Episode Details

I had a dream. And in this dream my pantry always had everything I needed. I never ran out of ingredients to make dinner. I would go to the pantry, pull out what I needed to make dinner that day and it’d be there—no surprises. I had achieved well-stocked pantry perfection.

But it turns out that making this dream a reality was much harder than I thought it would be. Still, it’s worth the effort to keep a well-stocked pantry. So, let’s talk about how to do just that.

So, you go to make spaghetti and there’s no tomato sauce. You go to make soup and there’s no chicken broth. You think you’ll make tuna noodle casserole and then there’s no tuna or no noodles, or neither. This is frustrating. And it illustrates one of the troubles of menu planning.

Menu planning isn’t just coming up with ideas of what’s for dinner. It’s managing this whole magic of having the idea of what’s for dinner, having the ingredients for that dinner on hand, starting dinner at the right time, on the right day, and of course, keeping it all frugal and within budget. There’s a lot that goes into keeping a menu plan. It takes practice. And with practice comes skill. But we need to practice—not just making a list and following that list, the menu planning proper—we also have to manage that pantry ingredient, grocery shopping side of things that makes the meal planning possible.

It’s really this whole separate piece that if we aren’t aware of it, managing it, keeping track of it, then that menu plan that we’ve worked on doesn’t work. And we’re thrown back to plan B, or takeout, or frozen fish sticks (if those are in the freezer). 

So, what does it take to keep a well-stocked pantry? What is in a well-stocked pantry? What should be in your pantry? What should be in my pantry? How do we know that? And then, how do we keep our pantry well-stocked while feeding people three times a day?

There are four important steps to keeping and using a well-stocked pantry.

1. Know what your family actually eats and keep a master list of those items you actually use.
2. Determine how much your family consumes of each pantry staple in a week or month.
3. Check your pantry stock before grocery shopping – every time.
4. Keep what’s in your pantry rotated so you use the oldest items first.

The Pantry Stock Problem

I know when I was newly married and stocking our pantry for the first time I felt at a loss. There’s so much food at the grocery store. There are so many options. How do I even know what to buy?

Sometimes we solve that conundrum by making a menu plan first and then buying the food that we need for those meals that we’ve planned for and that works. But it actually takes a lot longer to make that menu plan, to grocery shop for that menu plan, to follow the recipes, and to just make it all work.

We can cut down on the time and energy that it takes to make our meals if we become pantry cooks. If we keep a regular stock on hand and then base our meals off of those things that we just always keep on hand. It’s actually in limiting our choices that things take less effort, energy, attention, time. Not only that, but when we function within limits, our creativity is called into play. It’s needed. And so choosing dinners based out of a pantry system is not only more efficient, it’s also more creative. 

But the question still comes down to what is in the pantry? And it’s certainly something that takes experience to build up, experimentation to figure out, and iteration and flexibility in continuing it. One of the things that I tried to do the first time I was stocking a pantry was look up that Martha Stewart list of what belongs in your pantry. I didn’t know what should be in our pantry but I figured someone else knows what I should buy, and so I took Martha Stewart’s list and stocked our pantry with the things she said that