Eating Out the Pantry

If you're anything like me, your kitchen cupboards look a little something like this:

Well, mine isn't quite this tidy, but you get the drift.  It's pretty full.  You know, with the 3/4 of a bag of quinoa from that time I bought quinoa for that recipe and then never used it again.  Or the cans of soup I bought last year when I was sick, but then never ate.  Or the bag of panko bread crumbs that's never even been opened because I never got around to making those crab cakes I bought them for.

My freezer is just as bad.  Full of bags and containers full of things that I dutifully made and portioned out with the intention of having lots of easy meals on hand that could be ready to eat after only a few minutes of nuking.  But somehow, my freezer is like the black hole of forgetfulness (that's not a feature they advertise at the appliance store!).  Items that go inside - aside from ice cream and frozen pizzas, oddly enough - immediately leave my memory, not to be thought of again until the freezer's so full I can't get anything else in it and I start trying to sort things out and I pull out containers and ask myself what the heck is this and once I finally remember what it is, when, exactly did I last make sweet potato soup?  I've gotten better at labeling things over the last year.  Now, unfortunately, I know that the sweet potato soup is 10 months old.

The point is that if my grocery bills seem a bit low in these initial weeks, it's because I'm making a concerted effort to clear out some of the items that have been languishing in my cabinet and freezer for far too long.  I waste a lot of food (Don't judge me, you probably do, too!  Studies have shown that a full 25% of the food Americans buy gets tossed out!) and I feel guilty about it, so I need to get better at figuring out ways to use the things I actually buy.  After all, a key part of being thrifty and saving money is to not spend money on things you don't actually use or that you don't get your money's worth out of.  Buying food but not actually eating it is bad for my bank account and for the planet because it's either food that someone else could have made use of or stuff that's cluttering up the landfill.  

So, going forward I will make a point of disclosing items that I've used that I already had in order to lend context to the amount spent on groceries.  For example, last week, in addition to what I bought, I used the following items that I already had on hand: a can of coconut milk, havarti cheese, Mary's Gone Crackers, rice noodles, and assorted condiments.   The primary dish I made was a Thai green curry, which I ended up eating for a number of meals (four and counting) - which is the price of being single.  Stay tuned for this week's info.