How to Make Your Food and Supplies Last

Once we have our food and supplies for staying at home, how can we make them last? Since we can’t really go to the store, Instacart deliveries are a week out (at least where we live), and lots of food and supplies are sold out – I wanted to share my tips for making your current supplies last as long as possible:

How to Make Your Supplies Last

• Water Bottles: Opt for drinking water from your refrigerator filter. If your fridge doesn’t have a filter, a Brita also works. Use your bottles for times like exercise, etc. where you need your water to be more mobile and accessible. 
• Paper Towels: Keep a bunch of clean hand towels in your kitchen to dry your clean hands after washing. Make sure to compile the wet towels on a regular basis to wash them. You can then save your coveted paper towels for necessary tasks of cleaning, cooking, etc. Here is my favorite hand towel – works and washes up really well, love the black color, and it’s only $1.99!
• Soap: If you have an automatic soap pump (this Simple Human one is what we have used for 5 years and love!), set your setting to an amount that releases enough soap, but not too much. 

Food

• Food: Instead of cooking and choosing meals based on what sounds the best at the time, aim to try to use up all of your food based on the expiration dates. It makes for a fun challenge to be efficient with food usage and to come up with new meals with different food combinations! My most recent favorite is what I like to call a ‘garden pasta or risotto.’ I chop up and sauté all kinds of veggies to add to the pasta dish to use before they go bad – plus it makes for a super healthy meal.
• Leftovers: If you have extras from dinner, make sure to save them in the refrigerator to eat later or freeze them to eat another day. When we make burgers, we make a couple extra patties to freeze and then heat up days later for a quick meal. These are the best (in my opinion) storage containers for food.
• Freeze Your Foods: If you won’t be able to finish your loaf of bread before it goes bad, make sure to toss it in the freezer. Food like bread, chicken, meat, bananas, vegetables, and even avocados can be frozen to save for later.
• Bake Desserts: If you have overripe bananas and some baking supplies, try making banana bread. You’d be surprised what you can bake with the ingredients that you have on hand. Makes for a fun date night!
• Extra Freezer: Having an extra fridge or freezer definitely helps provide more space for storing extra food. Also, it can serve as a good backup in case something were to happen to your main fridge. Here’s a small one that is still in stock (unfortunately most are out of stock, including the one we got – crazy!).

Cleaning Supplies

• Cleaning wipes: If your cleaning wipes are large enough, you can cut them in half to double the amount that you have.
• Dishwasher Detergent: Coalesce your dishwashing cycles by only running it when your dishwasher is completely full. This decreases the amount of detergent or pods you use because you’ll be running it less.
• Laundry Detergent: You can also coalesce your laundry loads by waiting to run a cycle until there’s a large load. If you have an automatic detergent dispenser on your washer, select the lowest setting to conserve detergent.
• Dryer Sheets: Use them for more than one load of laundry – I use mine for a few loads before discarding, and they still seem to work for eliminating static (although the scent may be diminished).

Do you have any tips? Share them below and feel free to contact me anytime. Stay safe!