Pantry Raid
We’re practicing the Carnival tradition of clearing out the pantry and freezer of rich foods (and the refrigerator of beer), in preparation for the somber, scaled-back eating of Lent. This will culminate in a pancake dinner on Tuesday, aka Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras.
Sourdough pancakes for Fat Tuesday?
In the pantry we’ve got prunes and sliced cactus paddles, among other things.
We won’t eat all the way through the pantry by next Wednesday. Commonly accepted guidelines for food stamp challenges, such as those found here, say that you should not use food from your pantry, but we are making some adaptations. Most food stamp challenges last only a week; we are doing it for the 40 days of Lent.
So, instead of eschewing that food altogether we are working out a way to use it but still include it in our set budget. Ivan will have more details about this in his next post, but basically, we’ll use separate shelves in the pantry for old food and “SNAP food” and we will label the cans and bags we already had with their prices so we can “buy” them (that is, count them against our weekly grocery budget) when needed.
We’ll move the food we already had to the bottom four shelves and put the food we buy on our simulated SNAP budget on the top four.
In the freezer we’ve got a lot of corn tortillas. But luckily we have watched a LOT of Alton Brown’s show, Good Eats (from whence I stole the title of this post), so we know exactly what to do with those: enchilada casserole! We’ll chop the cactus paddles finely and mix them up with some onions and that one lonely leek still hanging about since cock-a-leekie soup at our Robert Burns Supper.
Instead of chicken in the casserole we’ll use some of the leftover pulled pork BBQ from when we hosted our church fellowship group and couldn’t stop giggling about the spice blend used for the meat (the butt rub).
Pulled pork BBQ and meatballs are in our immediate future! With blueberries and edamame to round it out.
Also lurking in the freezer…a Christmas gift.
Happy Mardi Gras!
Bread for the World
I am doing it as a diabetic. I began January 1. (www.fusiononthefly.com) I allowed myself .25 per day worth of existing seasonings and oil and kept that money to replace those items. I am almost to the end of of the two months and have only used 5.50 replace items.
Thanks for commenting, Karl. We are thinking of doing a couple of our weeks’ grocery buying with particular health needs in mind, such as diabetes, gluten-free, soy or dairy allergy (though none in our family currently has such requirements). Just to demonstrate what that might look like.