Food: I know buying food in bulk makes a lot of sense, if you can eat it all in time. What do you do when you can't eat it all before it goes bad?

This is absolutely true.  Buying food in bulk can make for some pretty wonderful savings... IF it doesn't go to waste because you couldn't or didn't want to eat all that food before it goes bad.

There are a few ways to handle "excess" food (isn't that a great concept - having *too much* food?).
1. Buy non perishables.
2. Freeze it if it is perishable.
3. Have a plan for it.

So, non-perishables.  These are cans, boxes, or bags of food - anything that you find on the shelf at a grocery store, as opposed to in the freezer or refrigerated sections.  When you come across an amazing deal on these, buy as much as they have/you have money for.  For example, I once found 18 oz jars of peanut butter for 79 cents each.  I bought two hundred of them.  Fyi, peanut butter tastes exactly the same for about 4 1/2 years past the "sell by" date printed on the lid.  At five years, it starts to taste kind of old.  Luckily, we only had about four jars left by that point!

Another example: my local grocery store had a sale on pasta a couple of years ago: 49 cents per pound!  I think I bought 200 pounds of that, as well.  And pasta never, ever goes bad, or gets stale, or anything else - as long as you keep it in a container with a lid so that bugs can't get into it.

So if you're perusing the clearance shelf at your local grocery store and find three cases of refried beans, go ahead and buy them all!  And then go back and read Marcia's post on where to store food for some great ideas of what to do with it.

However, if the super sale you come across is in your produce section, then you need a different plan of action.  One time I found strawberries for 50 cents per pound!  Now, my family loves strawberries, and my kids can go through four pounds of them in a shockingly small amount of time, but at 50 cents, I wanted to buy an amount even they couldn't keep up with.  I bought around fifty pounds.  We ate the first ten pounds in the first few days, but I had already washed, stemmed, and frozen the rest.

This can be done with any fruit, and most vegetables (except the leafy ones - they just get mushy and gross).  Freezing changes the texture of fruits and veggies, so they are better suited to baking, cooking, or smoothies, than to just snacking on after they've been frozen.  You can also freeze things like bread (wrap it in plastic wrap first to prevent freezer burn) and milk (pour a little out of the jug first so it won't explode in your freezer).

So buy what you can, eat what you want, and freeze the rest for later.  What a treat - going to the freezer to grab some peaches for a pie, or green peppers for tonight's stew, knowing you paid absolute bottom dollar for them!

The last suggestion I have is to have a plan for your food when it starts getting questionable.  The example I am thinking about is from just this past week, when I discovered that my kids hadn't eaten nearly as many apples as I had expected them to, and they were getting soft (the apples, not the kids!).  I started peeling and coring, tossing them all into a pot with a lid, along with a cup or less of water, and let it simmer on low.  After about an hour, I grabbed my trusty immersion blender - a potato masher works almost as well - and ta da: applesauce!

While my kids hadn't been so thrilled at the prospect of eating a mushy apple earlier that day, they were more than happy to down a quart of applesauce.  They ate what they wanted right then, and then I put the rest in a couple of jars in the fridge.  If there had been more applesauce than we could eat in the near future, I could have canned it in just a few minutes for more long-term storage.

So if you are eyeing that super clearance price, but wondering if you are going to be able to use it all in time, consider whether it is perishable or not, and make sure you have a plan for what to do with the extra so your savings aren't wasted.

Kate