Food & Grocery Thoughts

Ok, so let me let you in on a little secret: I buy too much food. Betcha didn't expect that, hah. I can't help it! I'm easily sucked in by fabulous clean foods, seasonal produce, anything unprocessed, interesting meat-free items, all grains, fun pastas, interesting flours, weird beans (fava, anyone?) and most everything that has no GMO's. I love love LOVE good food, or at least good for you food anyway. My kitchen cabinets and fridge are very very full of it.

I have read and considered just about every type of eating out there. Vegetarian, Vegan, Raw, Macrobiotics, Dr Fuhrman... I will most definitely be blogging about our diet changes over the past few years, but not right now. I seem to be chasing a rabbit. Back to the point!

One would argue (not that I would, ahem, know or anything...) that we have enough food for our family of 4 to eat off of for two or three weeks very comfortably. If you count the freezer, well, then we have enough food for about a month, easily. So as you can see, I need to work on this. Food hoarding, hah.

Here are some things I am vowing to work on:
- Trying to eat up what we have before buying a bunch of stuff, grains and all. Freezer too! That's going to be hard because I like fresh produce, but it's one of my new missions... no one ever said going through our house would be quick work.
- Formulate a plan! A menu is a novel idea. But better than a menu is to understand the way our family eats. We don't do well with a menu because it does not lend well to our food impulses ("I feel like eating breakfast tonight! But we didn't put it on the menu. Dang." this scenario does NOT work for us). Which is why we end up with so much food. I need to find a way to work on this.
- Actually sticking with a plan when I go into the grocery store and not impulse buying
- Entertaining the idea of getting rid of our deep freezer. Shock of the century! I have had a love affair with this deep-freeze for quite a while now and I am totally amazed that I am thinking of getting rid of it. But we don't use it like we used to! When we first got it, it held a lot of meats and convenience foods. Both of which we don't eat any more. Hm...

Here are a few embarrassingly incriminating photos:

My baking corner cabinet is full of at least 4 bags of flour - which does not count the small containers of flour in the top pink baskets. Coming from a family of bakers, I have always thought it unfit to have a kitchen without the necessary ingredients for a cake, brownies, or cookies of all sorts (obviously). As our diets have changed, we've still made room for goodies! But perhaps I have too much flour?

This is just oil and vinegar and about 3 rows deep

This cabinet houses our grains, pastas, beans, peanut butter, nuts/seeds, dried fruits, and sea veggies. It used to actually have a lot more food in it, but I've actually been working on getting rid of the stockpile of food in here for a bit.

This one is deeper than it looks and holds at least 5 rows of canned veggies. We have tons of tomatoes. And yes, we do drink, but so rarely that the Jack has been there with about 3 oz in it for the past 2 1/2 years.