12 Grocery Items to Buy Before October 1st (A Lunch Lady Ordered Ahead Every Fall)

📕 Get the full cookbook - The Lunch Lady's $3,600-a-Year Grocery Cut (175 recipes & tricks, scaled for 1, 2 or a family): www.dorislunchlady.com/ I never learned to watch prices. I learned to watch a calendar. For thirty-five years I ordered food for a school kitchen, and the thing nobody outside that job understands is that the buying year does not start in January. It turns in the autumn. Contracts close, the crops that come in once a year come in now, and whoever has not decided by the end of September is buying somebody else's guess. That is not a prediction and there are no percentages in this video. Every one of these twelve is on the list because of something that physically happens in the autumn and then does not happen again for a year. And this is not a panic list. Nothing here is running out. You only ever buy ahead on a thing you were going to eat anyway, and a cupboard full of food you do not want is clutter you paid for. Number seven breaks the rule of the whole video, and I say so out loud, because it is the one item here you should NOT stock up on. THE ONE THAT GOES THE OTHER WAY Olive oil is pressed once a year, mostly between October and December, so the bottle on the shelf today came from last year's fruit. But it is also the only thing on this list that does not keep. Good oil is at its best for something like eighteen months from pressing, and after that it goes flat and then stale, quietly, in a clear bottle on a sunny counter. So the rule here is the opposite of the rule everywhere else in this video: do not stock up on olive oil. Buy one more bottle than you have, in dark glass or a can, keep it away from the stove, and use it. If the back of the bottle carries a harvest date, that one number tells you more than everything on the front. THE TRICK FROM NUMBER FIVE, BECAUSE SOMEBODY WILL ASK To measure half a cup of shortening without wearing it: fill a measuring cup to the halfway mark with cold water, then drop lumps in until the water rises to the top. Pour the water off. What is left is exactly half a cup and your hands are clean. Somebody taught me that in my first month and I have used it a thousand times since. Twelve categories in this one: canned pumpkin and the single packing season behind it, evaporated and condensed milk and why they are not interchangeable, cocoa and chocolate chips, whole cloves and nutmeg and why ground goes dead, cranberry sauce and the weeks it exists at all, olive oil and the one rule that runs backwards, canned fish and the salmon with the bones still in it, vegetable shortening, dried fruit and how to bring a hard bag back, flour and the autumn a house actually has, butter and the freezer, and sugar and the purchase order that closed on the fifteenth of September for thirty-five years. #groceryprices #stockuponthese #frugalliving