Tired of Tossing Out Leftovers?
One Week to a Clear Pantry
How to Shop, Waste & Spend Less
I hate wasting food. No, that’s an understatement. I believe that in this world of poverty and deprivation, it is a mortal sin to waste food. It is easy to forget, living in the more developed parts of the world, how good we have it. There are many parts of the world where what we consider poverty would be a step up from their everyday lives. We should not forget that.
Even here, we are facing rising prices at the grocery stores. I saw a recent news article saying that due to supply chain issues, this Thanksgiving season is going to be one of the most expensive ever. I personally do not really go all out for Thanksgiving. I was raised in a family that did. It was a big part of my parents’ narcissistic egos to lay out a huge spread and have everybody eat until they were miserable. My wife and I do not do that in our household. Thanksgiving dinner for us is usually just some favorite dish served in reasonable portions. Eating to excess is just stupid.
It is also not really smart to waste food or money. Something we have been trying lately is to periodically skip a grocery run and just eat whatever we have on hand. Our normal grocery shopping schedule calls for us to go to the grocery store weekly. Our car is an MX-5 Miata, so cargo space is, well, limited. The trunk of that car can hold maybe a half dozen grocery bags.
Part of our weekly planning for our grocery run is to make a shopping list and stick to it. That’s partly for budget reasons, but more because anything we buy has to fit in a car with trunk space along the lines of an average set of saddlebags.
Food being packaged the way it is, and recipes being written the way they are, leftover ingredients and portions are just a reality when you prepare meals at home. After a few weeks of prepared meals, we invariably have a pretty random assortment of things that with a little creativity can be combined to make meals.
Recently, for instance, I looked at the stuff in the kitchen and saw some packages of frozen peas, a pound of frozen chicken, and plenty of cheese and dry pasta. That’s basically enough to combine with other on-hand ingredients to make a decent pasta Alfredo with some chicken added for extra protein.
In another cabinet, I had some leftover corn meal. I made an herbed polenta from that, enough for two meals, and served it up with some leftover frozen turkey meatballs. I do know how to make meatballs, by the way. We are currently living in the only place we could find following an interstate move during the pandemic. The kitchen has no real ventilation and no fume hood over the stove. Smoky cooking is off limits for now.
We also had a few eggs left over in the fridge, and some udon noodles in a cabinet. Combine that with a couple of stray scallions from the fridge and some chicken bouillon, and that’s a batch of egg drop soup.
It goes on like that. If you are not overly choosy about what specific foods you want to eat, you can let your creativity off its leash and just have fun seeing what you can create with what you have on hand. It is easy to just throw up your hands and declare that there’s nothing to eat, but a little applied inventiveness can lead to yummy meals where first impressions might just see an empty cupboard.
If you are having difficulty knowing where to start, try thinking of meals as construction projects. There’s a foundation, which I usually just refer to as the “base.” That is the really substantial part of the dish. It will be something like rice, corn meal, pasta, or the like. It could also be a liquid, such as chicken or beef broth, as a soup stock.
Once you have your meal base identified, build out from there. Use your experience to come up with some combination of compatible flavors, colors and textures to make something tasty from the ingredients you have on hand. Don’t be afraid to experiment, either. You might stumble across something unexpected and amazing that you have never tried.
Once, I had made crab cakes for dinner and had a couple of cans of leftover crab meat. The next day, I decided to do pasta, and wanted meatballs. I had no turkey or beef, and thought, “Why not?” and ended up making crab meatballs. They worked really well, and became something I continued making every now and then.
Given the time of year, I should warn you off one of my failed experiments from years past. I love pumpkin pie. I will make pumpkin pie year round. I just never get tired of it, and it is very good for you. Pumpkin is great for digestion, as it has lots of fiber, and it is loaded with iron. I also love vanilla bean ice cream. It’s one of my favorite ice creams to pair with apple pie. One year, I tried pairing vanilla bean ice cream with pumpkin pie.
It really, really did not work. I do not know what strange alchemy occurs between pumpkin and vanilla, but I put two of my favorite things together and produced some evil abomination of flavor combination that I never want to repeat. You win some, you lose some.
As a way to clear out unused bits of food and partial bottles of spices, we have found this to be a very effective way to reduce shopping costs and food waste. The other nice thing is, when we shop next, there is plenty of room to put away the new groceries.
