Trip to Town | Foods We Buy & Don't Buy

today we are taking you guys on a trip into town we're heading into Willow that's our first stop and then we're gonna be heading over to Wasilla which is about an hour away some of the things we're gonna be doing is going to a large hardware store a sporting goods store and we even have to pick up some food for the dogs and the cats first off is the post office in Willow so we are going to head out so Eric and I are down in Willow now and when we left our house it was 40 degrees and it's 25 here which is crazy because we came down in elevation and we're only like 15 20 minutes away from our house but that is how big of temperature difference it can be nothing in the mail today alright that was our one stop we had to make Hin willow so off to the big town Lowe's is our first stop we're gonna head inside and get the spies mean next up on our list we are at the Sportsman's Warehouse in Wasilla we got some little lures for ice fishing because that is going to be the season soon and we just need to wait for the lakes and rivers degrees we're off to Freddie's now Eric's making the last pit stop at ETSU to pick up some cat food one thing I wanted to point out is how often we come into town we are kind of in a schedule where we're coming into town probably every three weeks to once a month ideally we'd like to come in even less than that because we find the less we come into town the less money we spend when we first moved here over a year ago we were coming into town quite a bit more because we were living in the dry cabin we found ourselves needing quite a bit more as far as food went and getting set up where we lived so we're gonna get home and get our sink installed today and put away some of this stuff we got back to go to the pet store cuz they give out free popcorn so got some we're back at the cabin and the main reason that Eric I went into town was to pick up this sink behind us so when we moved in here a year ago we put in our own sink and it was a galvanized tub it wasn't really meant to be a sink so we're having kind of rust issues with it there was no shallow spot where the water would drain out of it easily so we got an actual sink and this thing is pretty awesome so far we're really loving it we love how it looks the galvanized sink was a really cute idea but not very functional and we learned that I guess really quickly this is a true sink it's a utility' it's like a fiberglass blend and it is awesome it's low budget it's cheaper than if you're looking at a you know an actual true sink for a kitchen like a stainless steel or porcelain those were some 100 this was way more affordable and it's huge which we love for pots and just cleaning all that kind of stuff and when we were in town yesterday picking up all the supplies we could have sworn that we had leftover red paint to paint the wood we're gonna have to put in here but then we got home and realized that we painted our chicken coop door with that red paint so this thing's not all the way done next time we run to town we are gonna have to match the paint and just throw some paint on there but other than that we think it turned out pretty good also while we were in town the other day we didn't do some grocery shopping we thought it would be fun to talk a little bit about what we get from the store but we don't buy and just show you guys what we bought yesterday which was a really minimal trip for us I got wheat flour and more wheat flour I stopped that bought flour looks like there's a hole in that bag I snuck up on flour for a long time I got some brown sugar is on sale lots of things on sale because it's Thanksgiving time brown rice brown rice and we've got baking powder we go through this whether it's you know pancakes or Bannock bread we use a lot of that we've got another like Ariel said this is this is not a lot of food we didn't have to get a lot of things while we were in town but the main trip was for that sink as far as how often we go to town we really just try to limit it as little as we can I think the last time we went was two weeks ago two weeks ago so that's yeah that's pretty good sounds pretty far so we're just trying to minimize how often we go because there big costs when you're driving an hour each way ideally we would probably go to the grocery store I'm gonna be cool if we can't go every few months I think we'll probably maybe at every month - every other month we've been spacing out our trips more and more especially since we don't we were you know we were able to grow some food this year we have the pig things like that we have some fish so it's just a little easier to go in every once in a while and stock that we actually have quite a bit more of this stuff put away in our conics and some other areas in our house we're also just trying to minimize our overall consumerism even from the grocery store I mean you can tell all this stuff comes in plastic bags so that's not ideal it's definitely better than just buying bulk but we can't find that brown rice in bulk as of right now we were going to talk a little bit about some of the other things that we stock up on and some of these stuff that we have shipped to us as you can tell flour is one of the main things that we stock up on we have a sourdough starter that we use to make our bread products this is some of the other stuff we stock up on oops we go through quite a bit of oatmeal we have more flour we have a bread flour and our white flour coffee that's kind of a big one around here we probably drink 2 cups a day each and then we always have a lot of beans here we have black lentils lentils and some navy beans one thing that we've tried to look into is buying more food in bulk but we just economically haven't been able to find a cheaper option than some of the things that are offered at a local grocery store which is crazy you think you could get it cheaper online but believe it or not we thought you found the cheapest prices so these are pretty much our main staples and they work really good with us because all this stuff can kind of be mixed with a lot of the stuff we have canned in the root cellar like beans rice oats those are all really good things to add to meals and one more thing that we do buy is we buy whole milk we have kefir grains that we turn over daily and we drink giver both the kefir and the sourdough starter do require quite a bit of milk and flour we're trying to our consumption of those now that we talked about some of the foods that we do buy we are going to go over some of the things that we don't buy or haven't bought in a few years something that I think we always stock up on when we used to go to grocery store was pasta we don't buy any pasta anymore and snacks such as crackers chips things like that we don't have any snacks anymore like none like when you're hungry here you have to sit down you have to make a meal which it kind of sucks but you you really do get used to it yeah we start buying snacks like that process process quite a few years ago so it's been a learning curve yeah it definitely has it another thing that you see a lot of households that you won't see in ours anymore is butter and cheese we cut those out at least a year ago we do sometimes occasionally buying certain things for recipes but it's pretty infrequent actually we do a lot of substituting we'll use coconut oil and apple sauce again on occasion we have bought some cheese but it's just not a part of our normal routine other things that we don't buy anymore are canned foods or jarred foods we used to stock up a lot in that kind of stuff you know sun-dried tomatoes pepper teenies before we made them yeah and what was the one olives we used to buy all of us a lot and we just totally omit all that from our diet we don't buy canned foods like that anymore but we do make our own campus now and along with that we started to admit pretty much all condiments that you can think of Eric does a lot of natural seasoning and bringing for his meat we don't use a bunch of spices a lot of our spices have been gifted to us actually which is nice but we just normally try to focus more on what we can grow ourselves yeah when I used to make meat and jerky and things like that it was washed ashore it was teriyaki sauce it was soy sauce it was all of those high sodium type of condiments and we just don't use those anymore we've found different ways to flavor our meats and cook our foods one more huge thing that we took out of our diet was processed meats we used to dice la me lunch meats sausages sometimes yeah just you know regular packaged meat and we haven't bought packaged meat and quite a while again there's some exceptions to that but for the most part we've been pretty frugal through our adulthood because that type of things dairy and meat more expensive and we just avoided those as a whole for that reason and I think when we both had jobs and worked more and you know could afford more we did start to get in the habit of maybe spending more on food and we just totally cut that back at this point our lives and I'm not going to talk about it too much in this episode but we definitely have minimize our spending on products that are for cleaning beauty products hair products we just don't buy any of that stuff I don't like throwing away the bottles that you have to buy it in and we don't feel like spending the money on it you can make a lot of that stuff on your own and make our own toothpaste we don't buy paper towels that's one thing we just use kitchen towels because you buy them and you throw them away and that pain is painful to me so we just avoid that we do buy toilet paper though as you saw another day we haven't decided to go that far yet so there's a lot of stuff that you've seen our videos on these shelves behind us and you might be wondering like what is in these jars what do these people have I'm gonna jump behind the camera and Ariel's gonna get in here and kind of show you what is going on behind us on our shelves so before I get started like Eric mentioned some of this stuff is what we've grown and harvested and we're going to be moving towards that trend you know the longer we live here I'm gonna be phasing out of some of the stuff that we have up here in the corner I have some colorful stuff I've got chlorella and spirulina and you have turmeric powder beetroot powder and ginseng I bought a lot of that stuff back a few years ago when I was really going through a health phase and now I just feel like buying things that are you know in my in my opinion that's still processed so it's better to not have stuff shipped to you if you can forge it or grow it on your own so that's what we're going for here these are coriander seeds and these next spices are ones that we were able to harvest this year we've got dill seeds I've got sage this is parsley we have rosemary tarragon believe this is oregano okay that's more parsley and then I have celery leaves oregano and thyme and then the rest of these herbs we grew way too many herbs are in conics we continue on with some coconut oil coconut oil is one that we buy quite a bit of the only other oil that we use quite a bit of is lard when we have it and I do on occasion use olive oil I've got some cleaning products washing soda so it varies tea we have salt salt and pepper it's things that we will continue to buy even when we don't have spices we have corn masa grits we've got some bulgur brown rice beans cornmeal peas some of beans we grew and this is red palm oil this is for soap making once they run out I probably not going to be buying it again this is our tea section so this is something I'm very excited about because we forged pretty much all of this stuff this is birch polypore that's been dried a b-bomb behind there we have Labrador tea and we have a mixture of orange and catnip this is mint we have a few jars of chaga I have Clary sage and yarrow some more lemon balm chamomile this is a really strong concoction I told you guys about its marigolds and chamomile and that will knock you out if you change that right this is mr. shim and they have some lemon verbena and pineapple sage that we heard this year more chamomile and some lemongrass I have nutritional flakes flaxseed chia seed this is cacao powder I will probably always buy this because this is really useful for a lot of the baking we do we have dried blueberries we're running low on those syrup is a treat around here we stopped buying this a while ago but we were doing a few recipes that we wanted to use it on and I'm almost out of my coconut shreds I've got some popcorn kernels back there and I have some cornstarch then we go into our like coffee tea section so we have brown sugar and sugar Eric and I generally didn't eat very much sugar until we got those bees and we had to start buying sugar so that's something we really need to work on reducing we were buying hunting a lot more in the past and we really aren't buying any honey here next we have coffee and then some of these vinegars vinegars is my one weakness back home we used to buy so many of them we had balsamic golden balsamic we had a red wine vinegar white wine vinegar apple cider all of them I just have three right here again mainly for recipes the main one that I use is apple cider vinegar the rest of this is cups and bowls and plates and I have a little bit of laundry and dish soap solution stuff at the end so hopefully in a year this will be close to 100 percent of all that we grew or harvested right now it's not but we're still happy with what we were able to harvest this year let's take a look at one more thing that we have which is what is inside of our refrigerator this is our refrigerator which is just a little cooler that we keep cold by putting in some ice jugs and I have to warn you it's a little bit of a science project experiment in here I always thought that was funny in our old frigerator back home we just ended up having canned goods that look like this and usually no labels this is herb butter we have apple sauce and pesto apple jelly cat food I think I have some leftover salmon stuff for raviolis the one condiment that we kept buying was mustard so we usually always buy mustard but recently we invested in some mustard seeds and mustard powder so we're going to be making our own mustard from aerelon this is kiefer that I changed over yesterday and this is mayonnaise that that Eric made the other day we have two containers full of snow in here and those keep our milk cold that's virtually the only thing that needs to be kept that cold a lot of this stuff would be fine if it was kept warmer or if we just had it outdoors again we just try to minimize what we need to keep at this temperature so on that note I wanted to say that Eric and I are 100% not perfect we are far from it and the only reason we really eat this way is economically you know it's cheap to go out there and forge your own food and it's also I think can be low lower cost to grow some of it we also do enjoy just knowing some of the ingredients that are in our food that's our main reason why we eat this way that is it for today's video we hope you guys enjoy getting a look at some of the more private aspects of our lives and we will catch you guys next time you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 616,768

Rating: 4.9410167 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, off grid vlog, alaska vlog, homestead alaska, cabin life, tiny house alaska, off grid cabin, daily life off grid, winter in alaska, full time off grid, living in a tiny house, cabin in alaska, winter cabin living, day in the life off grid, homestead off grid, pantry tour, off grid food storage, off grid fridge, root cellar food storage, underground root cellar, storing dry herbs, storing spices, storing foods mason jars

Id: oWTJW2fV5DA

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 24 2019