Is your pantry full?

As of right now there is not a lot that we are keeping in our pantry. I'm wanting to remodel our kitchen and because of that I've not been keeping our pantry fully stocked. I don't want to have to displace all of that food while we are replacing the cabinets and such in our kitchen. Once we get the kitchen in a situation that I am happy with, then I do want to keep at least a week's worth of extra nonperishable food in our house.

how true.. i dont have a 'pantry' - but i do have a 'designated shelf' where i 'store' things - i would say that we have enuf to eat - but like u said.. it would require 'someone' to cook or heat it up.. (guess who the 'someone' MUST be??) my husband would usually do monthly shopping - and i'd usually have some cans of tuna, sardines, packets of instant noodles.. cans of soups.. 3-4 packets of biscuts.. packets of flour/sugar.. these are the usual stuff, we'd have in our 'storage'..

I don't like to look after yet another thing, namely checking for expired food items in my pantry so I keep very little on hand. Since it is essential for me to have a healthy diet I store some brown rice, lentils, chick peas and rolled oats in jars as well as some whole grain pasta. I don't use canned vegetables so I only keep a few cans of tomato paste, spaghetti sauce and canned tomatoes and kidney beans on hand which I need to make chili, pasta sauce, lentil soup and minestroni soup. Once a week before I go shopping I check the fridg and any cooked item that is 4 or 5 days old has to be eaten or used up. If there are herbs left over I chop them, freeze them in small containers and label them. Any lettuce celery and tomatoes from the week before are made into a salad or made into soup stock (except the lettuce) and frozen also, so I can always make soup where I control the salt content. Also I know my stock has no preservatives. So in answer to your question, there is very little in my pantry and very very little in my fridg. I have a friend who is a single person. She has two fridges, a small freezer and a pantry full of stuff. I hate to eat at her place. When she was sick I went there to prepare a few meals for her. Some of the meat in the freezer was two years old. Half of the cans in the pantry were past the expiry date. Since she is an elderly person I mentioned to her that food does not last forever and needs looking after. She told me she had never gotten sick from her food and was doing just fine. The point is: people may not get sick from old food but the nutrients are gone so they may as well eat cardboard.

My pantry is pretty bare! I just moved in here at the end of December, and so I haven't had a chance to buy a lot of those staples that you always keep. Plus, I'm on a very limited budget, so right now we have the bare minimum and are trying to stretch it until we get more money in. I would really love to have enough money to just do this HUGE grocery shopping trip and get all the things I want!

during the hurricane season I am well stocked up with tinned foodstuff, water and disposable plates etc but once the season is over we tend to use everything up. I live in a small house with limited space - smetimes the hurricane suplies are packed in plastic boxes tightly sealed under my bed I usually have enough meat for a week and except for bread only shop once a week.

I am a student now .At home my mom do those .but my home 's pantry is full always . I do not like eating snacks .so I do not notice it . my roommates appreicate me for this point of me

Well my pantry I would say is halffull. I have all kinds of stuff in there.

this always happens to us! we will have food in the house but none of it look good.. right now we are actually stocked up but some times we run low since we hate to grocery shop!

Hey mommyboo! I have the very same problem! I have loads of things to eat, but I can never decide what I want if it is not already cooked! I can open a can of something, but if I'm not in the mood to really cook something I just can never decide what to make! Like tonight for instance! It's 9:30PM and I haven't had anything to eat at all today, which is pretty much the usual for me! My girlfriend and are were out most of the day shopping and just never got around to eating! So, now I am trying to decide should I make a sandwich, which will probably be what I will end up doing! I want to have tuna, but that is too much work! It means I have to cut an onion! How lazy can I be-very! It is too messy to clean the can opener and the onion makes a mess! So, you see my dileman! How patheticly lazy we can be! Shame on me!lol

There are times when our pantry is well stocked, and times when there's nothing to eat or to cook! My mom does the grocery every week so it is usually full at the start of the week and then there'd be less and less as the week goes by.

I try to keep mine pretty full. But I haven't had much money lately so I've been eating whatever is left in it. Mostly ramen, mac n cheese, soup and whatever else I can find.

My family's pretty bad - our pantry's is fairly empty - in the sense that while there are ingredients, ironically enough, there is not enough to create a dish. This is why me and my sister's rarely cook as we're usually missing at least 50% of ingredient to even make a basic dish. As such, there are usually four options in rectifying this problem : - hope that either Mum/Dad brings back something to eat - We (me and my siblings) go to the shops and buy something - Cook the basic ingredient and eat it plain e.g. eating pasta without sauce, boiling an egg - Complain that there is nothing to eat Or starve.

I keep a lot of items in my pantry, regular items we need and eat regularly. I also keep a lot of things in my garage in case of a disaster of some kind, like cereals and peanut butter. I usually have at least a couple of loaves of bread in freezers, plus spaghetti and sauces in the pantry at all times. My refrigerator always has eggs, milk and fruit. I have 3 children, 2 do not live at home and one does. The others visit sometimes on weekends. This is really from my days of having 'young' children at home who ATE all the time. But I have found that as I get older, when the weather is really bad or I get sick, and I can't get out of the house - I have things on hand to cook or for my husband and daughter to eat (f I am too sick to cook)- and at least they are o.k. When the big rains hit, it's nice NOT to have to run to the market and cook what you have at home. There are always some little snack foods too, just for those munchy times.

I find that it's real easy to become a hoarder! Me and the missus will go to the shops and see something we like, buy it, take it home and leave it sitting for months until we fancy it again!

Right now I have a decent amount of food in the pantry, but it is not full by any means. I like to let it get low sometimes and restock, so I know I am using the older things. I am planning on going shopping on Sunday and restocking the canned foods. We never get really low on food.

I have TONS of rice... I love rice I hate making it LMAO but right now my cupboards are bare, I do need to go shopping though, but since it's just me and my little man, not quite easy to make a 1.5 person meal .

I grocery shop weekly, and can't really afford to stock up on staples.. I just plan my weekly meals and buy what I'll need for that week. So my cupboards may be full or empty depending on the day of the week. However I too am one of those people who will look at a fully stocked kitchen and say "There's nothing to eat". It may be because I'm too lazy to cook something, or it may be that I just don't want what we have. I'm terrible for that!

I have a large family so i always have plenty of food and yes my children are always saying there is nothing to eat all the time.The fridge is always full aswell.We have all kinds of foods including frozen ready meals that you heat up in the microwave.We have two fridge freezers as well as a large chest freezer that is always full to the top,also food in an out house as there is no more room in the kitchen to put the food.I do agree with you that people are too lazy to get themselves something to eat.

This discussion reminded me of my visit to the US a few years ago when I had the opportunity to spend a few days each with friends and family. It was unbelievable to see their overflowing pantries and yet they would shop for the same things already stacked up in their pantries. I just could not bear to see that waste as obviously that which was stacked up would be eventually thrown away!

Hi Mommyboo! This is a timely question for me because I was over at my mom's today, I've been helping her clean, and her pantry shelves are literally falling down. When I was a kid we lived some distance from town so you couldn't just run to the store if you needed something. My mom kept a lot of stuff on hand for that reason. However, it's been about 30 years since we lived on the farm and she hasn't got out of the habit. By comparison my pantry is pretty bare although I feel it has just enough stuff to cope with last minute company.