Restocking The Fridge For Less

As many of you know, hurricane Irene was a total jerk to our neck of the woods. Not only did it knock trees into nearby homes, cars, poles, and roads, it also took the power out for a pleasant long time. Three days for us. But that was nothing compared to some other areas of our neighborhood (where it was out for over seven days), and other parts of Richmond (which did not get it back for close to two weeks). There was even a contest for the last person to get their power back on a local website.

So yes, three power-less days were annoying, but it could have been waaay worse. The only thing it truly ended up affecting was our fridge. Yup, everything spoiled. So we lost every last container of salad dressing and mustard and soy sauce and cream cheese and every other item that you take for granted because you do not typically buy them all at once (you know, you tend to amass them over time so you are not met with the harsh reality that you simply spent $200 on condiments). Yikes.

So yup, this is a post about the state of our fridge. Because it is house related and save-a-buck related and simply something I hoped to blather on about. I in fact get a surprising amount of requests for couponing updates (and you will see how those tie in momentarily). The good news is that we did not lose everything. There were some items in the fridge that did not absolutely need to be cold to survive, like:

• various containers of berries and other fruit
• some veggies
• sandwich wraps
• wheat flatbread
• garlic
• soda
• chocolate

So during our day-three clean out when the power came back on we were able to pull them out alive. But everything else had to go.

The weirdest casualty was a container of biscuits that in fact popped open on its own from the lack of refrigeration. It was quite Twilight Zone.

Melted ice cream sammies = sad ice-cream loving hubby. Especially because they were not simply melted, they were curdled and rank. So no amount of refreezing was gonna save them.

But let us rewind. Before the hurricane we saw a pointer on TV about freezing ziplock bags of water so you could transfer them from your freezer to your fridge to keep things colder (much like a giant cooler) to hopefully save food if the power is out for an extended amount of time. Wellllll, that was a bust. We diligently filled five or six ziplock bags with water (leaving sufficient unfilled space for them to expand, as directed) and placed them in the freezer. We did not immediately want to transfer them over when we lost power around 4pm (did not want to open the fridge/freezer simply yet), so we went to bed in our interior rooms (explained here) while the hurricane continued to loiter over our fair city for another eight hours and chose to make the switch in the morning.

I do not know what went wrong, but by morning there was a big old wet spot in front of the freezer. You can even see the towel shoved next to the fridge in the picture above. The bags that were supposed to be ice that we could transfer to the fridge had already melted fully and were now leaking out of the fridge and onto the floor. Booo! At least two of them inexplicably punctured themselves or something during the freezing and unfreezing process (although we left plenty of room for them to expand when frozen). So looking back, we wish we had never seen that pointer since it made for a mess that we would not have even had to deal with had we skipped it. Oh well, it was worth a try. And it might work better for someone who could transfer them faster (when they were still ice) although I wonder if they would melt and drip out of the fridge side instead of the freezer side in that case. Hmm. Perhaps our fridge simply does not hold cold air as well as others do, so ice melts swiftly and does not truly make much of a difference in a power-outage situation.

There was one rescue mission that went on about 15 hours into the blackout though. In order to stop the leaking situation we realized we had to toss open the doors to the freezer and grab those bags of water and toss them into the sink (to keep them from continuing to leak/drip)…

… so although it is totally not ideal to open any fridge doors without power (keep that cold air in, baby!) we knew we had to get in there for a sec. So we figured while we were at it we should likely swiftly reach in to save a few things on the fridge side by packing a cooler and bringing them to Grammy and Tom Tom’s house (where they miraculously never lost power at all, and sweetly offered up half a shelf of their fridge). In hyper-speed, before slamming the doors shut we grabbed:

• 12 organic yogurt cups
• organic whole milk (Clara’s) and organic skim milk (ours)
• a pack o’ cheese sticks
• a package of strawberries and blueberries
• 2 laughing cow cheese wheels

All of those items made sense since Clara eats/drinks them a lot so we would have had to rebuy them right away if we did not save them… except for the laughing cow cheese. I have no idea why I panicked and grabbed that. Total auto-pilot grab-the-dairy madness. But at least we saved a few things (which would likely have set us back about $30 if we had to rebuy it all).

So when the power came back on during day three (I heard angels singing) we gave everything a little bit of time to firm back up thanks to the cold and bravely opened the doors. Yuck. It was staaaanky in there. So we held our breath and walked things directly out to the garbage pail outside (which stunk to high heaven until the trash truck came a few days later). But we were able to save the few items that I mentioned in my first little list o’ bullets since they did not need cold air to not spoil (we simply kept them in the fridge for brought in lifespan or because we did not have a breadbox, etc). But everything else was done-zo. Even the bagged salad was slimy and gross. And the giant tub of yogurt. I cannot talk about that. Scarred for life. Note: after snapping this picture we realized we could compost/recycle some of the stuff in the trash so out it came and into our compost/recycle bins it went (must have been in shock from the smell at first and could not think straight).

It was about this time that we realized simply how much stuff we would have to rebuy. Boo.

But John was smart about it. As we tossed things he suggested that we write them down, so we ended up with a shopping list to remind us of all the take-for-granted, perpetually-stocked stuff that we’d likely fully forget to rebuy until we reached for it and did not find it (like ketchup, salad dressing, hummus, syrup, butter, etc).

It was handy to see all the stuff that we needed to rebuy but also kind of a buzz kill in that how-much-is-this-gonna-cost-us way. Then I chose it could become a lively little self-imposed coupon challenge since I seem to have hit a plateau with my couponing adventures (I can save around $40-55 on a big shopping trip, but cannot seem to get past that since we buy a lot of produce/organic stuff and refuse to buy stuff simply because we have a coupon for it if we do not in fact need it simply to see the “you saved X amount” number go higher on the receipt). But I began thinking… perhaps all these common household items that we only buy occasionally could be the coupon jackpot?

There are a heckova lot more coupons for ketchup, mayo, and salad dressing than organic ground turkey and kale, so I figured that my challenge would be this: to try to save as much as possible by hunting down coupons for as many of those items as I could. Of course this big coupon idea set me back a few days while John kept saying “we need to go shopping, woman” and I kept saying “give me time to hunt coupons, man” and we simply ate stuff from the pantry like pasta and cereal along with the few things we saved by bringing them to Grammy’s house (yogurt, milk, fruit, etc). Sure I had a little stockpile of coupons already laying around from before Irene, but this was before I knew my whole fridge would get wiped out (so none of them were for staples that we already had and later lost).

Then we went to the beach for the weekend so that picked up me a bit more time (I reasoned with John that going shopping for a big haul before leaving town for a holiday weekend might not be that smart). But even on our mini beach vacay I picked up the Sunday paper and got a few coupon inserts from John’s mom after she clipped her own stuff and went online to all of the coupon sites that I occasionally peruse (you can read more about those here in this initial couponing post from a while back).

When I got back home I printed and clipped to my heart’s content and even digitally loaded my Kroger card with virtual coupons that I could use when they scanned it at the store (more on that here). So when we at last hit The K-rogue (that is how $herdog says Kroger), I was armed and dangerous coupon-riddled. Note: I have no idea why it took me over a week to get my act together and write this post up. Perhaps it is the same defect that made me inexplicably grab the laughing cow cheese?

Happily, we came home with a ton of stuff (we did not even have sufficient reusable bags for all of it!)…

It in fact felt fairly good. The fridge went from nearly fully empty to looks-like-normal-full for $257.40. It is certainly not nothing. And if you watch those pro coupon shows (where they get 1K worth of food for three dollars) it is downright sad. But we in fact expected it to be a lot worse I think. Some of our normal grocery shopping trips can top $200 when we are running fairly low on stuff (we typically go every two weeks or so, to avoid impulse buys that can add up when you go more frequently). And we were nearly starting from zero this time (we had filled nearly an whole trash can with spoiled food), so we expected that we’d have to buy a lot more than usual (and spend a lot more than usual too).

The only sad thing. I still only saved $47.51.

Cannot a girl catch a break and save over fifty five bucks for once, K-rogue? Oh well, $47.51 is still money saved. And it certainly would have hurt more to see a total that began with a three at the register (it was originally over $300 but thanks to the coupons it came down near $250). And there is consistently next time. At least the fridge is full again and my wraps will not go hummus-less while my salads go dressing-less. And the fridge itself has never looked cleaner. We scrubbed that baby to the bone when she was empty.

Of course I got a few catalinas at the checkout (not all ones that I will in fact use, but we are certainly suckers for yogurt, so…). The cycle continues.

And you know we enjoy a good after picture or two, so behold… the freshly stocked fridge:

All in all, it was a pleasant little fridge makeover. Now I am off to call my insurance company because someone mentioned that some of them might reimburse you for food that spoils in natural disasters like hurricanes. That would be fairly pleasant. Update: simply realized our deductible is much higher than $250, so never mind.

Anyone else doing any fridge cleaning or restocking? Or hitting a coupon plateau? Better yet, have you broken through it and ache to tell me your secrets? Please do.

Psst- Check out this initial post all about couponing for specific deets about how I save money/use coupons – and check out a ton of excellent pointers in the comment section while you are at it. I am totally JV but there are plenty of varsity couponers out there.

Psssst- We announced this week’s giveaway winners. Click here to see if you are one of them.