The Pantry System

So, I finally feel like I am getting a hold of all the monsters in my home!

Laundry Monster

Grocery Monster

Cleaning Monster

Closet Monster

I still have a few monsters to battle...for instance the Toy Monster and the Yard Monster, but today...I focused on the Pantry Monster!!

Gabrielle is my "Food Lady".  She loves food, not really the eating part. Although, she does enjoy that...it is more the cooking and shopping she loves!

This made it so easy to choose her to be the "Pantry Police" and she gladly accepted the task!  Thank God!!

Anyway, we have the shopping part mastered and for those of you whom would like to know what we budget, I will tell you.  I will also say that this year we had no garden...hopefully next year we will and also, we plan to purchase a whole beef to be butchered for our family which will lower our yearly cost tremendously!  Not to mention, we will have 3 hunters in the family this year, which means we will have lots of yummy venison as well!!

For now, we have our grocery budget logged in at about $600 a month.  About $500 is spent at the beginning of each month on our "Big Shopping" day and then the remaining is spent each week on milk, fruit and other perishables.

 Here is a glimpse of about half of our pantry.  The other is in the kitchen...we have a lazy suzan for breakfast, a lazy suzan for snacks, a shelf for our breads and a shelf for our chips and misc. items.

We also have two refrigerators.  One in our kitchen that holds all our "normal" cold foods.  And the other that holds all our drinks, eggs and leftovers.  All shelves in those fridges are labeled of course.  ;)

 This is how I decided to go for inventory.  It is just a spreadsheet with all our dry good items.  There is a mark for each item that we have...for instance, if we have 8 tomato sauces, 8 of the boxes have a mark.  Gabrielle and I are the only ones allowed in the forbidden pantry room and so when we need an item, it is highlighted or checked off.  Next to each item is a number of how many we like to have on hand after shopping day.  Also, Gabrielle is working on prices for each item...that way we will know almost exactly how much our grocery bill will be.

I just attached the highlighter using a Velcro dot...we all know how quickly things like that disappear if left to the hands of the little ones!!  ;)