Cereal Anyone?

I have a thing about kitchen pantries - the bigger, the better. A large pantry is a must in any Mormon household it seems. When I look at houses or walk through model homes, that's one of the first things I notice. Forget the size of the yard or how many bedrooms, I want to see how big the pantry is!! In fact, my dream floor plan (in a neighborhood not far from where I live now) has a long, walk in pantry that takes up one whole wall of the kitchen and has a door on both sides. When I first saw it, I envisioned rows and rows of neatly stacked soup cans and food storage. It was beautiful and almost made me cry.....


Then there is my kitchen pantry - it's way too small. Sure it was sufficient for our needs when we first moved into this house over 5 years ago with two little kids, but we have way outgrown it in the last few years. I tried extra little shelves or containers to maximize the space, but it was still too small. I could never really stock up on a lot of things because frankly I just didn't have the room for it. We've been counseled for years to have a supply of food on hand and that was always a goal of mine that I felt I couldn't achieve because I had no room to put the extra food. It was this reason alone that we finally took action last year and put up shelves in our closet under the stairs to start our 3 month food supply. (Check out this post for a picture.) I loved it. With a case lot sale at Smiths, I was off to a really good start with my 'expanded pantry.'



Well, it's been about 10 months now - I've been slowing adding to our supply since then, but now I'm faced with the slight problem of running out of room again! Since joining the coupon revolution back in October and scoring major bargains at the grocery store, my 'expanded pantry' now looks like this:

I guess I could stop purchasing more food, but it's hard to pass up deals like cans of Chef Boyardee for 50 cents, bottles of Motts apple juice that were $3.39 and on sale for 99 cents, or boxes of cereal for around $1.25 each!! You think I have enough cereal? Andrew was teasing me about how much cereal I've accumulated lately. I've probably got close to 20 boxes but hey, our family goes through a lot of cereal. I'm not ashamed to admit that in a pinch I have fed my children cereal for dinner, quite a few times actually!

How do you know when you have enough food for 3 months? Is it too much of a good thing?