Grocery Staples

[surgtech1956]

What are your grocery staples or on your weekly grocery list? Do you buy snacks, chips, popcorn, cookies, etc...?

Ours is: fruit(bananas, seasonal), fresh veggies(lettuce, carrots, celery, onions, cucumbers, radishes, (ususally) broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts), milk, eggs, bread, juice, a couple times of month - cereal(grape nuts, oatmeal, raisin bran, honey nut cheerios), cheese, spaghetti sauce, canned and frozen veggies, frozen pizza, peanut butter, butter, yogurt, canned and dry beans, condiments, potatoes, rice

I hate to say but we like our potato chips and buy them a couple of times a month. I like my salty snacks and DGF likes sweets.

[shootingstar]

There are certain staples both of us have, while other stuff he and I individually have, because the other person just isn't interested in having the stuff regularily.

Nearly every week to have on hand:
freshly baked bread, rice, oranges, lemon, 1-2 fresh herb bunches per wk. (basil, dill, thyme or mint), parsley, 3-4 different veggies per week (whatever is in season/on sale, usually 1 Chinese veggie plus whatever else), mushrooms, ginger root, white onion, green onion, garlic, fruits (1-3 types weekly), then in additional we each have strong preferences), egg whites, small amount of meat (1 type: seafood or chicken breast), pasta (eggless or Asian dried noodles. I no longer buy Italian styled dried. But love freshly made Italian as an indulgence.), raisins.

Him: plain low-fat yogurt, carrots, apples, bananas (I eat latter 3, but not as much), sunflower seeds, walnuts

Me: skim milk, oatmeal, tea, grapefruit/pears.

These are staples after all, not the indulgences 2-3 times per month ie. goat cheese. But we don't buy butter, peanut butter, chips, sugar, jam, etc. for home. We rarely buy dried beans.

We have our cookies, chips, desserts, etc. at cafes, other people's homes, restaurants.

We would actually find things very dull if we didn't have: fresh ginger root, onions and garlic on hand at all times. Plus safflower cooking oil, chili paste and reduced sodium soy sauce on hand all times.

[OakLeaf]

Fresh fruit and vegies - with a preference for local and seasonal, but I confess I'm not perfect on that count. Usually we'll also have canned and frozen produce on hand from the previous year's harvest.

Peanut butter
Shelled nuts (DH prefers pistachios, I prefer walnuts, but sometimes we get pecans or almonds)
Yes it usually takes us more than a week to go through a jar of PB or a pound of nuts!

Cereal, cold or hot depending on season
Often but not always - raisins or other dried fruit
Soy, rice or hemp milk

Dried beans and lentils (chickpeas are my favorite! but we like all kinds)
Dried grains (usually we'll have at least three kinds of rice on hand, plus maybe some barley, quinoa or buckwheat)
Pasta
Parmesan
Parsley
Olive oil

Salt-free broth cubes if we're low on homemade stock

Wheat-free yeast-free bread if we're down south where there are two good local bakeries. Up north, occasionally, but not always, sprouted grain tortillas or other flatbreads.

We usually have on hand, but use very sparingly so we buy them maybe every two to three months, local eggs and some local cheese. I'll buy cheeses that aren't local, but not eggs unless I need them for holiday baking and can't get them locally.

+1 on the ginger, onions and garlic, plus herbs and spices

[ZenSojourner]

Milk - I buy it 5 gallons at a time
Fruit - oranges, tangerines, tangelos, clementines (in season), bananas, berries (in season), mangoes
Vegetables - carrots, celery, potatoes, eggplant, green beans, peppers, tomatoes - mostly whatever grows in the garden is what we eat in season
Sugar (my dad goes through 5 lbs a week, I don't use it at all)
oatmeal
frozen omelets (I make lousy omelets and my dad loves these)
Grape juice
cilantro, garlic, ginger (whenever we're out)
fresh green chilies
Hamburger, corned beef ribs, sausage, or pot roast (this is for my dad, I hardly eat meat)
bread

Things I stock up on but don't need every week:
coffee (for my dad)
flour
salt
Baking soda
baking powder
yeast
rice (basmati, preferably)
toor dahl (dahl is split legumes of several sorts)
urad dahl
chana dahl
moong dahl
chappati flour
rice flour
semolina
Urad flour
besan (chana flour)

Fruit Salt
Tamarind

curry leaf
curry powder
black mustard seed
turmeric
fennel
clove
cardamom, seed, whole, ground
Coriander, ground and whole
cumin, ground and whole
amchur (mango powder)
black cumin seed
Powdered fenugreek
Dried red chilis, whole and powdered
asofoetida
mamri-style tea (for chai)
Papad
Chips (not potato chips, this is an Indian thing I can't really describe)
mango pulp

Extra-firm tofu

Rarely - chicken, ground lamb, brown sugar, oil, vinegar, wine vinegar, brown rice, couscous, wine or sake, sea salt, cheese, bacon, catsup, tartar sauce (for my dad), saffron

[shootingstar]

Zensojourner- hope your dad will consider substituting some of the sugar with honey or sugarless applesauce instead of sugar. It's a serious amount there. He can't afford this impact on his health at his age.

Looking at all your different flours -- reminds me that we've been down to 1 c. of white flour--for past 4 wks. Just used as a sauce thickener. (His style of making sauce. I make my sauces differently.) But need that bigger bag of flour for focaccia later. We buy no other flour type for home.

[ZenSojourner]

There is no way my dad is going to cut down on his sugar, and there is absolutely no point in asking him to at his age. He's 89 and he's survived 4 bouts with cancer - I don't think sugar has impacted his health much, not compared to the carcinogens he was exposed to working in machine shops in the 30's and 40's. He has no weight problem, no sign of diabetes. Short of his suddenly becoming diabetic, which is just not going to happen, there is no way I'd even consider asking him to cut back.

If *I* ate that much sugar, I'd be one of those people on Dr. Phil, who are too fat to fit through their own doorways. But he handles it just fine. It's one of the few things he can still enjoy. I'm just really grateful I didn't inherit his sweet tooth.

As far as the flour, I make chappati and puri, have done for years. I'm learning to make dosai and idli - finally found some recipes for that that don't require a lot of grinding. And I am just now in the process of learning to make bread, though I've made pizza dough for years.

[Tuckervill]

Heck ya, he's lived long enough to enjoy whatever he likes!

It seems like the only staple I buy a lot of is gallons and gallons of organic milk! I bought 4-1/2 gallons on Monday, still had 1 gallon in the fridge, and I'm down to 2-1/2 gallons.

That's just from one teenage boy and the half an ounce I put in my tea every morning!

Luckily, I can buy it at Sam's club for less than the local store, 3 halves at a time, and since it is ultra-pasteurized it lasts for 6 weeks before going bad. But it never makes it 6 weeks in this house. He drank the last batch labeled for May 30 before it was even May!

Then, I keep Rotel tomatoes and chilies in the cabinet, along with tomato soup, just for him. During baseball season we have to keep whatever can be made at the last minute--sandwich stuff, etc., because there is usually no time for cooking.

Karen

[OakLeaf]

It's a good thing I can't get papadum locally. I'm pretty restrained about snack food but those are just too good.

ZenS, you seem so enterprising, have you ever tried making them from scratch? I've read that they're an enormous pain... but so is bread...

[ZenSojourner]

Papad from scratch?

Enormous pain doesn't BEGIN to cover it, LOL! It's much worse than making idli or dosai the traditional way.

Here's a link describing the process briefly:

http://www.aayisrecipes.com/2008/06/...ddina-happala/

When she talks about uradgram, what she means is urad dahl, whole, with skins still on, brought to the household by tenant farmers in wooden barrels. Basically this is the raw bean picked straight off the plant.

That stone thing is a grinding mill for separating the urad from it's skin and crushing or splitting it. This had to be done by hand with that heavy heavy stone and a heavy piece of wood for pounding the urad. The separating is done by hand too.

This is sort of like having to harvest the wheat, separate the grain from the chaff, and then grind it. She was cleaning this stuff by hand and then paying someone to pound it and clean some more.

Even if you buy the urad already cleaned and split, it's still a huge pain to make papad. You still have to grind the stuff into a paste (that's what the second stone thing with the hand held stone thing on top of it is for), make the wafers, and spread them to dry in the sun. Here are some pictures of handmade papads drying in the sun:





They have machines to do all the cleaning, pounding, grinding, paste making, rolling out, and drying. For about $1 I can buy enough papads for a month. There is just no way I would even try this, LOL! This is the sort of thing that only worked when women slaved from dusk to dawn trying to take care of the household because it was that or starve. I can't tell you how much I admire the generations of women who did these sorts of onerous tasks, and more, to keep their families alive. Food preparation and storage was a daily task that could not be shirked because there was no grocery store to turn to when the (winter, monsoon, or other non-growing season) came.

Today we wouldn't want to do this anymore than we would want to take our clothes to the river and clean them by pounding on them with rocks.

They are a MUCH more enormous pain that bread making, LOL!

Early in my marriage I actually did consider making papad from scratch, because everything's better from scratch, right?

However my then-husband (now ex) dissuaded me from this notion rather rapidly. Having actually witnessed the huge amount of labor that goes into making papad, he pronounced himself MORE than happy with the store-bought stuff, as any negligible improvement in taste for having made it by hand was more than offset by the guilt he felt over the tremendous amount of work.

This from the man who insisted I should be ironing his underwear. If HE thought it was too much work, it was REALLY too much work, LOL!