Eating down the Fridge

The Washinton Post's blog A Mighty Appetite with Kim O'Donnel has announced an interesting challenge. Eating Down The Fridge starts on March 9th. The goal: Eat from your staples and your pantry rather than running out and buying fresh.

This is a problem I've struggled with for quite some time. I hate throwing away food; but due to a lack of planning (or an inability to follow the plan once made) I often do throw out food. And I often have a pantry full of small bottles of strange sauces, odd mixes, and ingredients I never eat.

Civil Eats posted today about the challenge, and Jerusha Klemperer posted about her own struggles of the leftovers in her pantry that she's not sure how to cook, or once cooked even how to serve them.

I haven't decided yet if this challenge is for me. About once a month I try to eat from my pantry; and it usually reduces my grocery bill significantly. My tools for this sort of thing include the Food Blog Search Engine, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, and a healty dose of imagination. Some weeks I do quite well, like at the end of January where I was able to use up the last cup of couscous and three kinds of rice, tinned shrimp, and a very old bag of frozen strawberries. I didn't quite finish the bag of frozen cranberries though, and I never got to the can of chickpeas or jar of artichoke hearts. And then there's that old bag of dried chickpeas.

Maybe I should take up the challenge again.