Make Grocery Shopping Easier With A Reverse Shopping List

Oh, you love to cook? Name everything in your kitchen. Memes aside, it's a common grocery store conundrum, with or without a shopping list. Home stock ignorance is also the fast track to a cabinet cluttered with half-empty silos of panko, duplicate baking soda boxes each with two teaspoons removed, and enough tomato paste tubes — in gradient states of squeeze — to make a stop motion film. But you can mitigate at least this one grocery shopping mistake with a reverse shopping list.

No, a reverse shopping list is not a list of things you'll never buy because their sponsored posts are too annoying. A reverse shopping list enumerates all of the ingredients you already have in your possession. You know, the perfectly good (fingers crossed) ingredients that you already spent money on. You denote items as you run out to mark them for replacement. So, rather than recreating a new grocery roster each week, you maintain this one dynamic list. Unless you are a stock photography bachelor, this might at first seem like a big undertaking. And it is, but not only will it keep you more organized in the future, you can also knock out another oft-forgotten task in the meantime.

Like with most things, the best approach in this case is the one you're actually going to begin. So, whether you're going to work clockwise through your kitchen, start with the spice rack, or tackle the deep freeze first, just pick a path. Then, take inventory of your inventory. Any optimistically preserved, now ancient leftovers; deeply dented cans, or scent-free spices have got to go. And you will add any discarded items that you wish to replace to the reverse list, temporarily highlighting to signal the need for replacement. Then, once your list is a mile long (or, you know, a few rows in a Google sheet, or even columns on a dry erase board), you'll continue highlighting things as they run out. Then, when it's time to go shopping, those highlights actually are the list.

This method will be most effective for households on consistent rotations of taco Tuesdays, winesday Wednesdays, spaghetti Sundays, and so on. But even for à la minute home chefs for whom no two dinners look alike, a reverse shopping list can help organize staples like stock, seasonings, oils, and grains. And, in the meantime, here's a bitter coffee fix, a microwave cleaning tip, and a canned tomato trick to try and make a dent in all that pesky baking soda.