carefully just enough to keep cold stuff cold and frozen, about ten days if the generator runs non-stop. If shit went so sideways that I couldn't even get propane, I could pretty easily pressure can every bit of meat and vegetables in my freezers that we could not eat in the short term. I have three pressure canners and more jars than any sensible person should have. I usually have a hundred or more new large and small lids for the jars, too. Canning jars useless without good lids and rings. I could also make a bunch of jerky or simply dry some things to preserve them. I also always have a couple hundred vac bags and several rolls here.
Mom had a cold cellar under our front porch where she kept the stuff she canned. We lived on a 5 acre substance farm so we had our own eggs, milk, meat, fruit & veg and stuff. Well my dad was out of town so we got his 46 chevy pannel truck out. Well we had a long driveway and me and my big bro were taking turns driving up and dow the drive. Bro backed it into the porch knocking a bunch of cement blocks down on moms jars.
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It would suck if the power went out for more than a week with no access to fuel. Wouldn't be the end of the world though. I have a few months of dry goods and staples. Fortunately, between the wood, bayous, rivers, lakes, and gulf, there's a bounty of protein food around.
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Our canned food stuff was in the “fruit cellar” as my grandmother’s called them.
They always had their respective fruit cellars full. As kids and young adults we joked about it. Not so much anymore.
We canned rabbit when the kids were young. We’d usually end up with close too a hundred per season. Canned about 3/4 of them. They didn’t look like much in the jars, but man were they good out of them.
