The forecast here for the next few days is for 6″-10″ of snow.  Which means we could get anything from a light dusting to three feet.  (Colorado weather can be exciting.)  And, as a local radio station observed, that probably means that by 5:00 pm tomorrow, grocery store shelves will be completely bare of bread and milk.

That has always puzzled me:  Why bread and milk?  Because the only thing I can think of that you can make with bread and milk is…soggy bread.  And really, who wants to live on that for a couple of days?

It’s odd, because while most people consider bread and milk to be staples, I rarely buy them unless I have a specific purpose in mind for them.  Milk usually goes sour and bread gets moldy before I can get around to using them.

On the other hand, there are certain things that I almost always have on hand.  So in the event of a freak snowstorm, I know I and my Beloved Husband won’t starve.

However, it was somewhat disturbing recently to finally get around to putting up the pantry shelves I’d been wanting, and to start stacking food on them.  See, we’d outgrown the cupboard where we’d been storing canned goods and pasta and such, so instead of dutifully putting things away when we brought it home, we ended up stacking up piles of plastic grocery bags on the counter, and the back porch, and pretty much everywhere.

But once the shelves went up, I decided that everything was going to get put away.  And while I was at it, I was going to take a rough inventory and see what we needed to stock up on.

Thirty-three cans of tuna and forty-odd packages of pasta later, I decided we had plenty of those things.  Which sounds like the makings for a lot of tuna casserole…except for the part where we were lacking any “cream of whatever” soups (which are essential for casserole-making, you know).

We also had five or six bottles of barbecue sauce (which was actually less than I expected, since Beloved Husband has a tendency to bring home anything saucy that catches his eye…oh, wait, that’s not quite what I meant….).

What we didn’t have were things like the makings for spaghetti sauce, or much in the way of canned vegetables (which are handy for snowed-in stews), or the above-mentioned cream-of soups.  Guess I’ll be doing a little stocking up over the next few weeks.

What’s in your pantry right now?  What should be in there, but isn’t?