All the food in my cabinet by Shuli J. '22, MEng '23

I live with three other people. We have a relatively small kitchen, but it’s got a pretty good cabinet setup, with plenty of space for all our communal items like pots and tupperware, plus enough room for each of us to have at least a shelf of our own personal stuff. Two of my roommates have their own shelf; one has their own small cabinet. None of them are full. I have my own big cabinet, and baby… it’s like Tetris in there.

This post, just for fun, is the unboxing of my cabinet! I’ll go through all the food I have stocked up, talk about where I do my grocery shopping, and try to defend my hoarder tendencies. You’ll have to be the one to judge if you’re convinced or not :P I will start by saying that I am a big snacker and always have been — that’s just how my metabolism works — and that this represents my cabinet at its fullest point, since I stocked up on everything when I had extra time over IAP. By the end of the semester, it will be much emptier as I eat through all my food supplies in preparation for moving out. Finally, I’ll note that most unprocessed foods, like tofu, fruit, and vegetables, are perishable and live in the fridge, so this is the least healthy segment of my food consumption ><

Venture forth!

Level one...

...and level two.

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As you can see, there are two levels to the food situation here. (My bookshelves are also double-stacked like this. Perhaps I am not making the anti-hoarding case look good right out of the gate.) We’ll start with level 1:

1. Almond crunchies: as you can see on the package, these are little three-packs of not-quite-cookies not-quite-crackers. They’re a Costco exclusive that I got really into when I was living with my parents in high school. Now I have less ready access to a Costco: it’s pretty far away, and although an MIT shuttle does run there about once a week, you also need to have someone who has a card and can get in. For that reason, I usually don’t own these, but I was lucky enough to get to go to Costco recently so I’m all stocked up.
2. Rao’s Marinara: my most adored tomato sauce 🥰
3. A little jar of flour: I don’t bake as much bread these days as I did a couple years ago during the height of the pandemic, but when I do bake I find it really useful to have some flour in a shaker jar. It makes it a lot easier to dust flour over surfaces and keep dough from sticking. I bought the empty jars online from my favorite spice company, Penzey’s spices.
4. Oreo thins: Oreo thins! I like chocolate and I like crunchy cookies, so these are my jam. I like that they’re in smaller units than regular Oreos, so I get more choice over how big my snack will be.
5. Butter waffle cookies: These are from Trader Joe’s, my favorite store to get snacks from. I’m not that close to a TJ’s — there’s one all the way up Memorial Drive, past Next House, and one across the river near Newbury St — so I tend to stock up when I go. Unfortunately, these are one casualty of that: when I did a TJ’s run in the fall I really liked these and bought two, but since then I’ve gotten bored of them and so the second box remains unopened :( This is only one of two unused items in my cabinet, which I feel pretty good about overall.
6. Milk chocolate peanut butter cups: Also from TJ’s and one of my current snack obsessions.
7. Chocolate chip granola bars: These are from Costco and perhaps my most go-to snack of all. Because of that, there may or may not be another 64-ct box in my room that doesn’t fit in my cabinet.
8. Protein powder: I am not as famous a Lifting Blogger as some people, but in this post, my dirty secret is out: I am… a protein shake bro 😔 Actually, though, lifting weights is my fave way to exercise — I find it really meditative and I like that I’m always making concrete progress. I lift 3x a week and always make myself a smoothie afterwards with almond milk, frozen berries, and protein powder. I’ve been trying to eat more vegetarian lately and that can make it harder to hit the daily recommended protein amount, so this helps a lot! It’s also delicious :)
9. Vanilla rooibos tea: this is my very favorite flavor of tea. I actually bring it over the border from Canada whenever I go home because I haven’t found it in the States yet! (This explains why you will see a third tin of tea in the next photo…)
10. Nutella: what more can I say? I love bread, I love Nutella, I love putting Nutella on bread. I keep my bread in the freezer so it lasts longer, which is why it’s not included in this post (but I’ll just say that the TJ’s sourdough really comes through for me).
11. Food scale: I don’t weigh most of the food that I eat, but I find it invaluable for measuring out precise ingredient amounts when I’m baking.
12. Chocolate covered almonds: These are a new TJ’s snack for me! I only bought one box though, and they’re disappearing fast. Since I probably won’t go back to TJ’s for most of the semester, it might be a short-lived option.
13. Chocolate hazelnut biscotti: can you tell I really like chocolate? These are another of my current TJ’s obsessions. There is another box (or two?) of these in my room.
14. Noodles: I have a couple different sizes of wheat noodles that I picked up in Chinatown a long time ago. I primarily use them when I’m making a quick meal, but I’m more on my game with mealprepping these days so they don’t get as much play as they used to.
15. Lentils: a staple of the vegetarian diet. I go through so many of these – I buy the big cheap Goya bags at Daily Table⁠01 The new uber-affordable grocery store in Central Square! They're relatively small so I buy most of my snacks elsewhere, but Daily Table is THE go-to for basic produce and proteins. I live like 5 minutes away now, which is the BEST, but even when I lived in East Campus, I would walk 20 minutes here because their prices are just so good. (And because most grocery stores are 20+ minutes from EC :/) , but I keep around the smaller TJ’s bags I originally bought because they’re resealable, which is very handy.
16. Sushi rice: my roommates and I have a big bag of communal long-grain rice, but I sometimes like to use short-grain when I’m making a recipe that goes well with it, like Japanese curry. I bought a big bag at HMart a long time ago, which lives in my room, and I refill this smaller resealable container⁠02 No clue where it came from, TBH, or what it originally held as needed.

We’ve made it to level 2! There are some things here that are still visible from level 1, but I just labelled the new ones.

1. Cereal: I actually never eat cereal for breakfast or with milk, but I like it a lot dry as a nighttime snack. I have Cheerios and Life cereal.
2. Flours: We have communal all-purpose flour, but I have a couple smaller bags of specialty flours. I have glutinous rice flour aka sweet rice flour, which is used to make mochi 😋, and I also have regular rice flour, which is helpful for baking bread because it reduces stickiness much more strongly than wheat flour does.
3. Hot chocolate powders: these were a Hanukkah gift! It’s a sampler box of five different fancy hot chocolates. I’ve tried two so far and they were both delicious.
4. Kind granola bars: the Costco granola bars are a yummier snack, but these Kind bars (in addition to being a lot more expensive…) are more nutritious and have more protein. I always keep a few in my backpack for when I get super hungry during the day and need to refuel. I buy these on Amazon because they’re cheapest there, and there’s another two boxes in my room.
5. More tea 😅
6. Steel cut oats: these are the one other thing in my cabinet that I actually never use. I used to be really into making overnight oats for breakfast, but I never bother to eat breakfast anymore (it helps that I don’t have nearly as many early classes) and so this bag of oats is unopened :( I should just give it away to someone who will actually use it.
7. Shabbat candles: I bounce back and forth between doing other things on my Friday nights, going to Hillel to celebrate Shabbat, and celebrating it myself at home. This last one is rare enough that I’m still on my first box of candles, but I do use them and I really appreciate having them on nights when I’m feeling it.
8. Pineapple in a can: good for baking and for pineapple fried rice! I used to have a ton of cans around, pineapple and beans and tomato and whatnot. Now that I live closer to grocery stores in Central Square (as opposed to East Campus which isn’t as conveniently located) I’ll just pick up what I need for the week.
9. Extra spices: the little shaker jars of spices live on a communal spice rack, but because I online-order my spices from Penzey’s, I order in bulk to keep shipping cheap. Also, I go through a lot of cumin and paprika :)
10. My favorite chocolate: this is a Cadbury sub-brand that doesn’t exist in the US, so this is also brought from home. It’s just a simple milk chocolate, but it’s super rich and really melts in your mouth. Sometimes just a square or two of this is all I need.
11. Pasta: OK lowkey I forgot to take the food scale out of the pic, so you have to squint, but this is a box of pasta. Like cans of beans, I used to keep a lot more of these than I do now.
12. Snickers: I keep fun-size Snickers around as a pick-me-up. When I know I have a particularly long day of meetings, I’ll toss one into the lunch I pack in the morning. An emotional support fun-size Snickers bar can be surprisingly effective.
13. More chocolate peanut butter cups 😅
14. Dried fruit: my usual favorites are dried apples, mandarins, and mangos. TJ’s was a little short on these when I went recently, so I branched out into dried apricots and dried berries. I haven’t tried the apricots yet, but the berry mix (blueberry/cranberry/raisin) has been super yummy.
15. A spare blender cup: I keep an extra around for my shakes. Usually I’m drinking them at home, but sometimes I take them with me when I’m in a hurry and in that case the lid comes in handy.

And that’s all folks! Hope you enjoyed this tour through my cabinet! Now you know the depths of my snacking habits, for which I will not apologize :) Although I cannot quite defend the number of duplicates I own of my favorite foods, I can promise you that it all (except for the steel cut oats) will get eaten. And if you know me and are in the market for some steel cut oats, hit me up!