cleaning the cupboards...

DandRAgain

gah, I've challenged myself to make dinners with "what we have" and I'm not going to the grocery store until MONDAY!  (Started this last week Monday...so 2 weeks).  ok, and that's a little exageration, I have gone to the grocery store, but the only thing I am allowing myself to buy is fresh produce and milk. 

So far so good, but I'm starting to run out of stuff to make any sort of semblence of dinner....

I'm afraid for the rest of the weekend we will be eating rice with mustard and soy sauce, or tortillas with soup.

BUT, my cupboards look great!!!  and I'm going to start meal planning so we don't end up with random cans of tomatoes or  soup or boxes of pasta.

j-w

I give you credit...I am more prone to just toss stuff!

shouldbworkin

I don't see anything wrong with having tomatoes, soup and pasta on hand.  I stock up with there are sales.  But, I do have to thin out my freezer every once in awhile.  Do you have anything in the freezer you can make? Make soup with leftover veggies/frozen veggies, a little bit of meat and some rice or barely.  Serve with some bread.  Yum!

Yodajo

I am on a meat buying freeze until I have used all the existing meat in my deep freezer!  Its was so full that it was getting ridiculous.  I haven't bought anything, with the exception of ground turkey yesterday and shrimp for a special dinner a few weeks ago in months.  It will feel so good to start fresh!

Good luck!

DandRAgain

freezer is definately part of the cleaning....I need more room in the extra freezer for freezing dinners in the future so on activity nights I can pull those out and put them in the oven.

I pulled out salmon....going to have salmon with some sort of sauce/marinade and rice tonight. My kids are not salmon fans...but I'm hoping I can doctor it up with a marinade so they like it.

AnnapolisLari

I am trying to clear out the freezer as well. I have 1/4 cow coming next week and I am not sure exactly how much space that will take. Plus I think that some of that stuff needs to rotate out anyway.

joseysbride

I do this once in awhile, too, mostly with meat in the freezer because I don't buy any boxed type of stuff and I don't buy a ton of canned stuff.  Now that you are a week into it, I'm sure you can think of some dinners to make with what you have that only require you to buy one or two ingredients to complete it.  You can make a ton of casserole type dishes if you have some kind of meat and any kind of pasta.