My annual pantry reset: Why it starts with Thanksgiving

As we near the end of October, you may already have Thanksgiving on your mind. Perhaps you are traveling this season or planning to join friends and family nearby to celebrate the occasion. Maybe you are the one that is hosting this year, maybe for the first time or maybe you host every year. If that is the case, you may be getting ready to plan the feast and deep clean the house.

As someone who falls into that later category, I have often described Thanksgiving to others as my first foray into project management. In my early years of hosting, I generally tended to begin preparing for the meal about a week before. Over the years I have come to understand that like any project, planning and preparing a feast of this scale is a series of smaller tasks that begins 6 to 8 weeks before the actual event. One reason for this is that in my home, Thanksgiving is actually the kick-off to a much larger project that involves taking stock of my pantry, including home canned foods, using up the rest of last year’s stock and building up stock for a new year.

Why Thanksgiving is my stocking season

By the time Thanksgiving is on the horizon, my summer garden is winding down. After months of harvesting and preserving the bounty from my garden and fruit trees, you might think I’d be eager to pack up the canning equipment and tuck it away in the garage for winter. Instead, I’m clearing out last year’s preserves to make room for the new and taking advantage of the holiday’s low turkey prices. Thanksgiving has become the grand finale of my stocking-up season.

November and December are my busiest months in the kitchen. However, this investment of time, over the course of a few weeks, not only saves me money over the coming year, but a great deal of time over the rest of the year and ensures that less food goes to waste in our home. 

Taking stock before stocking up

When it comes to organizing my food storage, I follow the National Center for Home Food Preservation guidance for storing home canned food. This includes not stacking my jars, storing preserved food at an ideal temperature and using up what I preserve within one year. This requires that I track and use what I have in stock within a timeframe.

While modern homes are beautiful with their wide-open spaces, they are not designed to store a year’s worth of preserved food. In addition, one significant challenge that I face as a desert dweller is that my home does not have a basement. Storing food in the garage is not a great option either because of temperature swings throughout the year.  

For my home this means that food storage is spread across three rooms, which include a nice sized pantry in my kitchen, the laundry room and the closet of a spare bedroom that we utilize for multiple purposes. When you factor in what I have in the refrigerator at any given moment and a large freezer in the garage, you can see how this would pose a challenge in keeping track of what I have in stock.

Before the busiest cooking season of the year begins, I take stock of the preserves approaching the one-year mark and plan our household meals around them. It’s a simple idea, but putting it into practice takes time and effort.

At this point I do not have a formal system for pantry inventory, and I rely heavily on this annual routine in concurrence with my Thanksgiving preparation. It is not my intention to wear myself out in this process, so I do not inventory my entire food storage over a day or two. Instead, I do this over the course of a few weeks, one shelf at a time across all my food storage zones. 

Keeping a well-stocked pantry organized comes with its own challenges, especially when storage space is limited. I’ll explore the logistics of managing food storage in a future article. For now, let’s look at why I find the investment worthwhile.  

The economics of a well-stocked pantry

While it is always my goal to grow and preserve most of the food that we consume over the year in our own home garden, there are times when it is more economically feasible to purchase something from the store. Even when you factor in a one-time cost to purchase equipment for preserving food including reusable canning jars, and a pressure cooker, that investment will pay you back overtime by allowing you to take advantage of Thanksgiving turkey sales. When you are stocking a pantry on a budget, seasonal sales can have a big impact on saving money on groceries throughout the year.  

You may have already noticed that there are times in the year when certain items are on sale. For example, turkey and ham are two proteins that receive remarkable markdowns in price over the holiday season in the U.S. Honestly, it would cost 4 to 10 times more to grow and harvest them as livestock here in the desert. In many areas of the U.S., the price of turkey in November and December typically ranges from 50 cents to $1 per pound. Every year our family easily consumes at least 4-6 turkeys, often in place of chicken. When you include the broth that we also make and preserve from the bones that would have otherwise been discarded, the price just cannot be beaten.

There is also a time investment to consider. For me, the time investment for canning 4-6 turkeys is on average 24-32 hours. This includes deboning and chopping the turkey, preparing the jars for the process, canning the turkey using the raw pack method provided by the NCHF, and preparing and canning the broth. A few days of work yields at least 20 quarts of preserved turkey and 20 quarts of turkey broth for future meals. This pays off in a big way during the rest of the year.

Preserving turkey with minimal seasoning gives us a versatile substitute for more expensive chicken. A single quart jar can provide the filling for tacos, BBQ sandwiches or pot pie, or the base for a hearty soup. Having it on hand helps us put dinner together quickly on busy weeknights when takeout or the drive-thru might otherwise be tempting.

For me, preparing for Thanksgiving is about more than putting a holiday meal on the table. It’s an opportunity to take stock of what we have, make better use of our resources and prepare for the months ahead. Of course, you don’t need to preserve a year’s worth of food to benefit from this approach. Even taking an afternoon to go through a cupboard or freezer can help you make better use of what you already have and avoid purchasing things you don’t need.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll share more about how I prepare for Thanksgiving, from planning the meal to stocking the pantry and making the most of our leftovers. Next week, we’ll start with the infamous game plan that helps me bring it all together. 

New to “In Season?” Learn more about why I share these projects and my approach to living well by living with the seasons. 

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