SanDiego1K

We are 10 weeks or thereabouts into quarantine. I'm curious as to what you bought in the run up to quarantine, what you should have bought and didn't, and what you bought and haven't used. A friend never cooks. She and her husband eat very good take out. She joined the scramble to buy food and stocked up on things she never uses, such as beans and tuna. We have a food pantry drive going on at our church and I thought what a great opportunity to move along such purchases. We didn't buy anything and I'm happy with that decision. We are good home cooks and have a well stocked pantry. Grocery stores continued to have the fresh food that we primarily buy. We also were able to buy takeout from favorite restaurants that switched to a takeout/delivery model.

Where we've run short:

• 409 - found it just in time at Smart and Final last week, then received a delivery from Shoplet so am back from having none to having excess.
• cashews from Costco - we didn't go there for several weeks. A friend now includes our shopping with hers. Costco didn't have cashews online for a few days. When we ordered, it took a couple weeks to get them. Fortunately, they are a treat and not an essential.
• Arnold Palmer iced tea/lemonade mix, zero calories - this has been in scarce supply throughout. A friend bought 20 cans at Stater Bros on Sunday for us. That wiped out their inventory.
• chicken from Costco - no surprise, given that many food processing plants are Covid19 hotbeds and have closed.

What are your stories?

BamaVol

Right now I have 3 packages of pasta in the pantry. I was worried that I couldn’t get out for the fresh veggies I spiralize instead. It will be donated. We ate the canned ham (story posted elsewhere) and I took a lot of crap over it. I bought canned soup and we ate it even though Florida in spring is hardly soup weather. I stocked up on canned tuna. But we eat 4 cans a week so no big deal. It was a mad scramble to get flour and yeast. I am baking like crazy and enjoying it. I had never baked a thing until a month ago. I have extra canned veggies. They’ll get eaten eventually. It’s not like I bought Lima beans or anything I wouldn’t normally like. I have a freezer full of meat and fish. All good. We aren’t ready to eat out yet and only do takeout once a week.

JBord

We didn't hoard. Didn't realize it would be a "thing" in time though and nearly ran out of toilet paper when we couldn't find it in stores for many weeks. We found an 18 pack at Target several cities over, just in time. So maybe that was an official hoarding, since we would typically buy 12 packs or fewer.

We have a little more meat than usual in the freezer, including a few cuts that we would typically buy and use but never freeze. Most people would look in our freezer and think it's normal or even a little bare though. Funny thing about meat, most people here seem to hoard boneless, skinless chicken breasts, ground turkey and beef, etc. I like a lot of the less typical cuts -- give me bone-in, skin on chicken thighs any day, or wings and drumsticks. Ground lamb, hanger and skirt steaks, and so forth.

Haven't run out of anything. Stores here seem to be out of different things at different times. So it's become somewhat common to visit two grocery stores in one trip to get everything we need.

gfunkdave

We bought a bunch of beans, soup, canned veggies, and pasta. I've been slowly working my way through it. Last night I sauteed some chicken sausage with a can of kidney beans and a can of cherry tomatoes. Added a little stock, garlic salt, pepper, herbs. It was good.

And tater tots.

lhrsfo

We bought tuna, baked beans, pasta, tinned tomatoes, papads, tomato puree, more spices where we were low, some single pints of milk for the freezer, together with butter, chicken breasts, minced beef and lamb, sea bass fillets, smoked haddock, rice, flour, jam etc. These are all things which we generally keep and only restock when we get low, whereas we wanted two weeks' supply.

On top of that, we made batches of bolognese, puttanesca, moussaka, etc.

The issue is that we still need to have two week's supply in case we need to self-quarantine, but we feel the need to change the freezer supplies over so that they don't get stale. Next weekend is the date we've set to do the inventory and restock where necessary.

kipper

I picked up more frozen veggies and some canned veggies at the start of all of this. I haven't needed to restock on much of anything, because the freezer is still filled with meats, plus I do Dream Dinners once a month, and supplemented it with Gobble this month. I did place my normal stock up order for toilet paper, paper towels, etc., before all of this started.

I guess I did stock up on Lysol laundry sanitizer, because trying to find it is ridiculous!

bitterproffit

I usually buy the Costco frozen ground beef 6 pack of 1lb tubes but they were out and the grocery store was out of ground beef. The only thing I could find was this huge pack of fresh ground meat at Costco. It was almost 8 lbs on one tray. I took it home and broke it down into 8 one pound loafs and froze them. I felt like a hoarder.

Two days later a derecho came through and knocked out the power for a few days, so I took them to a friend’s house who had power and room in a freezer.

And, just to make sure I didn’t run out if I had to self isolate for a couple weeks, I have an extra bag of York peppermint patties. I will hoard those as essential for life.

kipper

Chocolate is essential to life!

anaggie

Stocked up on rice and whole wheat flour to make roti since that is our daily staple. We will go thru it over time. Didn’t go overboard on anything else. I knew that the grocery stores would keep bringing in stuff. A few weeks ago, bought extra chicken breasts and thighs just in case. They will last 6 months in deep freeze so we will finish them in time.

Didn’t really need to stock up on anything else since we keep a well stocked fridge, pantry and freezer.

gaobest

I bought other flours for baking tries and I’ve yet to use them. Mostly Bob’s products - tapioca flour, blanched almond flour, something else.

I bought semolina flour because it’s italian and I thought it was same as 00 flour. I’m sort of seeking 00 but I can keep buying frozen multi or whole wheat pizza dough for now as I won’t try making those pizza doughs. Or we just keep eating the pizza on multi or whole wheat dough. It’s hard to argue with a $3 max dough ball from my cornershop (where I got 4 lbs of yeast and the 50-lb bag of flour) and I can buy it for $1.99 at Gus’ instead.

and I bought a 5-lb bag of organic 00 flour, made by a local flour company. $12.96 or so - I had paid $14 for a 50-lb bag of all purpose (non-organic) flour from the same cornershop.

Hope it works - I’ll still use the Roberta Bklyn recipe for it.

obscure2k

Prior to quarantine, I always bought my fresh produce at a local Farmers Market and never had frozen vegetables in the house. Now, I have frozen asparagus, green beans, spinach and peas. I also have chocolate chips and walnuts for delicious banana bread. I haven't had chocolate chips since my kids were little.

vargha

We stocked up. But it wasn't really for things we wouldn't consume. So, we have extra frozen chicken breasts and sirloin burger patties in the freezers right now. The PB and a few other things are stocked more than usual, but they'll all get eaten. The only food we bought for the SHTF scenarios was 40 pounds of rice, 12 pounds of lentils, and 4 pounds of pinto beans. If things calm down, and I still remain employed, the rice and lentils will go to a food bank. My wife was using one of the 20 pound bags of rice for an online workout class she was teaching for her gym.

Tpa-flyer

The only decidedly different thing we added to our shopping list was canned tuna. We've been making tuna salad every other week whereas previously we might have made it once year. We always keep an array of canned soups on hand, but for quarantine we widened our selections and added several additional cans to the pantry. Before the shelter in place life, we went to Costco about twice a month, but we haven't been there since early March relying now on Safeway curbside pick up. Yesterday I went on the Costco website to research a product only to learn my membership expired on April 30. Surprise! I don't plan on renewing it any time soon, but will return to Costco for sure once we have a vaccine. We haven't hoarded anything, really, and have bumped along so far w/o any problems just by replenishing the larder as we need to.

pmiranda

Nothing.
For two months of stay-at-home we've been doing our regular shopping once a week. Buying a little more than usual since we're eating meals at home that would normally be eaten out, but less than 50% more. Easy to say since the stores we visit have been limiting how much people are allowed to buy at once to discourage hoarding, and we have been able to get take-out food for at least 4 meals a week, partly for variety, and partly to give business to our favorite non-chain restaurants that really need it.
Definitely recycling alot more takeout containers since we're not eating at restaurants yet.
I did make one big buy at the beginning of this month: couldn't find Tilex anywhere local so I ordered a case on Amazon for a reasonable price. Kept two to use and gave away the rest to neighbors in need.
[Edit:] I'm going to have to make a run to the liquor store soon... running low on rum for hurricane season!

kipper

That is something i stockpiled... Alcohol!