PANTRY SECTION INTRODUCTIONThis section of the website isn't just about our actual pantry (the closet we built to hold bulk food purchases and the items we've canned or otherwise preserved). It's about returning to the days before people went grocery shopping every week, and instead relied on what they had in their pantry. It's about learning the skills our great grandmothers had so they could cook from their pantries, which were full of basic staples from which they created whatever they needed, from condiments to fresh bread.
We're trying to relearn how to stock and eat from our pantry for several reasons:
Learning Pantry SkillsLearning how to live by eating from your pantry instead of running to the corner store (if you didn't grow up in a family where it came naturally) is a journey, not a rapid weekend change over. We've made changes in steps, as we've had the time, energy, and money available, and we still want to do a lot more.
Here are some of the steps that we've gone through to change our eating habits, not necessarily in any order:
Overall, we've tried to learn a process of thinking about our food by breaking it down into its parts, then seeing if we can reliably provide these parts ourselves, then breaking it down into even more parts. We can buy bread, or we can buy flour to make our bread, or we can buy whole wheat to grind flour to make our own bread, or we can grow the wheat to grind our own flour. |
Pantry How To:We'll be sharing information on:
- How we built our pantry - What to store and how to store it, which includes:
- Different ways to preserve food (such as freezing, dehydrating, storing in a root cellar...) - Cooking from pantry supplies:
- Making staples (such as butter, syrup, soup stock...) An Example: Theresa's Evolution to Healthier Oatmeal
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Take Your Time
Our process toward being more self-sufficient has evolved over several years, and we still have a lot to learn. Going through this process, though, hasn't felt slow and arduous. Since we learn new things at every step, we always feel like we're making progress. This is a great example of my life is a journey, not a destination.