Sunday, February 18, 2018

Pantry Cleaning plus recipes

Once every year or two, I like to cook through all of the food stored in my house so that I know how old everything in the pantry and freezer are.  It also gives me a chance to give my pantry and refrigerator a good cleaning.

So... here's what I've been cooking:

My first day home from vacation, we decided to eat but we didn't want to go grocery shopping.  Fortunately I have a reasonably well-stocked pantry and was able to pull dinner together completely without facing the lines at the market:


Do you use a rice cooker?  I've had this one for nearly 20 years (and it shows)!  I'm toying with upgrading to an Instant Pot and am looking for yes/no testimonials.

So, what was for dinner?  Vegan Kung Pao Chick Peas, rice, and sesame garlic green beans.


The next night, I pulled some shrimp from the freezer and some 'not dead yet' mushrooms from the fridge and pulled together a quick dinner of Shrimp Gruyere from a 30 year old Weight Watchers cookbook that I don't even own anymore and Crock Pot Mushroom Risotto adapted from a recipe in The Gourmet Slow Cooker.


Don't judge me for the peas and carrots from the freezer; we still haven't been to the market for fresh produce.

Next meal from the freezer was Country Ribs, buttered noodles, and corn.  All of my food was the same color, but I still haven't visited the market.

I've been popping popcorn from the pantry for snacks and experimented with a mug cake last night.  Mug cake isn't cake with a "C" and this one didn't have any leavening agent in it, but I might try to tweak it at some point to make it more "C"ake-like.

I've made no progress on depleting my fabric collection, but we've definitely eaten from the food stash.  Hopefully I can make progress on both collections next week!



4 comments:

Lisa said...

I recently watched a consumer report YouTube video comparing the Crock Pot brand's "multi-cooker" to the Instant Pot. The results were that apart from yogurt making they virtually identical. I will probably replace my current slow cooker with an instant pot-esk device soon.

I too recently set to using my freezer up. My updates to my husband would be "today I took three things out!

Rebecca Fiedler said...

I love my Instant Pot and use it several times a week. Everything is so easy to make in it. And convenient!

Pamela Arbour said...

The Instant Pot is great for quick cook that tastes like it has been cooking all day, but I still use my crock pot if I am going to be gone about 5 hours. It just depends. Both are good. Also, sometimes it is helpful to have both to cook another dish and have them ready at the same time!

Kerry said...

We are planning on moving this year and so we are running down the freezers and the cupboards. It's very alien to me as I've always made sure the cupboards are all up to date and full - for those times when flu strikes or car breaks down etc so no shopping trips! Then again both my children have left home and as there are just the two of us we don't need such overflowing cupboards. We are still eating our parsnips from our harvest this time last year - we had such a bumper crop that I didn't sow any last spring but grew potatoes instead. We also had a bumper crop of French beans that we've just finished. I wonder how long the last tub of clotted cream ice cream will last! ;) Ooops almost gone!