Zombie issues aside, how much food do you generally have in your house?

[sylar]

How long would your food supply last if you suddenly couldn't leave the house? I've just read that most people only have enough to last them three days since most of us eat out several times a week.

I have an emergency stockpile so accept I am probably a bit extreme but I am concerned that everyone else is being taken out to dinner far more frequently than I am!

I've got 4 very hungry boys (and a hungry DH) doesn't matter how often I shop we are always running low on something. Do have a new 25kg bag of spuds atm, but last big bag of rice i bought the mice got into so had to bin it. I wouldn't be able to store enough to last us for a month.

I'm with HellenaHC:
Lots of herbs & spices, 3 onions, 1 sprouting garlic bulb, lots of tinned beans, some lentils & rice. Bit of flour (bread and regular). Might manage a week, fortnight on very strict rations! We;d be pretty bored.
I walk past the shop every day on the way home from work and pick up fresh veg/fruit/milk/butter if we need it so we never have more than a day's worth.

Methinks this might change after eggbert is born.....

At the moment we probably have enough for about 5 days of decent meals (if we ate lasagne twice and chickpea curry twice!), followed by a few days of lentil soup with rolls from the freezer and porridge for breakfast and lunch!

I have a large pantry cupboard with lots of beans, tinned toms, pasta, lentils, tinned soup etc, longlife milk, a couple of loaves in teh freezer, lots of cheese which keeps for ages, chips, fishfingers etc.. probably 2 weeks of stuff, boring and basic, but we'd not be hungry

The freezer is currently full of M&S reduced food that I stumbled upon last week!

Got pasta, rice, tomatoes, garlic and some veg.

Could keep going for a week or so I think.

About a month, I think. Freezer usually full (although emptyish atm cos I've just defrosted it). Larder full-ish- beans, tomatoes, pasta, cereals,spices, sauces, flour, sugar, tinned fruit etc etc. Ooh and about 600 teabags (I ran out recently and nearly had to have decaff tea for breakfast! )

But I need to restock on some things

Probably about 2 or 3 months on what's in the fridge/freezer/cupboards, but I've only got about a week's worth of fresh stuff. It wouldn't be fancy or fab, but it would meet our needs.

I have a stockpile of things like tinned toms/beans/fruit/veg/lentils/chick peas and other beans/fish/meat/condensed soup and dried onions, also a whole load of jam/chutney/pickle/fruit pie filling that I made last autumn, 2 big sacks of bread flour from the mill along with a lot of yeast, about 10kg plain and SR flour, about 4kgs of spelt and rye flour, extra sugar, honey, syrup, cocoa powder, oil, tea, coffee, dried milk, stock cubes, herbs, spices etc. About 10kgs pasta and the same of rice and another 10kgs dried beans, 3kgs lentils, 2kgs oats, a pile of dried milk, a case of peanut butter, some shelf stable solid veg oil (for baking), long life fruit juice, bottles of high juice....

The freezer has probably 15 or 20 kilo bags of veg as well as mince of various hues, pork shoulder, lamb shoulder, mutton, sausages, cooked chicken, cooked turkey, mixed game, a couple of rabbits, fish, prawns, scallops, mussels, homemade sausagemeat.

We would struggle for eggs, yoghurt, cheese and sandwich meat, but other than that, we would manage. The trick is rotating through it so that we use stuff and then replace it. It's all a bit embarrassing, really, but I have a complete fear of running out of money and not being able to buy food (it used to happen when my OH was drinking.) So, I buy a little extra every month and stockpile, you can hardly move in the hall cupboard for huge plastic boxes full of stuff and the hut has boxes full of jam etc..

Wow stressedHEmum! That's quite some stockpile.

Those of you that buy large quantities of potatoes how do you store them. Mine seem to go soft after about a week and so I never buy very many

Sylar, that's only the tip of it. I have a lot more

In the freezer I have various cuts of beef, some goat, a few pigeons, a few boxes of fish fingers for emergency wraps, tofu fingers, quorn.... and I have smaller stores of things like barley, semolina, cornmeal, bulghur wheat, quinoa, pudding rice, oatmeal, evap milk, dried fruit, couscous, nuts, treacle, chocolate . I also keep a small stock of things like loo roll, soap, toothpaste, sanitary towels, soda crystals, vinegar and lemon juice (for cleaning) and things like that. Oh yes, and during the summer and autumn, I grow veg in old sandpits that I've converted into containers and in compost sacks and grow bags, so that I almost always have some kind of fresh veg, any excess gets either preserved or frozen. It's all a bit paranoid, I'm afraid.

You can store potatoes for a long time if you keep them in a jute sack or something similar in a cool, dark place, a garden shed, a cellar or an attic are all good places to keep them, as long as they are protected from frost or too much heat. I grow my own and keep them in potato sacks in the hut during the winter. You can buy them in sacks made from a couple of layers of heavy duty paper which you can use to store them. Never store them in plastic or in the fridge.

Oh, and I haven't been out for dinner since my dad took my brother and his wife, my sister and her husband and me out to dinner for my mum's 60th birthday. That was 6 years ago!

I have a couple of small cupboards of basics like rice, pasta, cereal, pulses, spices, oils etc that can hang around for ages; I usually have a few meals in the freezer (frozen home made tomato and bolognese sauce) and I shop for fresh meat/fish/fruit & vegetables/dairy about 2-3 times a week.